ARCHETYPES IN THE CLOUD
Learning how to navigate a world where everyone and
everything is connected, where every object has a voice (if not IP address),
where all things can be found, and all that was hidden is seen, where realities
comes into being based on what decoding scheme we chose, is truly a mythic
challenge. Without proper tools and spiritual preparation, hyper-connectivity
can be an endless hall of mirrors, trapping us in the morass of our
electronically magnified addictions and fears.
Perhaps it is from the inner world of myth and archetype that
we can find the wisdom to live and thrive in this new environment? Each
archetype has its “gold” -- its power and its gift to connect us with our
deepest aspirations for our soul, and its “shadow” -- its immature
manifestation that tricks us with false promises (of safety, of power, of love,
of spiritual connection), and leads us further into isolation.
Traversing this
new world we can draw upon the deep wisdom of the protector archetypes: the Warrior,
whose work it is to set and protect boundaries from a deeply grounded place;
the Lover, who can establish clean connections with "the
other;" the Magician, who is able to discern shadow from light, and
recognize the larger patterns; and the Elder/Sovereign, who through the act of
blessing and generosity, can not only see, but change, the codes of
reality, healing the web of creation. We can see the light and shadow side of
these archetypes at play within each of the current strategies we have embraced
to guide us through the world of the cloud.
The Magician
Out in cyberspace, where every digital bit effects all
others, and where each bit brings forth a slightly different “reality,” having
a guide that can see through the “data smog” and recognize the underlying
patterns -- the meta-information -- is critical. This is the domain of the
Magician -- one who is comfortable in the shadow places, one who is a systems-seer,
capable of finding their way in a sea of conflicting signals. The Magician is
comfortable walking in the world of the manifest, and in the worlds of
potential form. It sees beyond habitual concepts to the underlying patterns
that modulate all reality. And, because it can past the illusion, it is not
seduced by every immediate stimuli. “Spend time pondering not what you
see, but why you see it,” Merlin tells the young Arthur in Depak Chopra’s
The Way of the Wizard. ‘Look at the carpets rising and the straw blowing
about; branches, leaves and trees dancing; the pond wearing rippled armor,’ all
these things look different, Rumi tells us, but “in root and reality, they‘re
one: the wind.”
At its best, this archetype can help us distinguish between
all the potential tricksters and false signs that we meet on the journey; at
its worst, in its “shadow” manifestation, it is itself the great manipulator,
the promoter of false insights and dreams that pass for reality -- the land of
the Matrix movies. More often, the Magician gets carried away with her
mental abilities, becomes detached from the earth, and loses touch with her
heart. Google’s reliance on its data-mining processes has much Magician energy
about it: wonderful results can come forth, but sometimes it provides results
that are completely disconnected from life as we live it!
Men and women following the Magician in cyberspace must be
alert for the intoxication of data-gathering, for the delusion that “only the
right algorithm can find the truth,” for the temptation to “just play one more
level” or download “just one more app.” But, at its best, the Magician reminds
us to venture past our fear of the unknown, to widen our reception channels, to
take in more frequencies, until we can see with what Sri Aurobindo called “the
eye of complete union,” finding, as poet William Blake saw, “a world in a grain
of sand.”
The Lover
The Lover seeks connection, sparks our creativity, and holds
all beings out in the web in its heart center. Relationship and reciprocity is
the core communications focus of this archetype, its greatest desire is to
reveal our dreams and joys, our innermost desires, to a trusting circle of
friends. When in shadow mode, the Lover can lead us into obsessive concern
about not being connected, and lead us to engage in compensatory
over-communications to the point of drowning out the truly important signals
all around us. It often mistakes codependency for compassionate listening,
getting hooked into other’s stories as if they were “real.”
This guide is an important friend, as it pulls us back from
the Magician’s conjured dreamspace and abstractions into the domain of feelings
and the safety of trusted circles of friends. The Lover is a strong advocate of
“crowd sourcing” and open-systems, freeware and shared content. It must be
alert however, to the seduction of self-promotion, group-think and mutual ego
inflation, that flows like a dark current through much of today’s social media
networks. When disconnected from the intelligence of the Magician, and
vulnerable without the protection of the Warrior, the Shadow-Lover may “spill
its secrets” on to all and everyone with the click of a mouse regardless of the
impact (some would see this “naïve openness” shadow in WikiLeaks).
A wounded lover can respond be becoming “thick-skinned” and
cynical as a way of self-defense, eagerly awaiting another scandal or
embarrassing video thrown up on to the web for all to see. At the other
extreme, the shadow can take the form of hyper-sensitivity and the “victim
syndrome,” compulsively finding more reasons for their own loneliness in every
friend’s Facebook status update or Twitter post.
The Lover understands that a trusted friend is a much greater
security check than layers of complex passwords and firewalls, that a referral
from within one’s circle of intimates is going to carry much more weight that a
data-driven recommendation protocol. The explosive growth of Facebook and
social search, the flood of heart-tugging “cute animal videos” on YouTube, and
the success of viral campaigns for human rights that continues today, reminds
us that the Lover has never been banished by the geek Magicians of cyberspace.
For this we can be thankful, for it will be the Lover responding to these calls
for environmental sanity, that keeps us from destroying our spaceship Earth.
The Warrior
If we use the Magician to help us see the underlying data
patterns within the cloud, the Warrior archetype gives us the power to move
through this hall of mirrors towards our true goals. It gives us a shield to
protect us from the constant bombardment of data distractions in our
hyper-connected world. The Warrior is protective of boundaries, defending our
personal information from expropriation by those that may want to harm us or
use our data for inappropriate purposes.
The Warrior is not tricked by appearances (the Lover’s
weakness) or seduced (as is the Magician) by the complexity of near-infinite
choice. Warrior energy fuels the use of the internet and social media for
justice and civil rights, for calls to live a life of mission and service.
Listening to the cries of the Lover, this archetype takes on the responsibility
of using technology for the care the earth, pushing the Magician to simplify
and clarify (through careful design and presentation) the complex data patterns
about global warming, population growth, pandemic outbreaks, etc., in such a
way that individuals and groups can take specific action.
We are all too familiar with the Warrior’s shadow. Violence
and aggression against projected demons and external enemies, rigidity and
attachment to rules and procedures, distrust and distance from the messiness of
life, are all signs of the wounded or immature Warrior archetype. We see these
behaviors all over the web. On the aggressive side, flaming wars, scattershot
spam, hate speech and “trolls” set out to destroy the infrastructure of the
network itself. In its passive form, hierarchical systems of control that
stifle others creativity and sharing.
In so many ways, Steven Jobs and Apple personified these
positive and negative Warrior traits -- from elegant simplified design
strategies and top-to-bottom responsibility for its products, to the rigidity
of locked battery cases and non-interchangeable cables, to exclusive smart
phone “apps” and cellphone contracts that trap its customers in a “follow the
leader” relationship. In its quest for just-in-time streamlined manufacturing
processes, Apple has been accused of forgetting the Lover’s core values in
terms of worker health and safety.
Tapping the power of the Warrior allows us to navigate the
cloud from a place of personal safety. And from this place, tap our power of
creativity, whether it is the making of new programs and applications, to
playing with our online identities and finding our personal expressive
voice.
The Sovereign
The Sovereign [Wise Elder/Crone] operates from a place of
blessing and generosity. Closer to death than any of the other archetypes, she
is no longer caught up in her own ego defense. She has no fear of the
transpersonal realms, but her stance is not to “understand it” [as a Magician]
or “change it” [as a Warrior], but to observe it with love and
compassion, watching the flow of information as it traverses the cloud from a
place of non-attachment. This distancing from the “hooks of attachment and
attention” allows the Elder to offer unconditional love for the entire human
experience. The shadow danger is here is one of inflation and narcissism,
mistaking one’s “big picture understanding” for that of the Divine mind.
Healthy Sovereign energy fuels our efforts to heal the web of
life. It is the underlying ethos of the internet itself -- openness, trust, the
free flow of packets across multiple paths, all finding their way to the final
destination through the “goodwill” of router devices that read the packet’s
destination and generously forward it on to next node that is either closer to
its goal or relatively free of competing traffic. The Sovereign understands that
each packet has its own destiny and path, but that once assembled in the proper
order, the true meaning of the message is revealed. Its job is to keep the
network itself, and all of its potential paths and routers, as strong as
possible.
When we tap this archetype, we are empowered to commit acts
of kindness without attribution. Performing the ancient Jewish moral
commandment of Tikkun Olam, the Sovereign calls upon all the other
archetypical energies to guide its stewardship of the planet, and its electronic
nervous system. It means staying fully conscious of our operating systems, and
like the self-healing “mesh networks” we are building out in the Infosphere,
downloading new applications that are in greater alignment with our inner work:
stepping into the Cloud not as dependent children, or dangerously independent
adolescents, but as “inter-dependent” adults, bringing forth a transformation
of human consciousness.
