One of the best ways to understand why you do what you do—or why others do what they do—is to explore the universal archetypes that influence behavior.

Carl Jung first introduced archetypes as important insights into human behavior. Archetypes convey an energy, a thoughtform that describes an aspect of our psyche. There are four archetypal energies that everyone functions through these are our inner family archetypes, because they are best described through the concepts of Father, Mother, Boychild and Girlchild.

These four archetypal energies spring forth from the original divine blueprint for our soul. They describe the attributes of the divine image and likeness in which were made. By understanding the archetypes, we can better understand how God made us in the beginning and how we departed from that divine blueprint through the fall in consciousness. By applying the keys and gifts in this inner family archetype work, we can find the pathway of how we can be redeemed (the return to Eden) and how we are intended to express our innate divinity in its myriad manifestations.

Like a four-leaf clover, the four archetypes precipitate as Father, Mother (Mater), Boychild (Christ) and Girlchild (Holy Spirit) through our superconscious, conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind. This precipitations of energy varies from individual to individual, depending on our karma, and accounts for some of the core personality differences that we find between people. The specific pattern we print from birth influences how we think and feel, what we aspire to and what we reject. The conscious and subconscous pattern is especially key in understanding personality traits, hence, “what are my archetypes?”

Each archetype has a loving and an unloving side. When our archetypes are loving, we outpicture our highest soul potential. When they are unloving, we experience rebellion, fragmentation, pain and isolation.

 

 

Returning to wholeness means we are centered with all of our loving archetypes present. We no longer act from one archetypal pattern at the exclusion of the others. Our four loving archetypes are integrated. Our Loving Father doing his job of protection. Our Loving Mother is nurturing. Our Loved Boychild is up and doing and our Loved Girlchild is relating to others in the highest possible way, all at the same time. This is the strongest position we can be in, the most effective, and the most beneficial for ourselves and toward others.

Returning to wholeness is an incremental process. We add to our integration and wholeness portion by portion as we take back to our center those parts of us that were stuck in the negative archetypes, or that needed external validation to be loving.

When we integrate the loving archetypes together, we find sustainable wholeness. Each time we make loving over unloving choices, we add strength to, and integrate more of the loving archetypes. Over time, it becomes easier and easier to stay in the loving archetypes. We rise on the ascending spiral of integration, raising all four archetypes to a new threshold of wholeness, and the change is sustained.

When all parts of us are integrated, we manifest integrity, honor, wholeness, completeness, balance, constancy and loyalty to our higher self. All of our loving archetypes become accessible in relation with each other. We no longer experience the imbalance, fragmentation and extreme ups and downs that happen when we are in the grips of our unloving archetypes. The sustainable wholeness we become allows us to also become the fullness of our higher Christic and Buddhic selves, or like Saint Francis said, “instruments of peace.”

 

The art on this page is an ancient Buddhist Thangka representing the four faces of divinity through Brahman, our Father Alpha,
and a picture published by Self Realization Fellowship representing the four personages of divinity through ourDivine Mother Omega.