Archetypes
“All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes.”
The word Archetype is based on the Greek ‘archein’, which means “original or old”; and ‘typos’, which means “pattern, model or type”. It’s the mold for everything that follows.
As psychologist Carl Jung saw it, these archetypes have existed in the collective unconscious of humanity for ages, the result of our shared experience over countless generations. They apply to all aspects of human existence, including events like birth, death, separation from parents, marriage, etc. and most notably, the pantheon of characters in the cast of archetypes:
- The Mother
- The Innocent
- The Regular Guy or Gal
- The Hero
- The Caregiver
- The Explorer
- The Rebel
- The Ruler
- The Magician
- The Jester
- The Lovers
- The Creator
- The Sage
All of these personas instantly conjure images in our minds because we have countless encounters with all of these stored in our collective unconscious, not to mention our DNA.
This is perfectly consistent with ISITAS, of course. Archetypes are simply Abstractions around certain sets of human attributes. Whether or not archetypes exist in their own right, as Plato would have it, they are most certainly Objects from the perspective of ISITAS. They can be named and identified. They have a reason for being, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about them now and you wouldn’t be reading it. So they are Objects; highly Abstract Objects that can be used as a tool to help us understand the human condition in general and the circumstances of our own lives in particular.
Stereotypes
Another method of classifying Objects is through stereotypes. Stereotypes are Derivative of Archetypes. Like archetypes, stereotypes are abstracted images that represent humans. But while archetypes represent profound, fundamental images based in biology and eons of shared collective experiences, stereotypes apply on much more limited scales. Stereotypes tend to come and go with the whims of public opinion. They apply to specific groups of people, and while there is often some justification for stereotypes, they are often largely exaggerated and inaccurate. As usual, the Derivative is more complicated, less reliable, and less useful than the Abstract.
We won’t go further into stereotypes here, not because they aren’t useful or have a negative connotation, but simply because they are beyond the scope of this introduction. We gave the archetype — an incredibly profound topic — pretty brief coverage above, and there are vastly more stereotypes than there are archetypes.
Part of the purpose for bringing them up here is that they serve as an excellent illustration for the core concept of derivation. It’s also a great model for how we can distinguish fundamentally profound ideas (like Archetypes) from derivatives (like stereotypes), which is a very useful skill.
So with that brief review of Abstraction and Derivation, let us now cover the ISIT Object Types — a set of primary Object types that represent Reality at a high level of Abstraction — somewhere between Sacred Geometry and Archetypes, that can serve as powerful tools to help us attain the Peace, Joy and Abundance we desire in Life.