Category Archives: Know thyself – gnōthi sauton
Man is a microcosmos, an analogy to macrocosmos. As above so below. Knowing thyself is knowing the All.
Ouroborus, eating the tale with the head – by Andreas N. Bjørndal
In different esoteric traditions man is regarded primarily as a soul. A soul suspended between his body in the physical world on one side and the spirit in the spiritual world on the other.
The body is just a vehicle for the soul in this lifetime, it is an expression of your roots both genetically as well as from the pre-existing soul. Your soul is the container of all your experiences and how you have digested them. The possible experiences of the soul are endless.
The spirit on the other side, represent what you left to become a soul and will return to as you approach the goal on your journey back to the spiritual world. The spirit is oneness and as you re-unite everything in your soul life you realize more and more of the spiritual unity that always was. The spirit is eternal the soul is endless; time and space.
This are the two driving forces in you, one that moves towards unification of space an other that drives you back from time to eternity. (Read about the driver and the connector here)
As your soul develops you get to a stage called the magic mirror where you star to look at your own journey and see that you are at this stage due to where you came from and that your next step forward is dependent on your last step from the past. To evolve forward you need to deal with your past.
The initiates symbolised this process with the Ouroborus eating its own tail. You use the highest parts of your soul being strongly in contact with spirit to transform the lower aspects of your soul being closely connected to your body.
The first step
Most humans today have reached a stage with a rational mind. Eating the tail in this case is to look at your own emotions and how you deal with things. Reflecting your emotional life on the mirror of your mind makes you judge your reactions. This cultivates wisdom. You realize that your emotions are like a weaver between you and other people. Some emotions create strong ties others cut the tread. Each time you look at your own emotions with the rational mind you become a bit wiser. As your wisdom grows you become more detached and you succumb less and less to the emotional realm. As you approach the second step you have become a wise man or woman.
The second step
As you master your emotions you start to use them to desire what is good for your vitality, life and health. It becomes not so much a question of emotions as health, vitality and life.
You choose to go to bed as it gets dark outside, to expose yourself less to the electrified modern world of www, to eat healthier food, to get fresh air, clean water and spend time in nature. Additionally you do not spend your vital energies just for emotional pleasure but learn to store them and use them to fuel your spiritual growth. You also start to appreciate the journey within your self, inwards to the internal realms. The care for yourself, for nature and for life creates an unconditional love toward everything. At this stage the ouroborus is eating all life-killers in its love and care for what gives you vitality. As you approach the third step you have become a saint.
The third step
This step is rare and requires such a radiant vitality from your previous steps that you eat with the head of the ouroborus the most material dead parts of yourself.
When you have reached this step you are at the gate between life and death and can die at will or consciously. It also frees you from the body and this earth. It is a state of deep inner peace. At this stage you have reached mastery on Earth.
The meal of bread and wine
You have eaten the bread of wisdom and drunken the wine of love and now they unite as truth and the will to follow a higher will within yourself.
After Abram returned from defeating Chedorlaomer and the kings allied with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him in the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King’s Valley). Then Melchizedek king of Salem (Peace) brought out bread and wine – since he was priest of God Most High and he blessed Abram and said: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand.” Then Abram gave Melchizedek a tenth of everything. (Genesis 14:18-20)
The oroborus in Egypt
Here you see the Aker lions of tomorrow and yesterday which represents the magic mirror. The sun disc within the Oroborus contains Harpocrates which is Horus the child or symbol of your inner child or spiritual re-birth.
From the Papyrus of Dama-Heroub. Third Intermediate Period.
Sensing the spiritual
Here you can read about the ability to sense the spiritual world and how it develops in stages.
Whimsical as a butterfly or wise as a fool? – by Andreas N. Bjørndal
Is whimsical always bad? Let us explore
Nature has so many diverse and beautiful manifestations. One of its most whimsical expressions is the butterfly. Almost every child must have experienced the amazement of this colourful creature suddenly changing direction in patterns sometimes difficult to grasp.
A young girl I know call them flower-fly instead of butterfly.
Flower-fly
Imagine the plant stretching itself up through evolution, taking its first hold on land, learning to transport water within itself, developing leaves and then flowers with coarse sepals to culminate with silky soft colourful petals that take off and fly as a flower-fly. It is not difficult to imagine, lying their in the summer field with summing bees and cumulus clouds with all kinds of shapes that the butterflies are flowers flying.
Evolutionary speaking the butterfly can be seen as the flowers of the insects. Insects where stuck on the ground before some developed the ability to fly. Of all the flying insects the butterfly represents the latest stage of evolution with its beauty and colour variations not to speak about the silky soft wings reminding of flying flowers.
Metamorphosis
The butterfly is also a beautiful expression of transformation; the egg turning into a larvae or caterpillars that then pupate in a chrysalis. When completely metamorphosed the butterfly comes out expands and dries its wings and flies off.
The egg can be compared to Carl Gustav Jungs first stage of human development, The Athlete Stage. Here we just look at what is inside the egg, we just look at how we look like, our body and how we dress up. The mirror and selfie are our best friends, we do not see outside the wall of the egg of our ego.
The next stage Jung calls The Warrior Stage, here we can compare it with the larvae or caterpillar working its way through the fields conquering life. At this stage humans try to do the best, get the best, compete for possession and position.
The third stage is The Statement Stage and we will compere it with the chrysalis. You realize that the external things did not make you happy you are not satisfied or fulfilled. You now want to take from inside yourself and give to the world to make the world a better place. You know it is not about the external values. You have become a grown up soul that want to guide the younger souls in the right direction. It all is a question of what you have cultivated inside yourself that can be given to others.
In the final stage of Jung, The Stage of Spirit, you transcend the body and the physical reality and you realize your true spiritual nature. You experience being a spiritual being in the physical world rather than a physical being with spiritual experiences. This is the stage of the butterfly with the spirit free flowing in the sea of light in a state of truth.
Being a butterfly
Homeopathy has explored substances from all kingdoms and so many parts of nature. A homeopathic scientific proving reveals the inner nature of things through its effects on the human mind. The last three decades also the butterflies have been investigated telling us a bit about how it would be to be a butterfly, or which human personalities that can improve and realize their potential from getting a butterfly remedy.
A state of being whimsical, light, careless and gay is absolutely present in the butterfly. Looking at it deeper it is a conflict between; going with the flow, what gives joy, ones intuition or desire for freedom as opposed to duty, convention and rules. Butterflies let you learn to surrender and let go of control.
This learning experience can be described as seeing things from another level, letting the metamorphosis take place stage by stage. Solutions are there and have always been there you just needed to perceive things from a higher level or a more spiritual plane.
What seemed fragmented, erratic or whimsical belongs to a higher level of order, law and care. What seemed to be a loosing of direction or track turn into a deep trust and assurance of being on the right path. A state nicely portrayed in the Tarot card The Fool or the film Being There with Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine.
Archetypical whimsical
Let us look at the planetary archetypes of whimsical as we can see in typology, astrology, and mythology.
Whimsical can be out of lack of direction or lack of grounding or anchoring.
The lack of direction is just a step of evolution where you are still young and need to experience things again and again to start to see patterns and eventually the bigger picture. Young children and teenagers have this as a natural step in their evolution. Just think about a little child learning to walk about, going here and there, suddenly doing something different and then again and again. This is exploring, learning and training by repetition.
This is the archetype of Mercury slowly approaching and uniting with Jupiter. The young lightly fanciful searching Mercury is stretching towards the overview of the bigger picture in Jupiter. “Should I go here or there, to get to everywhere?”
The other aspect is the lack of grounding making it capricious or over reactive. That can be out of lots of stress or chaotic circumstances getting towards neurotic or hysterical reactions. Here there has not been enough grounding or calming experiences and activities. The emphasis is too strong on the exterior world and there is a huge need to turn inwards. They need to create inner pictures rather than pictures fed from a screen as well as perceiving and dwelling with your own inner state rather than being a victim of exterior impressions.
Both of these represent challenges with the early stages in the life cycle, a kind of immaturity and something that need to grow and be developed. Both represent a lack of either direction or substance.
There is also a whimsical variation that comes from excess. When the emotional waters are running and overflowing or turn into fog then they make the objective structure misted and unclear. People in such states can easily appear whimsical. This aspect is not so erratic, but appears more confused. Here the archetypes of Moon and Neptune are manifesting. This whimsical person is more distant, like in a dream or fantasy world or under the influence of drugs.
The last archetypical aspect of whimsical we will address is a strong Uranus that with its active mind get sudden abrupt impulses and ideas. Here the balance is to be able to stay centred and not become a victim to all intuitive or genius glimpses and insights that comes to mind. Also to be able to meet the others where they are at in their own journey in life and adjust to their needs and not overload them with ones own cacophony of cosmic insights is an important lesson.
The solution to whimsical will depend on the kind. The young Mercury needs to explore and experience to get the bigger picture. The un-rooted need to cultivate the Moon and a feeling of inner peace. The foggy Moon/Neptune needs to dry out with intellectual wind or spiritual heat or purity and Uranus needs to find the balance between ego-centre and periphery.
At the other end of the cycle
The zodiac or circle of signs progressing through the year can be seen as a sequence for any cycle or project. Early astrological signs representing early stages of cycles in life as Aries or Gemini can be seen as whimsical, but so can also the last two; Aquarius and Pisces. As the young inexperienced can be whimsical so can old people, particularly women appear whimsical. With old woman it is also a lack of the anchoring forces in life, the yin or contact with the inner spiritual nature. As woman grow older it is important to connect with the inner life as their anchor. (Read here; Woman evapourate and men burn out ).
But also the highly evolved soul in contact with the higher realms can appear whimsical. You sit with a master asking him questions and realize he is reading your thoughts. He suddenly say; “do not worry about that” addressing your last though. This will abrupt you and could appear whimsical. But here the last polarity of Uranus of being centred is manifesting itself as acting out of an awareness of the present moment and the actual thought present here and now. For the observer it seems sudden, abrupt and erratic for the master it is a single bull eye statement as an act of least intrusion.
Also a soul living with the flow or being in deep connection with the collective unconscious or spiritual realms seeing through the veil of illusions in this world could appear whimsical for the person that is not connected to the higher realms.
Both these cases represent the qualities in the last two signs of the zodiac.
Lao Tzu in Dao Te Ching;
Can you coax your mind from its wandering
and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
supple as a newborn child’s?
Can you cleanse your inner vision
until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them
without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from your own mind
and thus understand all things?
Giving birth and nourishing,
having without possessing,
acting with no expectations,
leading and not trying to control:
this is the supreme virtue.
The sense of thought by Andreas N. Bjørndal
Have you ever felt that you just understood the other person as they are, just grasped their way of seing life? Then you have used your sense of thought. Read more here.
Walk in! Wake up! – by Andreas N. Bjørndal
Here is an article about verticality of man v.v. the horisontal animal, the connection between the beginning and end of life and awareness.
http://themagichappensnow.com/walk-in-wake-up-by-andreas-n-bjorndal/
Archetypes – by Andreas N. Bjørndal
Archetypes can be used in many different ways and in most fields of life.
Archetypes make it easy to classify and understand qualities that are related but also to see which qualities that are opposite. Here is a map of Archetypes that I have developed. Let us explore.
Let us first look at some words and make a little exercise.
Try to find which two words that seem not to belong here.
As you look at them you realise they are not synonyms neither a class of words, but most of them express a quality that we can call an archetype. An archetype that could also be expressed with words like; strong, independent, decisive, irritability, cutting, heat, accident etc.
The word tenderness and harmony seems to not only misfit, but even to be almost opposite to the other words. You could say that one of the groups have qualities like the colour red, the other like the opposite green. But what are they? Not synonyms but rather archenyms or semionyms if we should invent a name for them. What should we use as a common word for the red or the green?
We can easily see if we organize the words that “Self-assertive” or a strong person with a strong “I” could represent the red words. The green words are more about adjusting to the other or the surroundings. You can say these represent the focus on myself or the other, I and You.
These two colours or groups of words represent two archetypes; Mature man and Young woman. Both are archetypical qualities that can be expressed in many different ways and in many different fields.
In the schema below you see the six main archetypes with the “Master” as number seven in the middle.
This illustration is a synthesis of knowledge from different fields and even with its simplicity it explains some of the most important aspects in so diverse fields of knowledge as astronomy, taxonomy, psychology, biology and many more.
You can easily see it has some basic geometric structures.
1: Each archetype has a polarity (The master has centre-periphery)
2: The zigzag from the child to young man, young woman, master, mature man, mature woman and old, represents the stages of development in life.
3: The three top ones represent maturity and age, while the three bottom ones represent the young and immature.
*My courses on archetypes covers more than ten other geometric relations and what they represent in life.
Let us look at the polarity between the two archetypes; The old and The Child.
The Old
As an archetype the old can both be used to describe a personality as well as qualities in nature.
We will start by describing a person that is typical of the archetype “The old” since that is easy to relate to.
This person does not need to be old of age, but will have some qualities that are more common as people get older.
The old is serious, responsible and like to have control. They will easily feel alone, isolated or estranged. They do not let people get close to them easily and will not show signs of weakness.
The control aspect can make them stuck and fixed particularly in how things should be, used to be or they need them to be.
There is an atmosphere of coldness, constriction and inhibition around these persons.
On a more abstract level you can say that any process that contracts and gets compact, harder and more material represents this quality. This archetype is cold, black, stiff and represents structure.
In chemistry you will recognize it in carbon with its blackness, hardness in diamonds, and being the backbone of the structure in all life as well as what is left when you burn things.
In botany the archetype is represented by evergreen trees. Living into very old age, often creating a dark forest, and not letting other plants grow close to them.
This kind of person has learned to master the challenges in life by taking control, taking charge, by observing how others have coped. It could be that early in life nobody was taking care of them, so they had to take care of themselves. It could be that early in life things were so painful that they needed to supress the emotions and put them deep into a hidden place within. It could also be that things were so scary that they needed to control as much as possible not to end up in similar situations. Some people are also just born serious and with a lot of duty.
These people will particularly get drawn towards persons dominated by the archetype “The child” because that represents what they need.
The child is the opposite archetype and by cultivating that part within “The old” gets closer to a balanced place in the centre, a place of mastery.
The Child
As an archetype anything said about The old finds its polarity in The child.
These persons are dependent of others, clingy, insecure and wants to be taken care of.
They love home life and family life and can be full of care and mothering feelings they are mild and playful.
Often they will be childish, timid, changeable, yielding and demanding.
As a polarity to The old, The child represents people that need to mature, become independent and take charge of the duties in life. They need to grow towards the old to find mastery in life.
Same axis – but opposite
Persons that are dominated by The old or The child will find their own polarity in the other. First we can see that both are concerned about others. The child will often focus on the closest people, people in the family, neighbours or close friends, often people that have been there all the way back to childhood. They will spend a lot of time making sure these close people get their needs of protection, food and care.
The old also has concern for others, but it is often for their staff, people at work, in the community, society or the bigger more extended family. When the old is concerned about the family it is more that they will feel the duty to gather the family together.
We can find common things in the axis The old-The child, but the easiest is to see the polarity. You can say they are inter-connected, that to become The old, you need to “suppress” the child and to become The child, you need to be “blind” to The old.
Often a person being dominated by The old will be attracted to The child as a partner or friend. The polarity will attract but also be the main challenge in a friendship and in a relationship it could even end up being the reason for a divorce.
The old will love the care, mildness and mothering quality of The child, but will feel strangled by the clinging and needy quality. The challenge is these relations can only be solved it they understand that they need to find the qualities they are searching in the other also within themselves.
The old need to challenge himself and be daring enough to be vulnerable, expose his needs, express his weakness and let others take decisions. The child also need to go within and say what can go wrong by making a decision myself, it could always be redone. Only by trying alone will I get the experience and wisdom to take responsibility.
So how can we find that aspect within, how do we use this in our life?
Some exercises
The old need to get in touch with his inner child, with his needs, with the more subtle aspects of life.
Here are a few sample exercises for the old:
1. Lay down for a few minutes when you come home from work, put your hands with the palms on the solar plexus and breath deep and slow. Just feel how your body feels; hot, cold, tired, tens, painful etc.
2. Ask yourself everyday what you should do today that you do only for taking care of yourself with no modal verbs (Should, have to etc.)
3. If you were a child is there any presents you would have liked, that you never got? Why not give them to yourself now? Or maybe a grown up version?
4. Indulge sometimes in something that you enjoy so much that you could imagine your mother, father or partner preparing that for you out of love and care.
5. Try to remember your dreams when you wake up, you might need to get used to snooze a bit.
6. When did you last time ask for a hug, ask for a kiss, a massage or just letting your head in the lap of your loved one.
7. Create nice atmospheres, burn candles, incense and play calming music like if you would prepare for nice company with yourself.
These are just a few exercises for the old to give you a taste.
I am building up a complete archetype online course to be available, press follow to be informed.
Refresh – a question of new life – by Andreas N. Bjørndal
Here you can read my article about “refresh” (April issue 2016 in The Magic Happens Now Magazine). It is a short text about how you can refresh yourself and gain new “life” or vitality. Learn how to turn down the cockpit and connect to the black dark to dissolve all impurities.
You might also like the related article about Silence.
The article: Que Bella – find the hidden God or Goddess in your partner – by Andreas N. Bjørndal
Here you can read my latest article in The Magic Happens Now Magazine – Desember 2015 issue.
http://themagichappensnow.com/que-bella-find-the-hidden-god-or-goddess-in-your-partner-by-andreas/
The article “Curiosity” in the Magazine The Magic Happens Now – Andreas N. Bjørndal
Here you can read my latest article in “The Magic Happens Now” november issue.
Enjoy. Also remember to press “Follow” to be updated on the new series on holonistic health.
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