Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG http://www.esonet.ORG 1

Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
During the twentieth century, there has been constantly increasing stress upon
individualism and personal self-expression, even in very young children whose behavior
is mostly imitative (or in some cases polarized by distaste, fear, and revolt). As a result the
quality of relationships desired within the family group has become confused with the
quality of relationships appropriate within the peer groups in which family members
participate. Naive, immature, or overly idealistic parents desire to be "pals" with their
young and (even more) adolescent children. Parents no longer are able, or even willing, to
accept and perform their archetypal functions. Having lost its archetypal character, the
family is no longer, or at least not effectively and significantly, the next "greater whole" to
which the child belongs. If the child does not learn to grow within this primordial greater
whole and does not feel that he or she belongs to it, later the child will encounter difficulty
feeling a sense of belongingness to a still greater whole — to the community or nation and
eventually to the largest experienceable wholes, humanity and the planet earth.
When such patterns of thwarted development pervade an entire society, the only
relationships human beings can accept are with peers. These relationships are theoretically
horizontal, though in fact they are not always so. Lacking a sense of belonging to an
organic whole, modern pseudo-individuals envision peer groups as being formed by the
coalescence of more or less randomly formed horizontal relationships (a picture which is
reinforced in the United States by the restless, peripatetic nature of American society).
This, of course, is the democratic ideal, as it has come to be understood by recent
generations for whom all vertical relationships have become suspect. No great difference
is recognized between the often oppressive if not tyrannical "verticality" of social
relationships (employer-employee, governor-governed, general-private, and so on) and
the hierarchical, containing character of the immense series of natural and cosmic wholes.
The issue may seem to refer only to social processes and to the place occupied in the
modem world by the family and the multitude of peer-groups, unions, clubs, and societies
bringing together people who have common interests; but it actually refers to the whole
picture human beings make of their destiny and of the future developments of
consciousness and activity on earth. This picture radically changes when seen in relation
to the "model" of the cycle of being and the concept of holarchy I have presented. The
evolution of the earth, humanity, cultures, groups and persons need no longer be
interpreted and understood as a one-way aggregation of random contacts operating
within the laws of attraction and repulsion (important as these laws are). It can be seen as
a two-way process integrating the involution of forms (archetypes) and the evolution of
material energy-systems. Separate elements — be they atoms, living organisms, persons,
or groups — do not just come together; they are brought together. Pre-existing archetypal
patterns of organization gradually bring together material elements — including at the
sociocultural level, human beings — into structuring "fields of forces." The relationship
between these archetypes and the elements that accept their morphogenetic pressures —
albeit for a long time compulsively and instinctively, but eventually consciously — is truly
vertical.
Such relationships become focused in various ways. Catalytic agents exist in chemistry;
at the level of human evolution a similar function is performed by transpersonal agents
143