Connecting

The primal energies of Passion, Vividness, and Aliveness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Connecting Archetype Index

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

The body and spirit are connected through sensitivity and sensuality. The Connecting Energy is the power that joins all things, material and spiritual into wholeness and unity. It is the power of the Lover (Connector) and the Beloved (Connection) Experiencing Life fully.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Positive Archetypal Images

 

Complete: Mature - Adult
The Lover
Incomplete: Immature - Child
The Oedipal / Electra Complexes

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shadow Archetypal Images

 

Complete: Mature - Adult

Aggressive: The Addicted Lover

Passive: The Disconnected Lover
Incomplete: Immature - Child

Aggressive: The Momma's Boy / Daddy's Little Girl

Passive: The Dreamer

 

 

 

 

 

 

Connecting Archetypal Energy Introduction

 

The Connecting Energy is the power of the Lover (Connector) and the Beloved (Connection) becoming one to Experience Life fully. It employs the primal energies of Passion, Vividness, and Aliveness to guide the individual and humankind to engage their senses to sensually connect with creation, and their sensitivity to open the gates of understanding, empathy, and compassion for all living and non-living things.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Connecting Energy acts as the bond that unites all the energies (Generating, Questing, Transforming, and Connecting) together into a synergistic powerful force that draws the individual and humankind into a meaningful union. It brings The Lover to bear in all energies, thus providing an influence away from the shadow energies and a light toward connecting to something beyond the self.
 

In a reciprocal manner, the Connecting Energy needs the power of the Generating, Transforming, Questing Energies to keep it grounded and attached to the real world and to prevent the Lover energy from drawing the individual and humankind into a dream-fantasy world of inaction, disconnection to the mortality and perfect imperfection of being human. They keep the experience of being alive a sensual, passionate, engaged, human experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other Examples of Connecting Behaviors

 

Connecting: Relating to Others
establishing bonds • feeling love • forming a union or marriage • acknowledging kinship • sympathizing with another • getting closer • making a connection • being intimate
Sensual / Sensitive: Being Sexual
seeking union • experiencing desire • opening to another • responding with passion • feeling a physical attraction • tapping inner energy
Boundries: Establishing Personal Beliefs
questioning received opinions • figuring out where you stand • staying true to yourself • setting your own philosophy • going by your own standards • making up your own mind
Boundries: Determining Values
struggling with temptation • choosing between right and wrong • facing an ethical or moral choice • refusing to let ends justify means • finding out what you care about

 
 
 
 

 

 

Characteristics of Connecting Archetypal Images

 

  1. Lover: Experiencing Life Fully
    1. General
      1. Other energies (Generative, Questing, and Transforming) are detached and need the Lover energy for reunification within and throughout each other.
      2. The Lover needs the other archetypes for boundaries, decisiveness, and healthy reflection so a person doesn't over identify - become narcissistic.
      3. Keeps the masculine energies humane, loving, and related to one another and to real life situations.
        1. It keeps the Queen-King, Warrior, Magician from being sadistic, exploitive, cruel, or generally under the influence of the shadow.
    2. Primal Energies:
      1. Vividness
      2. Aliveness
      3. Passion
    3. Primal Hungers
      1. Food
      2. Sex
      3. Reproduction-Eternal Continuation
      4. Well-being
      5. Creative Adaptation to Hardship
      6. Ultimate Sense of Meaning
    4. Connectedness
      1. Agape: Brotherly Love - Love for Humankind
      2. Eros: Bonding and Uniting Urge of all things
      3. Amor: Complete Union of Body and Soul with another
        1. Unification of Body and Spirit / Spirit and Body
        2. Connection of Human to Divine
          1. God and World
          2. The source of spirituality, especially mysticism
      4. Creates a Sense of Meaning - Spirituality
        1. The essence of creativity is the connection and unification with the whole
      5. Open to "Collective Unconscious" of all creation, sentient and non-sentient.
        1. We are but waves on the surface of a vast sea. The Lover Connects us to what is beneath and around
        2. All Things are Bound to One Another in Mysterious Ways
        3. Everything in life is experienced in its oneness, its unity
          1. Even while experiencing life's pain, one can still experience joy
          2. Experience of the unity and oneness of the experience
        4. We become each individual AND all individuals we love.
      6. Recognizes no boundaries - wishes to live out connectedness
        1. Does not want to stop at socially created boundaries
        2. Tension between sensuality and morality
        3. Tension between love and duty
    5. Appetite For Life Through the Senses
      1. Heightened Consciousness of Life
        1. Aesthetic Consciousness (Life is Beautiful): experiences everything no matter what it is - all life is art
        2. Holographic Consciousness: not only sees, but feels
      2. Deeply Sensual and Sensitive to the Physical World
        1. Desire to touch and be touched (physically and emotionally)
        2. Related and Connected to the World through his or her sensitivity
        3. Healthy Embodiment of being in the world of sensuous pleasure in one's own body and without shame.
        4. Energy of Sensitivity and Sensuality both Internally and Externally
      3. Connects the Physical to the Infinite and Eternal through the senses
        1. Energizes the Idealist and the Dreamer - one who wishes abundance and generation
        2. Ever / Always Creating / Energizing new Opportunities and Possibilities
        3. Intuits the ultimate oneness while still in daily mortal life
      4. Archetype of Play and Display (The Mating Ritual)
      5. Passion - the feeling that goes with the intellect, empathy, sensitivity and sensuality
        1. Delight and joy in all life and the sensory experiences of life
        2. Feelings of relatedness, aliveness, connectedness, enthusiasm, empathy, compassion, energy and romance for and about our lives, goals, work, and achievements.
        3. Sensitivity Leads to Compassion and Empathy
          1. Capable of reading people "like a book" - sensitive to hidden motives
    6. Lover is Manifested in:
      1. The Artist: Lover as muse; messy; unconventional; creative unconscious
      2. The Psychic: world of sensations / vibrations; intuitions
        1. A world behind and beneath "daylight"
        2. The underlying unity of all things is present in intuition and premonition
      3. The Connoisseur: perceiver of oneness / wholeness
      4. Thinking with the Heart: feeling without the pressure to perform, look good, or manipulate
    7. Issues in the Lover Energy
      1. Lover energy is opposed to other masculine energies in many cultures
      2. Overly moralistic and self-righteous strands of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam persecute the Lover even to the point of misogyny.
        1. The mysticism movement in these religions has brought some change.
      3. The Lover creates the sacramental view of the universe as God in us
      4. Is it not through the woman (Feminine) that God enters us and the world?
      5. Hinduism is not moralistic or ethical in the Western sense, thus the sensual is part of the religion / cultural mores
        1. Oneness with all things (Brahman)
        2. Oneness with God (Atman)
        3. Respect for the sensual - celebration and joy
        4. God as exotic and sensual
  2. Shadow Energies
    1. Addicted Lover
      Does not wish to put any limits on sensual and sexual experience of this vast world, a world that holds the promise of unending pleasures
      1. Rejection of Boundaries
        Does not wish to put any limits on sensual and sexual experience of this vast world, a world that holds the promise of unending pleasures
        1. There are no boundaries and the Addicted Lover wants no limits or limitations
        2. Desire to touch what it is forbidden to touch or enter - the "Mother / Feminine Unconscious."
        3. Lack of respect for boundaries will ultimately result in Addicted Lover's own downfall.
      2. Lostness
        1. Addictive Personality - lost in the pleasures of the addiction
        2. Lost in the world of the senses, and loses contact with the real world and connectedness of the sacred and profane
        3. Captured and owned by their obsessions / possessions
          1. Unable to detach from our feelings and get in touch with self
          2. Caught in the agony and ecstasy of our own longings
        4. Eternally restless - always looking for the next yearning, searching for something
        5. Loving and Leaving - seeker of adventure and excitement instead of connection and awareness of what is beyond self.
          1. Don Juan Syndrome
          2. Looks for the ultimate "experience" and when faced with the humanness of others is disillusioned and moves on.
        6. Inner self is not yet solidified and thus looking for self on the outside and in others
        7. Sees the world in its fragments and not its whole - moves from fragment to fragment lost in each and never seeing the underlying unity.
          1. Lives FOR the moment, not IN the moment
          2. Prone to idolatry and obsessive worship of parts and no understanding of the whole.
        8. Trapped in the Feminine Power of the Collective Unconscious - Mother Issues, struggling to get out
          1. Needs to detach from and contain the chaotic power of the "feminine" unconscious.
      3. Disconnected Lover
        Impotent / Frigid Lover
        1. Out of touch with the Lover in His/Her Fullness
        2. Experience lives in an unfeeling way - Flattened Affect
        3. Lack of enthusiasm, vividness, aliveness
          1. Bored and Listless
          2. Feel hungry but no appetite
        4. Alienation from families, friends, work
        5. Ennui
        6. Chronic Depression
        7. Lack of Connection to self and others even disassociation (3rd person references)
        8. Isolation
        9. Loss of envisioning and imaging the Lover
        10. Lack of active sensual activity because of being overwhelmed by the feminine unconscious and becomes passive
  3. Oedipal and Electra Child Energies: Yearning
    1. General
      1. Warm, Related, and Affectionate
      2. Connectedness
        1. Passion, deep sense of wonder and appreciation for connectedness with his inner depths, others, and all things
        2. Need for connectedness and perfect, infinite love and nurturing
        3. Expresses (through connectedness to mother) the origins of spirituality
        4. Expresses sense of mystic oneness and mutual communion of all things
      3. Deficient in Experience of Nurturing Mature Masculine or Generating the Mature Feminine
      4. Ties to Mother / Father
        1. Yearns for the Goddess beyond his own mother, beyond the beauty and feeling of the things of the world
        2. Deep yearning for the infinitely nurturing, infinitely good, infinitely beautiful Mother (the one beyond his own) -- real mother and other women can't meet needs
        3. Yearning for unconditional allowingness and acceptance
        4. Must direct his spiritual yearnings at the Goddess not at mother or women -- need to relieve women of our (man's) need for them to be god-likeness
    2. Shadow Energies
      1. Momma's Boy: boys too bound to the mother get hurt
        1. Tied to apron strings
        2. Rescue
          1. rescue mother from father -- worse if father is absent or "absent"
          2. strikes down the god (father) for the goddess (mother)
        3. Don Juan
          1. oedipal boy inflated beyond mortal dimensions, cannot be bound to one woman
          2. never satisfied with mortal woman because he seeks the immortal goddess -- Don Juan syndrome
          3. chases the beautiful, the poignant, the yearning of union with mother from one woman to another
        4. Autoerotic
          1. Seeks to experience own masculinity, phallic power, generativity through the divine phallus that experiences all women or experiences union with the Mother Goddess in her infinity of female forms -- rather than affirming as a mortal
          2. Does not want to do what it takes to have real union with mortal woman and deal with complex feelings involved in an intimate relationship
        5. Just wants to be -- does not want to take responsibility -- seduction makes the other responsible through the trickster
      2. The Dreamer
        1. While other play, he or she dreams, separate
        2. Dreams are melancholy but highly idyllic and ethereal
        3. Takes the spiritual impulses to an extreme
        4. Feels isolated and cut-off from human relationships
        5. Relationships with intangible things and the world of imagination within him
        6. Accomplishes little and appears withdrawn and depressed
        7. Less than honest
        8. Prefers fantasy to real relationships
        9. May "love" objects and things
          1. Money
          2. Car
        10. Voyeur
        11. Demonstrates through passivity his or her pique at failing to achieve possession of the mother / father -- grandiosity hidden by depression.

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