Map your Life Journey 2
Map your Life Journey – part 2
The core elements of this training course help you to understand your life-journey and connect its dots in a meaningful story. This training course will help you to make a better sense of the VUCA world we are living in. VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It describes the situation of constant, unpredictable change that is becoming the norm in our world.
Co-living with others for two weeks, learning about different frames that map the human spiritual journey, being challenged by course’s games and exercises – will remove you from your routine, push your boundaries and help you to open yourself to a larger world. The challenges help us find ourselves.
Completing this training course is a significant accomplishment that cannot be easily dismissed.
This is the second part of the course and includes a Quest for imagining & designing a holarchic fair society.
The course “Map your Life Journey” is extremely useful in these times of confusion and uncertainty, when it is so difficult to orient ourselves. By learning to decipher the mysteries of the human journey, by learning to map this journey, we will better understand who we are, how we became who we are and how to orient ourselves towards the future in this changing world. It could become an important step on the road to authenticity.
All stories are simultaneously personal and universal. An archetypal understanding can contextualize our stories, helping us to see them from another vantage point. Employing archetypes for a better mapping of our psychological development is useful.
We are inspired on our Journey by 12 archetypes. Each of these archetypes informs a way of being on the Journey and are important to the individuation process. Each has a lesson to teach us, a gift to grant and each presides over a stage of the Journey: Innocent and Orphan, Seeker and Lover, Caregiver and Warrior, Brave and Creator, Co-Creator and Magician, Sage and Joyful/Wild.
In this second part of the course we will address the last 6 archetypes (once we approached the first 6 in the first part of this course (see Map your Life Journey – part 1)
Once a lesson has been learned and integrated, its spirit will act continuously in our lives in healthy ways. When one or more lessons are not learned and integrated, their spirit will express through us their shadow aspects. Going through the entire development cycle of each archetype, we will receive its gifts and become psychologically healthy human beings. Our life will be full of meaning, joy and will have a beneficial impact on the world around us.
What are the Archetypes?
The archetypes, in Carl Jung’s understanding, are part of a mysterious morphic field that informs the Universe. He sees them as universal patterns that inform our beings.
They are potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness (as images, symbols, stories.) The Universe is a dialogue, an emergent space of meaning that informs and inspires. These unseen patterns of information inspire particular expressions in individuals and cultures.
History, culture and personal context shape these manifest representations thereby giving them their specific content. These representations are more precisely called archetypal images.
Any attempt to give an exhaustive list of the archetypal images would be a futile exercise since these images tend to combine with each other and interchange qualities making it difficult to decide where one archetype stops and another begins.
Popular uses have often condensed the concept of archetypes into an enumeration of archetypal figures. Such enumeration falls short of apprehending the fluid core concept.
Strictly speaking, the Innocent, the Sage, the Magician, the Warrior, the Seeker etc. are archetypal images which have crystallized out of the archetypes-as-such realm. Definite mythological images are nothing more than cultural representations.
Let’s not stuck into literalism. Let’s use the archetypes as a lens to perceive and interpret the psychological realities; as windows through which we can see further. Let’s understand that this frame that employs archetypes is just a map and not the territory!
The Hero’s Journey Map
Each step forward has to be informed in our consciousness by a special archetypal image: If we want to evolve, the archetype of initiation is imperative to be activated in our consciousness to provide a meaningful transition from one stage of life to the next.
The archetype of “Hero’s Journey” is the archetype of transition from an immature toward a more mature level of being. The training’s prime aim is to activate this important archetype in participant’s life and to foster their conscious evolution.
Life is always an adventure of evolution, a rite of passage, a never-ending journey.
The “Hero’s Journey” stages are the stages of evolution itself. You could find them in your own unfolding of life.
The Journey could be organized in several ways, including division into three acts: Departure (Separation), Initiation and Return (Integration). In the departure part of the narrative, the hero lives in the “ordinary world” and receives “a call” to start its heroic journey. The hero is reluctant to follow the call but is helped by a “Mentor” figure. The initiation sections begin with the hero “crossing the First Threshold” into the “Unknown World” or the “Enchanted Forest”, where it faces tasks and trials. The hero finally reaches “the innermost cave”, where it must undergo “the ordeal” where it overcomes its main obstacle, receiving “the gifts of the Goddess”. In the return section, the hero crosses “the Second Threshold”, becoming master of the “two worlds” and “return home” with its gifts. The hero itself is transformed by the journey and gains wisdom over both worlds.
Everyone who takes its spiritual journey is already a hero. The rewards of self-discovery are great. When we find our authenticity, when we finally make sense of our world – everything seems to fall into place. We are able to see our beauty and intelligence and able to use them constructively in the world. So, we truly fulfill our lives. We have everything we need to claim our full humanity, our full heroism.
Moral Citizen, Authentic Human, Cultural Creator
Actually, there are 3 spiritual journeys, nested one into another:
Our first spiritual Journey helps us to become Moral Citizens. It assumes the healthy development/integration of first 4 archetypes: Innocent, Orphan, Warrior and Caregiver.
The second Journey helps us to become Authentic Humans. It assumes the healthy development/integration of other 4 archetypes: Seeker, Lover, Brave and Creator.
The Cultural Creator Journey assumes the development and integration of the last 4: Ruler, Magician, Sage and Joyful/Wild. The return processes include the development and resolution of the Ruler and Magician, who together bring cultural transformation (we become servants of something greater than us), and the Sage and Wild, who bring us love and empathy (we connect ourselves with The Great Circle of Life).
The Moral Citizen Journey helps us to create a boundary between us and everything else and mediates our relationship with the world. It also helps us learn to fit into the world as we know it and to act to change that world to better meet our needs.
The Authentic Human connects us with our deeper roots – the roots of Life itself. It connects us with our inner-callings – the source of our true gifts. When the Authentic Human is born, we know who we are, the disjointed parts of our psyche come together and we experience wholeness and integrity. The rising of Authentic Human unlocks the true potential that lies within each one of us. Everyone of us, like a seed, starts to germinate, ready to sprout and fruit!
The Cultural Creator signifies the achievement of a sense of genuine identity that expresses itself in creative ways. We are able to find adequate ways to claim our power and express ourselves in the world. Life becomes joyful and meaningful and socially impactful, helping the world around us to bloom.
We become effective Cultural Creators only when we let go of any need to “transform the kingdom”, to “change the world”, to force the transformation, to impose others our outcome. Nobody can “save the world”. All what we can do, as Joseph Campbell said it so well, is to bring life to the world. We can bring life to the world only insofar as we ourselves have become alive.
What is Holarchy?
We live in a holarchic Universe: a being living in a being, living in a being and so on. Now we understand that our Universe is self-creative. Its self-creative ability is brought forth by the participation of all its participants. Each holon is trying to maintain its integrity: to resist, to adapt, to change, to evolve, but not to break apart. It has the ability to self-organize, self-govern, self-control, self-maintain, self-repair, etc. It has the ability to relate to its environment, to learn and evolve. Trying to maintain its integrity, the holon participates as a necessary part in the functionality of a higher level of integration and being.
The Holarchic consciousness comes from a double perspective: toward yourself and your environment – the whole you are part of. A holarchic consciousness can integrate individual and community, personal wellbeing and community wellbeing. It is truly a “more dimensional” perspective than the self-centered one. Holarchic consciousness could bring forth unity through diversity, being able to integrate synergistically what, at a lower level of consciousness, seems mutual exclusive realities. It can build cohesion not through conformity, but in an organic way through synergy and cooperation. It brings forth to humanity a new level of organization: neither a hierarchy nor a heterarchy, but a holarchy. Holarchic architecture resembles an organism.
The holarchy offers a better system for governing and operating, one that authentically distributes authority and embeds flexibility and self-organization into the rules and processes through which the organization structures itself. We will learn how a holarchy works.
The holarchy is better fitted for a living human organization. A holarchic social architecture, resembling an organism, builds autonomy at every level of integration and this brings forth more resilience and diversity to the social body.
Thinking of social organization, we have to design, as its basic level, the holarchic human-scale community (150-180 people). Here we need to have our first level of autonomy, because at human-scale level we are perfectly evolved to live in collaborative, participative, responsible and moral ways. At this level, we choose moral life strategies because they prove themselves to be advantageous. We need autonomous human-scale communities as the first level of social organization.
Exercise: Co-design a holarchic organization!
This could be an amazing exercise! A possible fair human organization is not a utopia: It depends on us to imagine and design it! This imagination & co-creation exercise will last 6 days and will give students the chance to discover their inner “Cultural Creator”. At the same time, the exercise itself is a good training for nonviolent communication, cooperation, imagination, and consciousness development. (We can not imagine and design a holarchic organization – let alone to give it life – from a level of consciousness conducive to separation and competition.)
The holarchy distributes authority throughout the organization and enables self-organization.
A holarchy looks like a series of nested circles: each circle (i.e. team/group of people) is made up of a set of roles, grouped together around a specific function. Some circles will contain sub-circles and all are contained within the larger super-circle of the whole organization.
Each circle is a holon – both a self-organizing entity in its own right and a part of a larger circle. As such, it has autonomy and authority to manage itself, but must also coordinate with other circles in the system.
A holarchy aims to organize a community around the function that needs to be done instead of around the people who do it. This shift – from a hierarchy of people directing people to a holarchy of organizational functions – is critical. Therefore, the “cells” of this organism are not people, but roles, which people then fill. Most individuals will fill multiple roles and therefore be members of several circles. Nobody is a level up than others. Each role has not only responsibilities in order to fulfill its work, but all the liberty and authority it needs.
How it could help you
The core elements of this training course help you to understand your life-journey and connect its dots in a meaningful story. This training course will help you to make sense of the VUCA world we are living in. It helps you to understand how humans could bring forth fair social (holarchic) organization .
You will understand that you can live a meaningful way and create around you a healthy social environment.
It is said that “the truth will set you free!”
How it will unfold
The “Map your Development Journey 2” course lasts 2 weeks.
The accommodation will be in camping conditions. Therefore, each student will have its own tent, sleeping bag and all the necessary equipment for camping in Nature.
Why camping conditions? Because living in camping conditions helps you to reconnect with your roots.
In the first part of the day there will be courses. In the evenings it will be a campfire – we can dance or tell stories. Depending on weather, we will organize small trips around.
The unfold of a typical day:
08 – 09 – waking up and morning activities
09 – 10 – Breakfast (we cook/ wash the dishes/ clean the kitchen)
10 – 13 – Courses
13 – 14 – Lunch
14 – 15 – resting time
15 – 18 – Courses
18 – 23 – Evening program: Campfire (dance, story-telling, games etc.)
The unfold of the 2 week-course:
Friday afternoon – receiving the students, buying the food.
Saturday – the first day of classes, campfire in the evening. Because one of the goals of the course is to help students craft their own meaningful story, Bogdan and Natalia will tell their past and future story – as an example of what such a story might look like.
Sunday – the second day of classes, evening campfire, stories, dance
Monday – the third day of classes, evening campfire, stories, dance
Tuesday – the fourth day of classes, evening campfire, stories, dance
Wednesday – the fifth day of classes, special campfire
Thursday – the first day of imagination and co-design exercise
Friday – the second day of imagination and co-design exercise
Saturday – the third day of imagination and co-design exercise
Sunday – the fourth day of imagination and co-design exercise
Monday – the fifth day of imagination and co-design exercise
Tuesday – the sixth day of imagination and co-design exercise
Wednesday – sharing the experience from imagination and co-design exercise, special campfire
Thursday – sharing the experience from imagination and co-design exercise
Friday morning – we say goodbye and leave for our homes
What will we learn?
This course offers participants the chance to spend a few days in camping style: the chance to reconnect with Nature, with its beauty and wonder, to enjoy the dances and stories around the fire.
In the first part of the training (first 5 days) we learn about the human development journey, covering its second part, where we discover the Creator within. Due to the deeply interactive nature of the course, we will understand how we have evolved so far, where we are at the moment and in which direction of further development we can orient ourselves.
To map the journey of psychological development, we will use a specific framework: 12 archetypes map.
We have specially prepared an Archetype Assessment that will help you to self-assess where you are: which archetypes (psychic energies) you already developed and which are still for further developing; which archetypes are highly developed and which are weakly developed; which energies are expressing in healthy ways and which are expressing in shadowy ways.
The second part of the course – which lasts 6 days – is dedicated to imagine and desing together a holarhic (fair) human organization. It is a great opportunity for us – so accustomed to hierarchy – to rediscover that humans could organize themselves in different ways. That you are able to participate in the creation of the world around you.
All these 6 days will give us the necessary time to reevaluate our life in the light of the new knowledge acquired during this course, to reconnect its dots in new ways and to craft a more meaningful story about ourselves and the world we live in.
This training course is about understanding that we can choose who we want to become. It is about taking our lives in our hands and becoming creators of our life and even more: cultural creators – co-creators of a better world. It is about conscious evolution.
The third part of the course – the last 2 days – is dedicated to sharing the understandings, discoveries and experiences that each of us lived during the imagination and co-creation exercise.
Be a Collaborator!
Anyone can become our collaborator!
We are searching for artists, trainers, film-makers, web-designers and for everyone that is inspired by the same vision as us.
Whatever the challenges of the future, cooperators will have a clear evolutionary advantage compared to non-cooperators.
In the new VUCA world, we will have to survive and thrive in new ways, different from those that have been successful so far. As a multicellular organism is smarter and has better capacities to deal with its environment than a cell alone, as an ant-hill is smarter and has better capacities to deal with its environment than an ant alone, the cooperative groups will be smarter and better equipped to deal with future challenges than single individuals.
Educators, trainers or artists – those who aim to have a social impact, to spread an idea – have to cooperate, if they want to succeed. However, the evolution of Life has a clear direction: towards ever-increasing scales of cooperation.
Those who want to move forward must learn to cooperate in mutually enhancing ways.
The open project “Butterfly Communities” is an emerging community that is searching for young artists, trainers, filmmakers, etc. that have understood that we have to help each other to have a stronger social impact.
