Bees

Bees have always appealed to the human mind because of their organized behavior, as evidenced also by other insects. Bees have an incredible unconscious cooperation of the whole group, though we think of them as completely unconscious and as having only a sympathetic nervous system. The late Karl von Frisch described most astonishing experiments made with bees. They can distinguish colors and can show each other where nectar is. A bee will fly in a big circle and find honey, but does not have to fly back the same way; it can go straight and by certain movements of the back and wings can show and tell the others so that they can go straight to the honey. It has been discovered that their system of orientation has to do with the polarization of sunlight. The unconscious instinct of the bees is amazing, and they therefore often symbolize harmonious functioning without rational organization.

Our communal life is more complicated than that of the bees, but we also have an instinctual basis for it. Our instinctual basis was and still is the performing of instinctual rituals which hark back to the most archaic times. With the development of consciousness, however, these archaic rituals have been amplified and even sometimes superseded by rational organization. Instinctual oneness with one’s task and surroundings is an ideal state, the state where the religious archetype simply holds people together and they cooperate on a natural basis. This is a functioning which man has always lost and sought again—you find it in all youthful communities. In Zen Buddhism there were such groups gripped by the same living symbol; they were strong social bodies which functioned without too many outer regulations. The mystery cults in late antiquity are an example of our civilization. We know a little of the initiation of Apuleius into the Isis mysteries. He was to have been initiated into a higher degree but did not have the money; then Osiris told him in a dream to go to the priest and ask to be initiated, and the priest had also had a dream telling him to reduce the fees. The god therefore organized the group, and both the priest and the organization submitted to archetypal instigation. As long as a community functions in that way, there is real freedom of the human being and cultural life in a group. So we can say that the building of the castle by the bees is a model of the rebuilding instigation in the state.

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Published by Professor P

My name is Paityn Masters, my friends call me P. I am queer, Pisces, & an ENFP. I am trained as a psychotherapist, and my roots were as a youth pastor. As a psychotherapist, my specialty is in trauma and complex PTSD. I met my best friend and my cosmic partner, Jenni McCullum in graduate school. Together, we began discovering the spiritual world and the psychic gifts that had laid dormant in our psyche. We both went through a wild initiatory process that joyfully and sometimes even painfully expanded our capacity to both SEE and to HEAR, beyond the limits of the five senses. We are both intuitives, and Jenni is also a medium. As traditional psychotherapy frowns on the mystical modality, we had to start our own practice, and sacrifice licensing in order to answer the Call. Fortunately, we found our theoretical home in a branch of psychology known as Depth Psychology, that has its roots in the discoveries made by C. G. Jung, and seeks to study the soul rather than behavior, and sees the whole person on a spiritual level first—then works down to personality, family influence, upbringing, biology, heredity, physicality, status, image, and complexes. We see symptoms as more than something to eliminate, we see them as messages from the Soul. Psyche means Soul, but not many people know this, because our culture can’t seem to get beyond its dependence on the “safety” of the logical/rational mind. “Whenever you are in the realm of Soul, things will always go over your head. The statements of the conscious mind may easily be snares and delusions, lies, or arbitrary opinions, but this is certainly not true of the statements of the soul: to begin with they always go over our heads because they point to realities that transcend consciousness.” (C.G. Jung, Answer to Job). Healing means “making whole,” and many either think they are already whole, or fear they’re broken beyond repair. Healing involves the courage to look at the wounds that caused the brokenness to begin with. Symptoms are a huge help in identifying not only the injury but also the gifts one possesses. Marion Woodman said, “the wound is where the God enters.” So, we look at pain and trauma from the standpoint of Soul Making. I speak of God in my writing quite frequently, and like Soul, God is something that transcends our ability to conceptualize what that means. When I say God… I mean the God that I have discovered within… the same one that is within you. Folded up within each of us is the entirety of the cosmos. How we relate to our inner world determines how we will relate to everything. Our primary wounds and our deepest wounds are in the realm of relationship—beginning with the way we relate to our own inner selves. We are wounded in relationship and so we must be healed in relationship. That’s one of the things that we hope to do in our work here in this earth school. We hope to hold up a mirror so you can see your true nature, the image of your soul; reflection brings about insight, knowledge, and Wisdom.

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