Lofty Bird Soaring through Swords of Sunlight vs. Night of the Slithering Wet-Bellied Crawler (SO… vs SP & SX)
As we’ve passed through the archetypal animals of the Bhavachakra (pig, snake, rooster) and infused Life and Existence with the elements of fire, air, water, and earth – and thereby animated and architectural-ized the ecosystem I’m creating for you to dwell in – we can now pursue an angle on the Social instinct as, rightfully, the higher instinct.
Starting in contrast, if we put the Pig (SP) and Snake (SX) together into a single beast, we have something like a lizard/crocodile – a low coldblooded predator with no communication skills, no parenting skills, and an emphasized-yet-hidden underbelly.
A pig will ‘eat anything,’ and we call someone a pig or a hog when they take-and-take and never give, or they take more than their fair share. The snake has no friends, no bond or romance. You’re unsettled and threatened as it wraps around you. Or perhaps, at best, feel intrigued by the danger and emotionless stare. A pig-snake is therefore an indiscriminate garbage disposal incapable of connection. [Some of you have met me and can attest.]
With earth in conjunction with fire & water (SP & SX), we have melting untouchable, unusable lava or the flaccid goop of mud. Not much to build up structures of civilization or society from, or to form into the invisible social contracts intended not only for today but to be passed forward to future generations in noble protection and nurturing care, magically held aloft and sustained in the ‘spirit air’ of a tribe or nation state.
Air must pass over vocal cords for philosophers to communicate the overhanging law they see from their tower in the sky. And the language of the astrological stars came from somewhere out of the blue. All of these, written and recorded by a bird quill pen that once rode the air.
In the merge of SP and SX, language itself is not a native tongue. The tongue here is a heat-seeker for our own individual preferred flavors, in blind disregard to any collective good or mutual utility and interest.
The Social instinct is THE ‘human instinct.’ The differentiating thing of human beings in relation to animals – complex verbal and written language – is compelled, codified, made excellent by the thrust of Social in us. Human beings are social well beyond our capacity to fully fathom. Social is the basic drive to make contact and impart and could be said to be the animal-instinctual bridge to our hearts, to the emotional urge to protect, teach, learn, befriend, compete, achieve, improve, excel, illumine, and connect in commonality and/or purpose, to ‘find a place’ in context with others.
All relationships between people are essentially social. Sexual and Self-Pres are involved in human connections, in varying degrees and ways, but they’re not the raw stuff that compels bonding and closeness.
In romantic relationships, Sexual may be the restless first inner spark of the thing, but it’s not the thing itself in regard to a real relationship between two people, or even the courtship-to-mating process. I mean, go ahead into a herd of people – sniff an attractive someone – your eyes transfixed on them – grunt low at their pleasantly compelling smell; then mount and rub your genitalia on them through your clothes, and let us know how that goes for you in terms of successfully landing a romantic relationship.
The ethical health and interactive vibrancy of a community is intuited and sensed by the Social instinct. We track, contextualize, assign a name and characteristics to where a given person or group ‘is at’ through this instinct.
SP is ‘me and my well-being, my current state and sensual setting/environment.’ By itself, SP is self-fattening (fattening the self with more and more self-interest), self-conserving, reading the gauges on my own dashboard, not keeping my eye on the road and my fellow drivers in the traffic of human interaction.
SX is ‘are you into me? [into my hooking self-styled energetic choreography] I’m into you,’ i.e.- self-objectifying and other-objectifying with the intent to reach a sexual peak – an ecstatic bodily sensation – that essentially has no use. Procreation isn’t an underlying goal of the Sexual instinct; it’s a trick sprung while diving, self-absorbed, toward attraction and sexual satisfaction, ecstasy.
Literature, philosophy, spiritual guidance, theater/music/art are often understood to be ‘noble pursuits’ – and could be described as initially jolted and stimulated into existence by an internal libidinal energy field in the body, as well as stemming from a drive to attract; and they thereby have a tether into the Sexual instinct. But they affect and reach no one without the urge to connect and without ‘game’ to convey them through the vehicle of the Social instinct.
The intent in all the above is to consider simultaneously the implications relative to each instinctual stacking – in terms of handicaps and advantages for people of different personality types/stackings – and also to be looking at these observations at the level of what’s universal about the instincts in people of all instinctual stackings.
The Sylphs
The ethereal creatures who rule and dwell in the element of Air were described by Socrates in a way that points to the particular refinement, purity, and spiritual height that could be called the ‘high side’ of Social:
“And upon the earth are animals and men, some in the middle region, others dwelling about the air as we dwell about the sea; others in islands which the air flows round, near the continent; and in a word the air is used by them as the water and the sea are by us, and the ether is to them what the air is to us.
Moreover, the temperament of their seasons is such that they have no disease, and live much longer than we do, and have sight and hearing and smell, and all the other senses, in far greater perfection, in the same degree that air is purer than water or the ether than air.
Also they have temples and sacred places in which the gods really dwell, and they hear their voices and receive their answers, and are conscious of them and hold converse with them, and they see the sun, moon, and stars as they really are, and their other blessedness is of a piece with this.”
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