The Logic of the Subconscious
I often remind people that their primary communication is not so much to the conscious mind as it is subconscious. People respond to what they instinctively feel from you. Too often those brilliantly facile at financial, coding, or academic skills are weirdly blind to this instinctual underworld. Great leaders understand the tides and currants moving in the collective psyche of their teams.
One way to develop your understanding of the “logic” of the subconscious is to pay attention to the tides and currents moving in humanity as a whole. I approach that in 3 ways:
- The Season
- The Wound
- The Opportunity
Interplay of Archetypes
The tides and currants of the subconscious ebb and flow. Like seasons. A great way to understand which season is in focus is through what Carl Jung described as archetypes. Patterns of feeling from which actions are motivated. For example, feeling attacked—like “prey”—may make someone withdraw or manipulate. Or feeling focussed—like “going after a goal”—may make someone commit more effort or take more risk.
I find the synthesis into four basic archetypes by Moore and Gillette that we use in Shadow Work to be most helpful: Sovereign, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Not only is the interplay between these four subconscious drivers happening in each of us individually, it is also happening collectively. And there is a particular season happening collectively right now with respect to Warrior energy. We are after all at war, whatever you may be thinking and feeling about it.
Warrior Energy on the Rise
Warrior energy, our territorial instinct, is endemic in humans, as it is in all of nature. It is how we separate things into achievable priorities and get stuff done. How we distinguish self from other, friend from foe. At its best, it is about boundaries, clarity, truth, authenticity. Less evolved, it shows up as bullying, self-obsessed, vindictive, and petty.
If we are attuned, we can perceive a season where one of the four has become recessive—or dominant—and sense an impending rebalance. We seem to be in a time where in the collective psyche the season is shifting from an empathic inclusive paradigm—Lover energy. Perhaps also shift from revering expert knowledge—the archetype of the Magician or Sage. For a while now, Warrior energy has been emerging in the fore.
Such shifts in the mass psyche are not merely the result of the actions of one or two individuals. Rather, the rise of certain personalities, trends, and events are the result of this subterranean interplay of archetypal energies.
The Warrior Wound
Boundary trauma is when your “no” is ignored. Your line is crossed, leaving a diminished sense of self that needs to be bolstered. We have to fight to be heard. It is not hard to perceive this at the collective level too. War is usually a clash of conflicting identities, where who I am and who we are together appears to be under existential threat.
If we do indeed have this Warrior compulsion to be true to a deeply felt sense of self, I believe we all wish to find less harmful ways to express it, to discover and preserve our uniqueness.
The Direction of Growth
The tides and currents of the subconscious can also be understood as movement toward growth. Whatever the current season—Sovereign, Warrior, Magician or Lover—the psyche appears to be moving us toward a more evolved, mature, and enlightened expression. When each archetype has its day in the sun, so to speak, there is an opportunity for growth (or the opposite) on a mass scale.
We find out most about who we are, and what really matters to us, when we encounter resistance or opposition. If we let it, any conflict can move us in the direction of clearer priorities, deeper truth, and fuller authenticity. Until we get the lesson, we will keep getting the opportunity.
What You Can Do About It
The greatest contribution of a human life is to evolve. I don’t know if circumstances will ever evolve to make fighting completely obsolete, but there is a mature expression of Warrior energy that makes conflict much more likely to be beneficial than harmful. This has to do with taking responsibility for your and my personal experience of self.
Olympic figure skating champion Alysa Liu’s recent journey is a great example. She retired from the sport, broken, and then returned transformed. Her coach described her earlier self as “incredibly good at doing what she was told.” After the transformation, all that discipline—now free from fear—was devoted to a higher mission, “the expression of my art” as she put it.
Are you willing to get that free? To devote all your strength to an ideal beyond winning or preserving an old sense of self? Ending the sacrifice of self to limited concepts of good and bad in favor of the true self that has been waiting for you all this time, and embodying the fullness of being alive for its own sake?
Clean Boundary Practice
Try this. A few times in the next week or so, when there is some intensity between you and another, pause. Reflect on your thoughts and feelings, and note 3 ways in which you are making someone else responsible for your experience. “I am angry because…, or I am sad because…, or I missed my goal because…”. Then own your part more deeply, and discover the freedom of being at-choice in the situation.
When we notice how we still give others the power to control our experience, we are connecting with the Warrior shadows that surface through the mass psyche. As you own what is happening for you more fully, you are contributing to the emergence of a new world order.
Best,
David Lesser