1927 by Georgia O’Keeffe
The most foundational intents of the Force of Life, that are easily observed, are the impulses for Life to persist, and to create more Life. When Life first began creating more of itself it discovered that it wasn’t as simple as just getting bigger, otherwise, Earth would be covered with a singular soup of organic molecules. Instead, Life found the optimal strategy was in maintaining itself within a well-defined range of sizes and replicating. All of the known living things that inhabit our planet follow this strategy of cell replication. Cell replication is the foundational act of life’s creative force’s drive to extend its reach beyond prior limitations. Encapsulating replication, Sexuality, along with Exaptation and Death, frame the Creation Archetype. However, the Creation Archetype governs the more specialized archetypes of our lineage and Sexuality is a driving force in all of the archetypes discussed here.
/Sexuality utilizes a quality of the physics of our surroundings which is described by Chaos Theory. This quality is called Bifurcation, in which a thing, upon reaching an energetic threshold, splits into two.
Our lineage is established on sexual reproduction where two gene lines merge as offspring. Forming an elemental attribute of our evolutionary lineage, our sexuality is expressed in our reflexes, drives, instincts, emotions and additionally as aspects of our conscious awareness. It is a foundational, and probably the original form of cognition – continually checking that certain parameters are met, and if so then initiating sex. All sexual expressions observed in Living Things, including our species, embed this criterion of repeatedly testing for auspicious circumstances for replication. It logically follows that the lineage of any species that had lost this intention would not persist. Dr. Sigmund Freud’s description of sexuality as the basis for consciousness (1905) is established on the basal role sexuality plays in the evolution of creatures.
/Arousal and Orgasm
Primitive reproductive tactics are organized around simply being in the right place at the right time, in the manner in which Corals or Fish spawn. With the emergence of Mammals, with the complexity of their successful group dynamics, tactics for mating evolved far greater complexity in the quest to optimize matting success. These tactics were heavily weighted in ways that are common to see, in the way our species evaluates potential mating partners, with rank in the social hierarchy having significance among other fitness metrics. Our social-sexual interactions have not foundationally changed since the emergence of social Mammals. As sexuality plays an elemental role framing the intentions upon which our species acts, it is also an intrinsic, essential attribute of the SOCIAL ARCHETYPE.
Reproduction strategies co-evolved with the emergence of greater complexity in animals. One evolutionary example is how birds rear their young. Birds evolved from reptiles who simply laid eggs which hatched into fully functional iterations of their parents. However, birds fly, which is a complex acquired skill, leading birds to evolve the ability to rear their young until they reach a point where they figure out how to fly. Mammals manifest complex reproductive strategies, many of these based on their social unit (Herd, Pride, Tribe, etc.), which provide a supportive scheme for nurturing offspring. Our species is a singular example, completely dependent on the social network so that we can be born ~16 months before full gestation. Doing so enables our cranial vault to continue developing ex-Utero to a size that would otherwise not pass through the human pelvis, thereby accommodating our outsized brains. We additionally figure out the complex bipedal gait which is a hallmark of our species. Although we do not fly, balancing and moving our mass on the few square inches of soft tissue and bone on the soles of our feet is an equally remarkable achievement.
/Jungian Anima/Animus Archetypes fit here
THE POPULATION EXPLOSION
Starting perhaps 4 million years ago a confluence of adaptations gave one species abilities that enabled it to “game” their environment to a degree rarely seen in the history of evolution on Earth. These adaptations afforded this species the opportunity to bypass the regulating mechanisms that maintain balance in the living system and this species – us, came to dominion over most forms of life. Without regulating mechanisms such as predation and energy scarcity, the counterbalance to the imperative to reproduce disappeared and our population exploded, changing the balance of flora and fauna in Centuries instead of the Ages within which changes had previously transpired while the living system maintained a relatively stable state. The consequence of this is that we now have over seven billion of us on a planet whose maximum sustainable carrying capacity for our species is perhaps as low as one or two billion.
What this boils down to is that when we took those early steps of choosing to carry fire with us, fashioning a spear or agreeing on the meaning of a word, we concurrently took on the need for family planning to counterbalance our innate imperative to reproduce – our sexual drive, with its influence on our psyche extending from our most primal drives to our most sophisticated social interactions. Although not glaringly obvious, denying responsibility for population management desecrates our species, and the entire Living System’s underlying impulse to persist, conflicting with the intent of the basal Persistence Archetype.