← Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Beyond the Ego: Connecting with the Rebirth Archetype for Transformation
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to Jung on purpose with CreativeMind, hosted by Deborah and Dr. Rob Maldonado, creators of the NeuroMindra coaching method based on Jungian psychology, non dual spirituality and social neuroscience. Join us each week as we explore personal growth for purpose seekers and the incredible inner journey of becoming your true self. Let's get started. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Jung on Purpose. I am Deborah Maldonada.
- [00:38]
B
And I'm Dr. Rob.
- [00:40]
A
And we are here again continuing our series on the archetypes of transformation. And today we are talking about one of the most powerful, impactful archetypes in our whole process of individuation. And that is the archetype of rebirth. And if you are listening to us on one of the podcast services, we do recommend you subscribe to our channel that helps us a lot or our listening to us on YouTube that as well listen and make sure you subscribe so we can build our listenership and get more people access to this great information.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
So, yeah, and just another note that we are teaching these archetypes for a reason. We have a new program coming out in January called Archetypal Family Field System. It's a new practitioner course we have that is gives a set of tools to work directly for coaches and therapists that want to do some Jungian work and want to try on this type of system that we talk about, which is a combination of neuroscience, Jungian psychology and Eastern spirituality.
- [01:47]
B
Absolutely.
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A
So if you check in the show notes, there's some information there below. But rebirth is a powerful concept.
- [01:54]
B
Yeah. Which I think it's a perfect kind of continuation of our last conversation, which was the magical child. If we think about rebirth, it is now what we build up as individuals is young, you know, what Jung called the Persona and our ego and what we identify as, which becomes our self concept and our narrative in life. In rebirth, we have to let go of that. And so it marks a real transition in. In our life where we don't. We no longer identify with our narrative. Now we're not pushing it away, we're not denying it. It's not about saying, you know, I reject my past. On the contrary, it's really accepting it and being able to kind of absorb it and come to terms with it. But what happens is that there's a reconfiguration of the psyche where now we understand that we are conscious beings and we're able to make decisions not from our past conditioning, our narrative, but from a real independence, a real sense of agency. And that can only come through this rebirth archetype It's a pattern that takes us through the dark night of the soul, as many call it. It's only dark from the ego's perspective, because the ego is the one that suffers. That experience of having to let go of everything it built up and, and experiencing it as a loss, because from the ego perspective, it losing everything it had, invested as itself as what's important and built up as this individual. And it's time to let go and it's time to be reborn. And so it's. It's many people that don't understand symbology and. And individuation. They experience it as. As a turbulent time of loss and depression, which is the dark night of the soul. But in reality, it's the biggest opportunity we. We're given in this life, this opportunity to. To redefine ourselves in a conscious way so we can think about it this way. Instead of letting our culture, our family, our. Our society define it or define ourselves, we get to define ourselves in a conscious way.
- [04:31]
A
Well, you talk about. In the last episode, we talked about the new neuroscience that came out, that the brain actually has a huge shift in change when people hit 32. And so that first part of. They think childhood is 9 to. Or 0 to 32 versus 0 to 9. I mean, I think many of the formative years, the real deep condition aspects, happen before we're eight or nine. But they were saying at 32, there's some kind of shift that happened. And so it's almost like we're born with the rebirth archetype and we are meant to be reborn. And so at midlife we do start asking ourselves, is this my beautiful house? Is this my beautiful wife? How did I get here? And we start to question life and our choices and. And we often think that as a bad thing. Like, shouldn't I be happy? I'm a little depressed and I'm. Nothing excites me anymore. See that as like we. Some people call it the crisis of midlife, but it's actually an opportunity of midlife. And the. It's a calling for us to. We're built for this. Jung said that we're built to re. Be reborn. And I want to distinguish rebirth from reinvention because we're not simply just. There's a lot of people that talk about reinvention. I'm reinventing myself. But you're not really reinvent yourself because who you are, who you truly are has already been within you. So really the process is about remembering who you are before the story began of your Life before the narrative and the conditioning began. Who you really are on a deep level. And that's what the rebirth is. We're now like coming to connect with that part of us that's been waiting to come alive. It's a beautiful, beautiful process. So it's really the blueprint for us. That rebirth archetype is the blueprint for us, the steps we take to have that rebirth experience. So it doesn't just happen overnight. I mean, I guess if someone had like a very intense experience, it can happen like instantly, you know, like, so you get lost in the woods and you're almost going to die and you have your life, epiphany happens and there's like some kind of rebirth that happens. But for most of us, we're not like having any like intense tragedies like that that move us through it. But we do need to do need to do it, or else we're always going to be tied to that past. What other people told us who we were and what the world told us, who we were. So I think the first step in this rebirth is the dark night of the soul, which we talk about a lot.
- [07:06]
B
Yes, the symbolic death in, you know, Jung. I think he wanted to be a. An archeologist. He was a kid, and he kind of did archeology through his work. Because what he did was look at ancient cultures, through mythologies, through current traveled around the world. And he saw this rebirth pattern all over the place. In mythological, spiritual traditions, there's always this idea that the old person has to die and it's ritualized. Often there's the shaving of the head, the wearing of different clothes, the robes, changing names, changing names. Living apart from the social old structure and living in a new place in a new way. All those for him were symbolic of this rebirth archetype.
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A
And so when that happens, like this dark night, it doesn't just happen to us like, you know, like a cruel joke. It's when we're ignoring those that the goal of re, you know, rebirth, where we're quite, you know, starting to outgrow the ego if we're not paying attention and clinging to our old patterns, ignoring the intuition that comes from unconscious. We talked about the magical child, that prompting of living our purpose. I know for me, it took me a long time to answer the call because my ego is like, no, that doesn't make any sense. Let's not do it now, let's do it later. Or, you know, family and friends with their very good intentions saying, oh, you're really going to make good money doing what you love. Like, that's just, you know, fantasy and. And then we just ignore it and ignore it, and then something happens to wake us up. And it can be sometimes very, very intense, like a divorce or death of a loved one or moving loose, loss of a job. And you have to move across the country and just your industry changes and, you know, you're here going, well, what do I do now? And we always want to see that as an opportunity, but we do need to go inward. The dark night means going deep inward. It doesn't mean that we have to necessarily be super depressed. But I always call it. I call it the pause. It's like when everything gets put on pause for a moment and we're not moving forward anymore. And we're just kind of like in this place of, you know, questioning everything and deciding our next step. And so it's a beautiful place of kind of nurturing the soil for the new growth and the new birth.
- [09:34]
B
Yeah. One of the perfect myths for this process is Jonah and the whale, where he's swallowed up by the whale for a period of time. And Jung writes beautifully about this myth that he. He's gestating or a second gestation period in the belly of the whale where he's being transformed, almost like metamorphosis. You're being remade, restructured in the process before you're. You're cast out again in. Onto the land, meaning to unto the conscious mind. And that's very much what needs to happen. What happens when people resist it or because the ego will resist this process. It's not that easy to. To give up, even symbolically, the values that were handed down to you by your parents and your culture and your society and that you've spent so much time and energy building up and identifying with. It's not that easy to let go of those things symbolically. Of course, we're not saying to reject them or that you have to reject.
- [10:44]
A
Them, like reject your parents and disown them.
- [10:48]
B
It's more a symbolic transformation where you start to reconfigure yourself and to see yourself in a different way and to take full responsibility for your life. So it is kind of an. An initiation into adulthood. And again, those correlates in. In the brain development are going on that around 32 or 33 years of age start to have your brain kind of starts to go into different mode. It starts to focus more on interconnectivity between the different modules of the brain and seeing things more in holistic way. Instead of just developing better skills and better memories and better cognitive abilities, now you start to kind of question the meaning of your life and find those deeper connections between the. The past and the present and the future. So it is a special period of development. And we can see Jung's work very much as a developmental psychology. It's simply that he's saying development doesn't end in childhood. Development continues throughout your life where you start to go through different periods, that there's different challenges.
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A
Yeah. It's not just like, like, go and work on your childhood as an adult and then that'll clean everything up in your life. It's like, what is happening now? Where am I going? What am I. What do I want to achieve? How do I have more meaning? How do I have more spiritual connection? Those bigger questions about life and how do I feel fully alive.
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B
Yes.
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A
And so again, nothing is being killed. We're not getting rid of the ego, we're just seeing beyond it. The ego is going to be there. We need a functioning sense of identity that carries us, that controls our body systems and our sense of individuality. But we also don't want to limit ourselves by just that tiny little piece of our development and not ignore the. The grandius. Grandiosity of who we are. And so now we, if we can make space for it, we make. Have to make space for this part to emerge. And that's why the death is kind of symbolic in a way. It's like if you aren't willing to let things go, then you're going to be dragging them with you. It's almost like you don't have the freedom for the possibility because it's tied. You're still tethered to the past.
- [13:14]
B
Very much so. And so on the, on the other side of the process, the rebirth is reconnecting with your. That inner blueprint that the magical child had or gave us, which is leading us towards this bigger destiny, this creative destiny. And in symbolic terms, we can think of it as the magical child becomes the divine child. So we see it in a lot of iconography, religious iconography, especially in Catholicism, where you have the mother with a child, this child that is the divine God essence born as a human being. So it represents that spiritual rebirth in us that is natural. So natural, it's really a part of life that reconnects us to the world, to the bigger aspects of it than just our family history.
- [14:17]
A
You've spent years building success and achieving what others would only imagine. But yet something deeper is calling a desire for work that's meaningful, transformative, and rooted in who you really are. At CreativeMind, we train professionals to guide others through real psychological transformation using Jungian principles, Eastern spirituality and social neuroscience. No cliches, no surface level tools, just depth, structure and purpose. Our ICF accredited Jungian Life Coach training program provides a profound professional training in small cohorts that includes personal transformation with a dedicated coach and powerful tools to help you guide others in a deep, lasting transformation. Step into that next chapter of your personal and professional evolution. Join us by visiting creativemindlife.com and speak to an admission specialist today. That's creativemindlife.com. And it is scary to let go of the old narratives. I mean, we want to. I know it took me a long time. Rob's like, you got to stop going there. You can't blame your parents for your life anymore. You know, you have to understand where those patterns come from and that's fine, but you have to take responsibility and move forward or else you are going to keep limiting yourself as that narrative is always in that powerlessness that I'm not free to create because of this happened to me and we are creative beings. It doesn't. And I don't want to say that you should push it under the rug or ignore what happened to you, not process it, whatever, but after a while, you have to stop processing it and start creating because people get comfortable in the processing and they like it because they can analyze themselves and stay there forever. And it's great. You learn so much about your childhood and you keep working on it, but they never get to that point where they are really reborn. And so it's a difficult thing. And you know, working with people, you and I, for thousands of people, it's like the hardest thing for people to do is let go of the past and their, their old identity and be willing to step into something greater. It's comfortable being familiar, isn't it?
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B
Absolutely. In, in the mythology then, and in, in dreams, you know, Joseph Campbell talks about this as well, that the, the myth is like the collective dream of humanity or myths, right? The, the whole mythologies that we follow in different cultures in different parts of the world, they are like the collective dream that we're all dreaming these myths like nobody. There's no. Not an individual writer of these myths. They kind of arise from the collective unconscious. He says they're like also the individual dreams that we have or the, the individual dream is like our personal myth. So our personal myths give us a clue as to what's going on. In our individual journey of transformation. So we want to pay attention to that symbolic language of dreams because they're. They're cueing us into, where are you on this evolution, this developmental process of becoming, this divine essence of rebirth? Right. Or this process of rebirth. We can see it culturally because it's very similar to a tyrant trying to control society. It's the same thing that's happening at the individual level. The ego becomes tyrannical in a sense that it tries to resist and hold on to its old power. So often in mythology, it's framed as, there's an old king that's been a tyrant and continues to be a tyrant, but it's his or his time has come and his death is eminent. The death of the old king is arising or at hand, and the rebirth is about to take place.
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A
Sort of what happened in the US 250 years ago, where we, you know, we're under the power of a tyrannical king, and then the. The rebirth of a new nation in a new way of governing and, you know, collaboration as a country, the birth of democracy. It's very powerful if we can hang on to it. Right?
- [18:51]
B
Yeah. Because society is made up of individuals, all undergoing this dreamlike experience that is very mythological and very much cyclical. We've recognized that it's happened before in different contexts, of course, because time evolves and technology evolves, but. But it's the same pattern that we're seeing.
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A
Well, let me talk about a pop culture reference, because, you know, I'm a big Game of Thrones fan. Back in the day, I know it's been gone for a couple years now, but the death of Jon Snow, it's safe to say that now, hopefully anyone who was going to watch it saw that part. But he was on this. He was tied to his. His role as this person who can never get married, can never own land, has to. He's trapped in this castle that he has to stay there and he want. Do other things. And he has this bigger destiny, but his role and his title as a bastard can never, you know, he can't be anything else. And so when he dies and then comes back, he was now free. Almost like the contracts of that old. He said, I, you know, my oath is now not, you know, I. I'm. I died, so it ends in death. That was the oath. When I die, it ends. So I'm reborn. And then he was able to go beyond the castle and live out his purpose and his destiny as a warrior. And so there's a lot of examples like that. And it's like a symbolic death. This was actually a real death. And reborn. And then it turned out he was the king all along. So it's just really interesting, that whole theme. And I know that the J.R. martin, the author, George R.R. martin, he probably studied young, as you could tell, a lot of great writers study Jung in the Hero's Journey and Joseph Campbell, and inspired by these archetypal paths and powers and forces.
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B
Yeah, that's a good point. Oh, well. And even if they didn't study probably the creative process, because it's coming through the unconscious, the collective unconscious, it would have those elements, those archetypal elements, because it's nature, essentially. That's what Jung defined the unconscious as, our internal nature. Just like the nature we see out in the world, that inner nature is also kind of guided by its own intelligence.
- [21:18]
A
So writing and creativity is all like. Even art is archetypally. That's the source of it, not our little human self. But the archetypes are the source of the forces that shape our life. If we're not conscious of them and just think of ourselves as a little ego, we have a very limited life.
- [21:35]
B
That's right. So, I mean, it's fascinating when you think about Jung's scope of thinking and kind of his understanding of Eastern philosophy as well as Western mythological and esoteric practices like alchemy and kind of putting it all together, he was just way ahead of us in so many ways. Now we're starting to see what he was getting at because we're starting to discover epigenetics, which is kind of a collective transmission of human experience, that there. There are these correlates in biology that we can look at and neuroscience as well. Like we're looking at the development of the brain and its phases. There is this kind of moving towards the higher expressions of self. And we see that these. These points of conflict, external and internal points of conflict, are gateways to. To new stages of consciousness and self realization. So if we apply that principle to what's happening today with the technological developments of AI and quantum computing and just the. Our understanding of so much information and, and also kind of an inflection of political unrest and uncertainty, as well as economic factors playing into this, it is a perfect storm of those. Those individual experiences that we call transformational that. That are happening, happening now at the collective level.
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A
And so we can't be afraid of.
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B
What'S happening exactly, because they're pointing to. We're moving into a new stage of human development, of human Potential. So I know when we look at the news, often many of our students ask us, you know, what's going on and what's. Should we be concerned? And of course, we should do what we can to. To ease suffering and address whatever problems are at hand. But we also want to understand that there are new potentialities arising at the collective level that we have to be ready for and we have to take advantage of. Just like in our individual journeys, when we hit these inflection points, it's preparing us for the next level of our evolution. At the collective level, we're about to hit a new level of evolution, of social evolution. And it's going to be a very different space and plane for us, but it's also full of potential and full of creativity. And so we want to. We want to hold that vision of creativity, of potential for the human race, because somebody has to do it. Like.
- [24:38]
A
Well, can I just say that we do need a new psychology. I mean, I think we're providing a rebirth of a way to approach personal development with, you know, instead of spending a lot of time on our narratives and our past and, you know, Spiet is stuck in that little tiny piece to help people get into their creative energy, into the forces that are so much more powerful in them. And I feel like it's a. It's time for this, like, maybe turning this. The page on some old ways of doing things, old ways of thinking about who we are as human beings and approaching ourselves in our own personal work and development and rebirth in a just a more empowering way.
- [25:18]
B
Absolutely. That's part of our mission, is to kind of bring this to light in this depth psychology way. Right. That there's a deeper psychology, a deeper way of understanding what human being, what human behavior is, besides the cognitive behavioral one, which is an important one. Of course, it gives us a lot of understanding on. On the surface level. But the depth of psychology just goes deeper because it connects us to older ritualistic and mythological system.
- [25:52]
A
Yeah. And we're ready for it. So I say pay attention to those moments where it's time to. You feel a kind of a dullness or a lack of excitement in life. In Erickson's stages of development, he talks about generativity versus stagnation, and we feel that kind of stagnation, although he thought it happened at 40. But I guess with the new neuroscience, it happens much earlier. And just even with economic conditions, I'm sure, like, people are. Their jobs are being really redefined. And the way economics are working right now, that we may be like earlier in life. We're not staying at the same job for 30 years like our parents did or our grandparents did. We start to think about what do we want to do with our lives in a much deeper way than just finding another career to jump into. So think of it as an opportunity. And confusion is okay. Confusion is better than being certain of the wrong thing. If you're certain of the wrong thing, you'd be certain that I got to stay in this job and this is the only way I can make money, I have to stay in this marriage. This is as good as it gets. But confusion about maybe I should stay, maybe I should go, maybe I should try something else. That is the birth of potentiality is that when we start to feel less certain of our old ways and start to open up to new possibilities. And questioning is always the first step.
- [27:10]
B
Absolutely.
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A
All right. Well, we will see you next week on Yoga On Purpose. We are so excited to share this new information with you as you continue and again, check the notes for some more information on our archetypal family field system training. And we'll have a great holiday as well. I know the holidays are coming up, so we'll see you soon.
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B
See you soon.
- [27:31]
A
Bye. Bye. Thank you for joining us for Jung On Purpose with Deborah Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of Creative Mind. Don't forget to subscribe to our our podcast before you leave and join us each week. We'll see you soon.