No, the Self is only constellated very late in the process of individuation, because it consists of the unity of all the archetypes. All the partial archetypes have to be awakened first, and that's a long process. All natural images of the Divine are drawn from the partial archetypes. Please note also that the Father-as-Divine isn't necessarily punitive patriarchy -- that latter is a distortion and a defilement of the archetype of the Father, which in itself is generous, protective, powerful, loving. It's also not the only game in town. There are also plenty of people who experience the Divine as mother, as beloved, as darling infant, and so on. (In Bali they address their gods as "grandchild" and feel toward them the way human grandparents feel toward an adorable child.)
None of these images are true, but all of them are appropriate, since we think and feel with archetypes as inevitably as we walk with feet and eat with mouths. This is the way the Divine has created us; as social primates, we approach the Divine in a social way, using the archetypes that are the building blocks for our social experiences. We don't construct these experiences, if you mean by that any kind of conscious construction -- if anything, we are constructed by them, in that our social interactions mediated by archetypes are what shape our personalities and our experiences of ourselves and the world. Only at a very high level of development do we begin to outgrow them, and then it's because we have richer forms through which to begin to apprehend the Divine.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
Re: Question
Date: 2024-08-19 10:41 pm (UTC)None of these images are true, but all of them are appropriate, since we think and feel with archetypes as inevitably as we walk with feet and eat with mouths. This is the way the Divine has created us; as social primates, we approach the Divine in a social way, using the archetypes that are the building blocks for our social experiences. We don't construct these experiences, if you mean by that any kind of conscious construction -- if anything, we are constructed by them, in that our social interactions mediated by archetypes are what shape our personalities and our experiences of ourselves and the world. Only at a very high level of development do we begin to outgrow them, and then it's because we have richer forms through which to begin to apprehend the Divine.