Rise, Father, Rise
Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself
They come through you but not from you
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you
You may give them your love but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams
You may strive to be like them
But seek not to make them like you
For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday
You are the bows from which your children
As living arrows are sent forth
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite
And he bends you with his might
That his arrows may go swift and far
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness
For even as he loves the arrow that flies
So he loves also the bow that is stable
- Kahlil Gibran -
Last week, I became a father. To be honest, the pregnancy didn’t come as a surprise. Months before the moment of conception, I was shown visions of the upcoming pregnancy. Visions of a boy-to-be, with particular rebellious and innovative characteristics. Some months later, I learned that the birth would happen around the conjunction of the two planets Jupiter and Uranus, which exactly symbolize the aforementioned characteristics. And because they conjoined on the moment of birth, it signifies a Soul imprint. An important facet of one’s personality to which one is bound forever.
I was specifically curious how the birth would make me feel. The archetypal mother slowly took hold of my wife, as the little baby was slowly being formed in her womb. For me however, the father archetype was dead silent. Although I felt a strong connection to the soul coming to join our family, it didn’t particularly feel like my child. I asked myself whether it would even feel like ‘my’ child, for what is mine anyway. From one particular perspective, we are all children of the one Light, none of us possessing anything, none of us unfamiliar to any other person for we all share the same essence. It’s as Kahlil Gibran so eloquently writes, our children are really not ours. They’re fragments of eternity, being born in space-time to learn and evolve individually and therefore collectively. For a single drop is and contains the ocean, and has the power to slowly influence the entire ocean when the drops around it are affected by its evolution.
Before our child’s birth, I was not only shown his character. I was also shown some facets of his past lives. Very controversial, I know, but reincarnation, once experienced through meaningful occurrences, becomes obvious. And from the integration of the reincarnation perspective, the vision of parenthood changes drastically. Where the traditional view still believes our children to be bags of genes that combine both aspects of the father and the mother that is later influenced by the conscious conditioning of their upbringing, the reincarnation perspective offers a somewhat different story.
It sees a child as an experienced soul, a fragment of the one source that carries all of its limitless facets inside, and yet is unique through its particular manifestation of the specific combination of facets. This is easy to explain in Astrology terms. Let’s greatly simplify the limitless potential and state that the one source manifests itself through 12 archetypal zodiac signs. A soul being defined with it’s ascendant or sun in for example Aries, has a highly dominant Martian influence, with Aries and Mars both being facets of the one source itself. All of us carry all of the archetypal imprints within us, and yet they manifest differently through each of us.
But this is not all, as it would suggest that a soul imprint is solidified at the moment of birth, and cannot be changed through life experience. As ever, it’s way more complicated. For the unlived lives of the ancestors have a tremendous impact on the personality of the child. In the words of Paul Levy (Undreaming Wetiko):
Psychologically, the central point around which a human personality develops is the place where the ancestors are reincarnated. This is to say that the portal out of which our personality crystallizes into who we are is in-formed by the unresolved karma and the unmetabolized trauma of our ancestors. It is as if the ancestral unconscious provides the underlying archetypal structure out of which our personality comes into being. We thus become an open channel for all the unresolved psychic energies in our family line to incarnate in psychical form so as to potentially become liberated.
It are our own supressed shadow sides, or deep wounds that unconsciously govern our behaviour, that are transmitted to our children, thereby keeping them from realizing their true essence. Our wounds are our ancestor’s wound, or cultural wounds the collective wounds of our culture. And these wound, when not consciously healed within ourselves, become strong imprints within the child’s personality at conception. But it continues after birth.
A child, still unaffected by ego, lives in the Imaginal realm in which archetypal structures rule. This brings with it a heightened sensitivity for the truth. Does a parent say one thing but unconsciously means the other? A child feels it. Does a parent project his own supressed fear of abandonment on the child? The child will mirror it and unconsciously play the role of the clingy child. This becomes increasingly problematic if a parent fully identifies with the archetypal father or mother, for the child then becomes tied up in a symbiotic relationship that is kept together by the avoidance of unhealed trauma. The parent needs the child to feel a sense of wholeness. For without the child, the pain arises to the surface. The child then becomes a perfect mirror of this unsuppressed material, itself being completely stuck in the trauma bond which keeps it from ever getting to know its own wholeness.
We all know people who after the birth of their child seemed rather possessed by it, right? Mothers who can only talk about their children and don’t seem to have lives on their own. Fathers who are so protective that nobody is allowed to touch their child. I myself, feeling the soul coming to join our family from an impersonal perspective, was quite unsure whether I would have the typical fatherhood feelings. Which seems rather strange in retrospect, for the moment he was born I broke into tears of love and joy and realized that in that specific moment, the father archetype had awakened within me.
The archetypal daddy
As a facet of reality, the father has several highly important roles. It represents the authority figure, the protector, but also the initiator for independence and growth. The father provides and teaches, governs and rules. But as with every archetype, it does not only carry benevolent sides to it. It can be attached to power, become overly dominant, over-protective or too aggressively pulling a child out of his comfort zone to “become a man”. Ironically, you see the Dark Father archetype activated in many current male world leaders. The destructive consequences of this identification needs no explanation.
A man who wants to break fee from the chains of the father archetype, has to confront the dark aspects of fatherhood. He has to dive into the depths of his own potential destructive behaviour and feel all the protective emotions that hide this behaviour, to make sure that it doesn’t manifest itself in the child, playing the perfect shadow role in the intelligent field.
I already got a hint of the shadow side, as the newly born protective tendency was triggered when a nurse tapped some blood from my son and the image of strangling her appeared in my consciousness. To be sure, this tells me a lot about the work still ahead of me, as I am still working through some early post-natal trauma in which I, just after a rather traumatic birth, was taken away from my mother and was injected against my will and without the comfort of my mother.
How can you love your enemy if you do not understand him? Realizing that your enemy is within the deepest darkest parts of your own psyche, buried beneath feelings of guilt and shame that are hard to bear, is the key to understanding. So instead of scapegoating all those fathers who hurt their kids, neglect them, overprotect them or even rape then, thereby projecting the inner devil on the outside world, I am simply curious. What of all those dark aspects of fatherhood are within myself? And to be honest, I would be surprised if they weren't all. For archetypes are facets of reality that manifest themselves through us human beings. In my therapy work, I've seen many mothers deeply identified with the mother archetype. And identification often brings inflation of the light side, and a neglect of the shadow side of a particular archetype. The result? The dark facets of the universal mother are suppressed in one's psyche, which actually makes them manifest in reality. As Jung said; What you neglect from the Self appears in reality.
The main goal, as with every archetype, is to personalize it. Meaning that through observing and feeling all different facets of the father archetype and not identifying with any of them, the archetype is born as an autonomous entity in personal consciousness. With this dis-identification, it no longer unconsciously rules our behaviour. This not only releases the parent from the potentially destructive tendencies and narrowing vision of archetypal identification, but also unshackles the child from it’s influence. The child, when its parent is fully identified with the light sides of either the mother or father archetype, is a victim of its shadow. If its parents, out of pain-avoidance or sheer ignorance do not self-reflect on their own dark and destructive tendencies and heal them, simply infuse the child’s unconsciousness with these same tendencies.
We all recognize these powerful voices in ourselves, the voices of our ancestors, affecting our behaviour wherever we go. They are often vicious, critical and destructive. They keep us away from who we truly are, for if we stand for ourselves, shame and inner criticism are the result. These voices and painful feelings are our own parents unresolved lives, living through us and keeping us from realizing our own innate co-creative potential.
An example of the mother archetype
A mother that is primarily identified with the light side of motherhood is caring, protective, loving, but cannot help to sometimes loose herself in the opposite. She becomes cruel, manipulative, even possessive and jealous. Out of not wanting to feel her own pain, she might resist her sweet boy’s natural development to stand on his own legs. And the child, as a being that is still much more connected to the Imaginal nature of reality and is still unaffected by ego, unconsciously takes op the role of his own mother’s shadow. Just like people are spontaneously "possessed" by the intelligent field in family systems therapy, providing them with an acute knowing of the family dynamics and even acting out on these, the child is also called to play a role through the intelligent field that pervades the family.
This intelligent field keeps repeating itself, until it is made conscious and is healed, often through deep catharsis, by one or preferably all of its actors. Because only through consciousness can there be freedom of choice that is able to break the chains of karma and stop the repetition of harmful projections and behaviour in family systems. But it's not that easy, as becoming conscious also means that one has to face the shadow, the dark aspects that are often safely projected on others, in themselves.
Let’s take a concrete example from my therapy sessions. A woman has lost her mother on a young age due to suicide. To prevent her from feeling her own deep pain, a self-protective mechanism is automatically manifested. If it could speak, it would say something like:
I want to give my child what I myself have missed. I try to fill up the emptiness, the grief and the loss through giving the outside world what I myself miss. Only if I give everything of myself, I feel worthy. Only then do I feel a sense of wholeness and am not confronted with the grief I carry deep inside. But I have to keep giving to feel whole. And I can’t. So I feel guilty. I’m a bad friend, bad partner, and bad mother. So I have to try harder.
The moment she doesn’t give her child everything in her power, she is immediately confronted of the deep pain buried beneath. And the child? As a perfect mirror of her own supressed pain, asks ever more of her. She acts as if no matter what her mother gives her, she still needs more. More attention, more love, everything that her mother herself has missed.
The way out for this client is to give her own archetypal inner child all that she has missed. To feel her pain and carry it inside of her. Only then can the unconscious mirroring be broken, and can both she herself and her child be freed from these chackles. Perhaps she even has to go deeper, and confront her mother’s inner demons inherited from her parents, who led her to eventually commit suicide.
Whatever lies hidden underneath, it must be confronted and healed in ourselves, to keep it’s governing powers being spilled over to our own children. This gives our children a head start to feeling the comfort and trust that is necessary to find out what they truly are. And this, in turn, gives rise to a collective evolution of humanity, back to the realization of its simple essence.