Buddha Nature and Archetypal Dynamics, Cont.

Adam has been hooked. He is in love. Experiencing a level of excitation never known before, he takes her to dinner. Now, assuming that the woman does not behave too atrociously, he is confirmed in his idolatry. Addicted. In bondage. No drug can get him so high as he is on Reds. He passes the second phase of projection, one-pointed focus, and enters the third: blindness. He does not - indeed, he cannot - see her as she really is. He sees only the image which he has projected upon her.

For, in addition to granting the three visual qualities (hair, eyes, nose), he gener- ously accepts without evidence that she has fulfilled the remaining specifications of his 'dream-girl' construct; and he cannot even consider that such largesse may not be condign. Let his friend say to him, "Chaste? That redheaded bimbo we saw in the restaurant? Hah! She's slept with every cop on the force, including the women." Adam will respond with flaming eyes, clenched teeth and fist, and inform his former friend of the penalties of blasphemy. Let a friend say to him, "Honest? I happen to know she's done time for shoplifting!" and there will be much for that ex-friend to regret. And if, when confronted by her rap sheet, she snivels that the arresting officer and district attorney threatened to charge her with espionage if she didn't plead-down to theft, he'll believe her. Not until the awful day of reckoning arrives in the form of overdrawn bank accounts and credit cards maxed-out with purchases that included men's items he never received, is the veil torn from his eyes sufficiently for him to see that she is not the woman he believed her to be. And he will regard this as her fault! How he curses her as he itemizes her deceits! Well... we know that she never professed to be honest, loyal, generous, kind, loving, dependable and so on. We know that he merely credited her with those qualities. All she had was curly red hair, sunny-sky blue eyes and a cute nose that wrinkled at its edges when she laughed.

Had he been lucky, his materialized dream girl might have actually possessed fifteen or twenty of his requisite qualifications. She might indeed have turned out to be honest and loyal, etc. He'd have made adjustments for the few qualities she lacked. "My wife? Great in bed but no appreciation whatsoever of Samuel Beckett." It would have worked.

There is an old, ironic story in Islam about a handsome, rich sheik who never married. "Ah," said an old friend, "you were always such a great lover of women! Why did you never wed?" "Because," answered the sheik, "I was always waiting for the perfect woman." "Ah, and you never found her!" "Oh, yes, I did." "Then why didn't you ask her to marry you?" "I did. But she turned me down because she was waiting for the perfect man."

And so this is what God intends. We should be hooked by the presence of only a few features and should merely imagine that all the others exist as well... and then take our chances that each of us will possess enough of the required characteristics to keep the other happy. If we all waited until we found mates who were as perfect for us as we were for them, the human race wouldn't have made it to the starting line.

We find a friend and believe that he will make our interests his interests. We trust him with our loved ones, our reputations, our finances, perhaps even our lives. The pain we feel if we discover that our trust has been betrayed is terrible. Only when we become wiser do we understand that we are seldom justified in placing so great a burden upon someone, and that when a person fails to live up to our expectations, it is more the fault of our judgment than his performance.

To the same degree that we are blind to the faults of someone we love, we are blind to the good qualities of those we hate. We could hardly kill a murderous intruder if we stopped to consider the richness of his baritone or to admire the gentle way he steadies his Rottweiler. Blindness, a total inability to see objectively the person, place or thing upon which we have projected a hunk of our own psyche, has definite survival value.

It is a condition of Samsara that the instinct-gods who live in our cerebral cortex's Mt. Olympus demand that we worship them. They will do whatever it takes to get us to project them upon the people, places and things of our environment so that we can then kneel at the feet of the recipient. The gods reward us with pleasure. We feel happy, connected, and complete whenever we project one of these divine images.

To grow we must engage others or pay a penalty for failing properly to project an archetype. Loneliness and anxiety are the principal penalties; but there are secondary fines. An immature woman who has not projected her Animus (and is therefore not in love with anyone) is not merely lonely, she tends in her demeanor to become a caricature of masculinity - loud, opinionated, bossy, and rough. An immature man who is not in love is dominated by his Anima who frets, pouts, and flits about his mind impatiently. He tends to show this alien femininity by being moody, capricious, vain, overly-sensitive and catty. No one enjoys being so influenced by his own in-house Animus or Anima. The euphoria which attends projection, i.e., finally falling in love, attests to the despair of being unattached. When Cupid strikes, the bossy woman becomes a coquette and the tentative man becomes assertive, protective, and, for so long as the attraction lasts, as solid as granite.

When flesh and blood recipients are unavailable, characters from novels, movies, and soap operas provide convenient receptacles for our archetypal contents; but interactions with fictional recipients are rarely beneficial since we can mature only by interacting with living persons. Further, most projections are reciprocal: the Mother projects the Adorable Little One, the child projects the Mother, and the dyad is complete. There are two needed for friendship. There must be a pair of lovers. And a man alone has only half an enemy at best. In these bonds, one side necessarily informs and develops the other. We learn only by such confrontation. Fantasy friends, lovers, or children always do precisely what we or some clever screenwriters say they must do. There is no opportunity for conscious consideration, empathy, sacrifice, forgiveness, responsibility, or any of the trials and errors of learning.

Again, life requires us to engage, exploit, and then disengage and integrate, in an appropriate time and manner, the natural sequence of archetypes. As we have seen, as a man progresses from birth to fatherhood, he invests his psychic energy in a series of projections which starts with (no surprise here) Mother. When Mom pushes him away in order to care for a new baby and, simultaneously, his developing mind and body permit social interactions, he withdraws psychic energy from Mother and invests it in new Family and Friend relationships. He finds Heroes to inspire him. At puberty, the Anima can all but bankrupt his nervous system. Such assets as remain he stashes in his Persona. By the time he marries, he divests himself of outside social interests and devotes his attentions to his wife and children.

After we have fulfilled our biological commitments, we can attend to our spiritual agendas. We can detach ourselves from the people and things we have bonded to and absorb into ourselves the connecting archetypal force. Directed inwardly, our love becomes one- pointed devotion to our Buddha Self while outwardly, it becomes diffuse affection, extending to everyone, everywhere. Instead of having specific friends, we simply become friendly.

Thus, one class of archetype replaces another in accordance with rising biological imperatives. It is a unique individual, indeed, who attains maturity without having experienced these archetypal encounters.

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