42 Instinctive

“The hackles on the back of my neck just went up!”

Popular Idiom about a uncontrollable reaction to fear of shock 

Symbols and Color

• Atom: Scholar Set
• Man in the Center of Concentric Circles: Centers Group
• The Neutral Symbol: it assume no specified action in response.
• Spade: Assimilative Axis – Pointedly dig deeper.
• Border Color: Yellow – Scholar Set

Implications in the Upright Position or Positive Pole

Few animals call forth thoughts of raw power and nature’s beauty than the cougar, or mountain lion. It calls from us an essential purity and authenticity from being fully alive and in the moment. It is more than a predator it is master of its environment keeping balance with all others it interacts with. It does so instinctively and a part of the dance with Nature.

Card messages associated with Illuminated position.

+ Essential

(Atomistic, eros, primal, raw, visceral, gut feeling)

1. You are the alchemical product of your Essence. Let your gold luster with natural brilliance. Trust your gut instincts to point you in the right direction,  for you!
   
2. Like all animals you have instincts. Notice what makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up? Or, maybe you smell something ‘fishy’ or ‘rotten’? Either way, the animal within you is on alert! Honor it as it is your own watch-dog growling you a warning.
3. Instincts are our natural tendencies, not learned per se, but genetically transferred. Life force is generated from this foundational battery pack. A source that originates from SOURCE, out Source (Essence). It is not immortal, nor supernatural, simply available for us to explore and tap into. Finding one’s Self take you through this route, to your root! Get rooted into your onboard core presets and you will maximize your own life capacity.
4. One’s Essential nature expresses itself whether awareness is present or not. Open the doorway to your animal nature as framed by evolution and programmed by the soul. Rely upon and sharpen your instincts. Fly by the seat of your pants! If you are reckless, you will leave skid marks. 🙂
5. Sometimes, the fluid, unplanned and uninterrupted reaction is far more Essence directed than anything the mind could cook up. Jump into action! Don’t think, just do!
6. Pay attention, as if your life depended on it! By the way, it does.
7. When in the positive pole of this Center, a person’s connection to the Essential Self is engaged. Even if one is not sure what to call it, or think of it, there is an addition of a sublime nature to the Natural drives signaled from the complex design of the organism.  DNA is a message string that filters your unique Overleaves expression. When fully alive, you are both animal, ancestor and avatar all emerging collectively and simultaneously. Go with it.
8. Before you had a mind to parse your incoming stimuli, you animal self relied entirely on senses for data to act and react. It is time to check in with your senses and query: what are they telling me? They use sensation, feeling, viscera to transmit information. It is up to you to describe these in words and then decide on their implications.
9. ESP is nothing more than wit derived from extended sensory perception. You are capable of sensing more than your mind can realize.  Let the animal inside of you come out and sniff the air and listen to the music on the wind. Harmony is everywhere.
10. Instincts can be developed. It’s called evolution.
11. One of the simplest and most profoundly animal pleasures that everyone experience is a bowel movement! We all know the slang of excrement. So perhaps you should just clear it out by letting go. You will know it happens because of that satisfying “ahhh’ that follows after rising off the toilet.
12. Follow your circadian rhythm which is instinctive to all animals. Rest when you need to, eat only when hungry, play to nurture and release stress, but above all know when it is time to the hunt and gather what you need.
13. Gut instincts or hunches, are referred to as the patterns so deeply ingrained, even underneath our consciousness, as to alert us to variances on what seems “right” or “familiar”. Sharpen those instincts by bringing their unspoken influence to the surface. Examine them, sharpen them, and you will be more like a martial artist than a boxer. Punch or deflect with skill, acuity, and power, because it will be a trained reflex that is second nature.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.” Francis Scovel Shinn
• “Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. ” Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.” Socrates 
• “Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.” Honore de Balzac
• “The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” Bertrand Russell
• “That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It’s such a powerful force.” Danny Boyle, Film Director 
• “What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures.” ― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
•  “As he talked, I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feeling, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless.” Anais Nin – French Essayist

Implications of the Reverse Position or the Negative Pole

The Great White Shark has been called nature’s perfect killing machine: cold blooded and efficient. The Shark is mechanically perfect as a predator. There is no emotion, no malice, no intent; just operating upon millions of years of biologically programmed and naturally selected impulses to feed and survive.

Card messages associated with Shadow position.

– Mechanical

(atavism, survival, remote, unconscious, ID, automatic, reactive, feral, carnal, ravenous)

1. Ignited by atavistic survival mechanisms this shadow is vigilant but unable to know motive or operate from volition. The hallmark energy is the automaton reacting from habit driven behaviors outside of its control. Are you predator or prey in life’s jungle?
2. Animal instincts are operating in place of awareness. Be alert of some rash reactions.
3. Pay attention as if you are being stalked.
4. There is nothing wrong being a Homo Sapien Ape. This is the biology underlying the human being. But when operating from nothing more than hedonism or sensuality or primal urges, then you are trading beingness for beastness. Up to you! But don’t pretend you are enlightened, you are just activated.
5. Reactive programs are operating in place of awareness. Be alert for some rash reactions.
6. Something hidden is stalking you. Be vigilant.
7. Cunning is the quality that can make one dangerous. Scheming is often unaware of fearful defensiveness. It’s NOT the same as deliberate contemplation. Be leery of your own motives, too.
8. Living life on automatic, like a mindless herd beast; simply makes one food for predators. Who is acting reflexively, without notice or thought?  What might wake them up?
9. Perhaps a “Primal Scream” is in order? Your situation is getting so gritty that a full out explosion of uncontrolled reaction could be the chaos that shakes things loose.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” Bertrand Russell
• “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” Bertrand Russell
• “Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.” Blaise Pascal 
• “The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.” Charles Darwin
• “Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.(to instinct)” ~ G.I. Gurdjieff – use this as comment between Dominance-Consciousness Contrast 
• “I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.”  — Illinois Governor JB Pritzker

Overleaf of the Michael Teaching

Imagine someone who can sense something deeper and with greater subliminal accuracy than you. An adventurer perhaps, a hunter, or maybe even a psychic? Using one’s instincts is to enhance all the levels of the human animal with ESP extended sensory perception.  Thus, it is suggested the both intuition or gut feeling, ae aspects of the deeper race memory that the ancient brain possesses but in spiritual terms is part of the Instinctive Center. Said another way, this Center contains all the other Ordinal Centers within it. Thus it is valid to conclude that it gives a potential integration with all the others.

The Instinctive Center, the 1st or base chakra, contains access to all of the data every experienced by all the forerunner species of planet Earth.  And, as the Michael’s report of Devic Evolution would suggest, it was we, in our hive soul stage of development, that went through earlier and less complicated phases of life. All this accumulated information is nestled in the molecular memory of the DNA molecule upon which all life is built and shares.

As a connection point to Spirit, the Instinctive Center is our doorway into the Akashic Record. Often compared to the Universe’s data warehouse,  access to all past life and design information is said to be stored here.  Any time we invoke the concept of data, of course, it calls to mind the mechanical concept of computing and from there, programming.

Indeed, instincts are response patterns learned over millions of years of both biological and spiritual evolution, that have been distilled into chemical patterns. These patterns are embedded deeply within the Psyche. Most typically referenced as the “flight or fight” response, make no mistake these patterns are shared across species and reflect simultaneously accessible strategies to cope with fear. Overcome it with force, feel the force to flee conflict rather than engage in it.

But because the Instinctive Center is connected to the Akashic Record, as it is often referred to, the function of this chakra connects us to the Earth but also to that storehouse of memories that have happened in our past. So that hunch or gut reaction you experience in response to a circumstance or a person, is very likely a deep instinctive memory being triggered, probably alerting you to danger, but sometimes activating one of the other primal motivational drives: food, drink, sex, safety, or comfort.

Instincts, nested deep within the species memory, have both feminine and masculine qualities to them. Yet, in societies, the use of it is attributed more to females (women’s intuition) that to males, which are taught that reason and the mind should hold sway over decisions. Such stereotyping is not necessarily anything more than hyperbole shoved into corners with “should” labels on them.

But to be clear, Intuition or Instincts, are decidedly non-linear in a logical fashion. They often tap into the complex depths of the VOID, that infinitely vast aspect of collective consciousness that is still far outside of the comprehension of the Homo Sapien species. Thus, we can postulate that this sense is actually taping into the Grand Feminine of the TAO, rather than speaking to characteristics of biology.

Primal Scream Therapy, introduced by Arthur Janov, champions the idea that clearing all the residue of past traumas can only happen when one completely descends into the depths.  What Freud called the ID, the process was activated when one descended into their animal self, to reigniting all other aspects the emotional, kinesthetic, and belief attributes concurrently; in Michael terms: the Emotional, Moving, and Intellectual Centers. Like a volcano disgorging it’s magma from deep within the Earth, reshaping the landscape above with both destructive purging itself but also, leaving behind a new topography upon which a new life is built.  A human psyche goes through a similar process in acting our the metaphorical explosion and purging to the surface all which has been deeply stored or hidden.  This comparison describes two very instinctive processes.

Emotions and sensations, which tends to be the primal way that Essence/Spirit communicates, asserts itself through intuitive hunches, vague inspirations, or a capture of instinctive attention like hackels were raising on the back or your neck. The Consortium by Stephen Cocconi

Famous Examples

Count Dracula, Adolf Hitler, Pablo Picasso, Willem Defoe, Ted Kazinski, Tarzan, Tim Roth,  X-Men characters, Rod Serling, Mogli of the Jungle Book, Anton Levey, Franz Kafka, Stephen King,  Satanic cults, Charles Manson,

Cultural Meaning

When one is totally present with that ancient aspect of one’s animal nature, the mind is not lost and rationality discarded but augmented with a keener awareness added to with more highly attuned resources which many have stopped paying attention to because of the pressures of modernity.

Vampires and Zombies are two equally prominent archetypes in today’s allegories of human failings. They are meant to explore 2 sides of the negative aspects of our animal nature: pure cunning and deceptiveness driven appetites of the vampire, and the slovenly automaton-like compulsion of the nameless hoard of zombies. These characters are polar opposites in expression but driven by uncontrollable instinctive drives of a creature devoid of any spiritual connection. With further extrapolation, we are invited to notice the comparison to the Vampire class being elite, libertine, suave, predatory, and seemingly in control. The wealthy in the modern, and even ancient context, have are unfettered by any limits of morality, restraint or virtue when no natural counterforce is present to constrain them, let alone encourage self-constraint.

The Zombie (Nietzsche’s “herd” in contrast to his Ubermench) is also the conditioned, reactive, aimless animal self, Freud’s ID, totally constrained by urges it cannot control and has no consciousness to observe, let alone control. In the vast majority, they have little but roaming space and susceptibility to all external stimuli. The allegory here is the simplistic man or woman, socialized to exist in a milieu of preconstructed rules, mazes, and habits, it has adopted and operates within, and predominantly.

Each of these analogies to human character represent extreme overly simplified groupings. Yet, they serve as bookends to the way that our ‘higher-order mammal’ could present if all inner-awareness were stripped away in favor of one of these two reductionistic views of the expression of animal drives. What make the human animal so potentially miraculous and dangerous is the ability to employ language (or fail to become refined) and the creators of material technologies extending the effectiveness/deadliness of our physical apparatus: either to create or destroy, To heal or to kill. The vampire may seek both, the Zombie is mindlessly addicted to the latter.

You might be Instinctively Centered if….

1. You notice smells frequently and you derive meaning from them: fear, joy, arousal, etc.
2. At the result of being “startled” you natively find yourself ready to kill or be killed.
3. Emotions are fluid in me. I can have them and letting go quickly and easily.
4. I can’t help but notice my surroundings.
5. I have a tendency to look for a way out of any place I am located.

by Stephen Cocconi ©2011, Updated, 2024

For a Motivation Cards Reading or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com