I’m off to Greece, the land where the idea of archetypal patterns first emerged. If France is all about the heart, Greece is a good place to contemplate the mind.
France is associated with love and art. Greece is associated with science, and philosophy… plus sport and fighting. It’s where we get our stories of legendary male heroes, like Odysseus, Perseus, and Achilles… men who overcame outrageous odds in their battle to prove their worth to the Gods.
The Gods in the Christian Bible are Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Greek mythology has a similar trinity – Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades – God of the sky, the sea, and the underworld. All these Gods are male. In terms of patterns, (which couldn’t give a fig about gender) these could represent the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind.
While the Christian Gods wanted their subjects to follow rules, the Greek Gods wanted their subjects to be really impressive. They weren’t too interested in the behaviour of humans unless there was some kind of competition going on, at which point they got involved by taking sides.
The Christian Gods judged if people were “good or bad” but the Greek Gods judged if they were “winner or loser.”
Unlike God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost who were all portrayed as celibate, Greek Gods were having sex with just about everyone – Goddesses, nymphs, and humans, both male and female. To Zeus, sex was a competition – he seemed to spend most of his time devising how to have sex with as many beings as possible, completely against their will, while preventing his wife Hera from finding out about it.
Competition is the main theme of Greek mythology. The Gods competed to outdo each other, and they created challenges for humans – just to see how they’d perform and get themselves out of trouble.
The Gods loved a bit of drama, which is probably why the Greeks went on to build amphitheatres and wrote so many tragedies.
Our inherited pattern from the Christian God is the need for obedience and our belief in the “carrot and stick” method of training. If we are good, we will be rewarded. If we are bad, we will be punished. The carrot is praise and the stick is withdrawal of love. As children, we were all trained in this method.
Our inherited pattern from the Greek Gods is the need to be heroic or sexually desirable. Greek gods didn’t notice what humans were doing unless they stood out either by being strong or attractive enough to catch Zeus's wandering eye. As teenagers, we all succumbed to this belief system.
These patterns make us push ourselves to achieve and punish ourselves when we fail. We criticize ourselves when we’re lazy or afraid, and we hate ourselves when we age or put on weight.
We train ourselves in this reward and punishment method, because the carrot and stick are now inside our mind, rather than projected onto a Godlike figure. We measure the success of our day by whether we’re winning or losing. Sometimes we reward ourselves if we’ve had a “productive” day – but mostly we beat ourselves up because we fall short of our expectations.
If the polarity in our heart is the tension between Neediness and Control, the polarity in our mind is the tension between Win and Lose.
When our desire to win is driven by enthusiasm or the joy of stretching ourselves, life is good. Unfortunately, our desire to win is often driven by the fear of losing, so we feel anxious, needy, or jealous a lot of the time.
Jealousy is an interesting emotion. We associate it with matters of the heart – a by-product of loving someone. But jealousy is more about losing than loving.
As always, it’s our driving energy, or “who we’re being while we’re doing what we’re doing” that determines the outcome.
The mind is a gift and a curse. It can imagine new possibilities, which is great for creativity, but it can also imagine worst-case scenarios, which keep us locked in decision paralysis.
We realise how little control we have over our mind when we try to meditate. Our mind grabs at thoughts, jumps between ideas, or becomes obsessed with the need for food. This is why we often refer to it as “the monkey mind”.
Athens is often cited as one of the “cradles of civilization”. These nurseries in which our intellect was first developed, could also be called “cradles of conditioning” – places we learnt to comply with the demands of masculine Gods.
Of course, there are upsides to this masculine drive for competition and winning. We have invented technology, medicine, engineering, architecture, literature, and labour-saving devices.
There are lots of positives, but if the negatives lead to the destruction of the planet, then the positives become pretty pointless.
The Indigenous tribes whose God was female (Mother Nature) had a mindset of “I have a duty to serve the whole of life and respect the planet for future generations”.
People who were influenced by the old paradigm masculine Gods had a very different mindset “I have the right to control all the resources and take what I want.”
This is not to slam the patriarchy. A matriarchy may have fared no better. Power doesn’t have a gender. It either serves the individual, or it serves the whole. If we feel powerless and needy on the inside, we’ll beg, trade, grab, or manipulate for power, regardless of whether we’re male or female.
On the other hand, if we’re connected to Flow, we’d feel powerful, so would be less likely to fall into these dysfunctional power dynamics. We’d make higher choices that favoured creativity and love rather than needy choices that favoured control and self-interest.
In the Bible, God told humans not to eat from the tree of knowledge. In Greek mythology, Zeus told Pandora not to open a jar full of secrets. In both stories, Eve ate the apple and Pandora opened the jar, unleashing all the subsequent horrors that humans have had to endure.
It’s no wonder we became wary of our feminine nature with its curiosity and desire for the unknown. But it’s important to remember that these are STORIES.
Humans favour hierarchical structures, just like their imagined Gods. We ascend to heaven. We scale Mount Olympus. In modern times, we climb the ladder of success.
Perhaps it’s time to change this linear geometry so that we can participate more in the circle of life… a circle is a feminine shape denoting wholeness and inclusivity rather than individual glory.
The mind of God has been masculine for a really long time… perhaps since the invention of language itself. Mother Earth has no language of words, yet contains a vast network of communication across millions of species, all getting along famously.
We need to update this old strategy of proving our worth to the outside world, and replace it with a new strategy by which we know our value on the inside. If we connect to the force of love and creativity moving through us, we would have less need to prove anything and less need for the approval of others.
The need to win is the f*ckery that blocks Flow.
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