“Building Castles in the Sand”

Booth Brothers Song

Symbols and Color

• Background Image: A flower opening fresh and new. The plant produced its bud and is now onto the next phase of its life cycle: showing itself ready to be pollinated. The flower symbolizes the stage where uniqueness of the individual begins to form.
• Border Color: Tan – like the Good Red Road of Life in Native American Mythology
• Artists Palette: Artisan Level Soul Age is of Expression
• Spiral Nautilus Shell: Soul Age Set
• Macaque: 2nd Stage of Simian Evolutionary Complexity
• Child: Stages of Maturity

Implications of the Upright Position or Positive Pole

The Child pictured here is shows her pleasure at connecting with the bird. Enchanted with the encounter, her radiant expression (Card 49 – Solar) reminded me of the simple awe and wonder at discovery. A condition natively present with the innocence of a Child. My friend Michaelene McElroy captured this image in a park in Paris as I stood by and drank in the beauty of the seen. What makes this period so potentially special, when there is an absence of fear, is the ability to experience with a “beginner’s mind and child’s innocence.”

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Discovery

(Rules, formation, building, enterprise, curiosity, conquest, contest)

1. Have you forgotten the simple pleasure in discovery? The inner child is re-awakened and giggles with the delight of something captivating and thrilling. Call upon these qualities and recall a “child’s mind” ready to embrace adventure. There is a hidden treasure.
   
2. A baby takes its first steps moves them onto the path of discovery. Exercising their muscles, the child learns to do for themselves; learning to say NO, rather than the comfortable ease of yes. Make decisions based not on what you know is safe, but what fascinates you.
3. The Baby Soul needs rules to guide them. At this stage, build on time-tested knowledge. Just because you flap your arms like wings, does not mean you can fly.
4. This formative stage involves development of the first design, structure, and imposing order.
5. Learn to say NO. Make decisions based on what fascinates you, not on what you know is safe.
6. Little children are always awkward, even recalcitrant, when they are exposed to something they’ve never seen or done before.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “Babies act out when they’re hungry, cold, tired. They do this for survival. ” ~ Marilu Henner
• “Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.” Friedrich Schiller

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

Children are not little adults. Their needs are different and necessarily so. I remember having bad dreams and running to my Dad (my authority and protector figure) to make it safe for me again. That dependency is appropriate between parent and offspring. But to the degree to which we forget or forego our power to make things happen for ourselves, we may regress to that place of helplessness (Card 24 – Martyrdom), falsely believing that permission or safety comes from another. To me, that would feel like a nightmare.

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Entanglement

(divisive, conformity, uniformity, absolutist, group think, tantrum, covetous, duplicity/duplicitous)

1. When a baby cries it is natural to see if they are hurt. How you respond may overcompensate or neglect the real issue, and thus render the child unable to know how to help themselves. They learn to have dependency upon those who they perceive more powerful. No competency or responsibility is developed.
2. If someone is throwing a tantrum like a manipulative child waiting for rescue? Intercede only if real injury is present! Offer them a hand-up, but encourage them to stand on their own two feet. In fact, insist upon it.
3. Ever seen a Baby get entangled in a bowl of spaghetti? Hopefully the mess they make is cleaned up by their parent. Is there a mess being made that makes everyone cry but nobody rectifies?
4. Calling someone a “big baby” is criticism to shame someone for a lack of perceived toughness. Why? Generally they cry out when they are hungry, tired or afraid. If only adults were that honest!
5. When a person is most scared it wants God to save them. When angry they want God to punish those causing them frustration. Someone is acting like a child and having a tantrum. Is this what they call power?
6. Children, and Baby Souls, want rules they can rely upon. When they are afraid, they will run to those persons of beliefs that where they feel temporarily safe. Be careful who or what has been enshrined as “the Rule”. You might just get trapped by it.
7. Seldom are things black or white, right or wrong. That is the simplification of binary thinking. Beware this trap. An answer or solution might not be in the middle, but rest assured, the circumstance is more complicated. Find out all the components.
8. Babies act out when they are hungry, tired, or afraid. Their motivations are almost always based in fear or lack. A Baby Soul carries that same basic belief and sense of deficiency that the world will not provide. If someone is acting from here, best to calm them down or get ready for a tantrum. Address the real need.
9. When a child is most scared it wants God to save them. When angry, they want God to punish those causing them frustration. Stop being childish and shoveling off to some mystical power your blaming someone else for feeling like a victim. Harsh? Words are less harsh than the actions you are imagining happening to the perceived offender. No God worth having is that vindictive.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.” Erik H. Erikson
• “Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.”  Immanuel Kant
• “The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.”  Clarence Darrow
• “The planet is just a staging area for Heaven. Why bother to clean it up.” Gore Vidal – The Decline and Fall of the American Empire 
• “In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” ~ George Orwell
• “He who obeys does not listen to himself.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
• “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche 
• “An authoritarian is (per academic literature in political psychology) a person who so values oneness and sameness that they would rather impose it coercively on others than tolerate diversity and difference. Once you grasp that, it’s no surprise that institutions and people who coerce in one domain tend to also do so in seemingly unrelated domains.” https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/02/modern-spirituality-is-a-consumers-choice-now/673178/

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

The Baby Soul stage produces what I am calling World View II needing: Rules, Security and Structure. These needs, aptly and generally coinciding with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, express a stage of development which the underlying strategic motive is to organize life to its requirements; and then clamp down to achieve some psychological certainty about it as to assure its own stability. This is why for instance that Michael Historian Barbara Taylor has termed this phase of spiritual and psychological development “Rule Oriented.”

The Baby Soul arrives at this stage of development having felt subjected to the whims of nature in the Infant Soul period (Card 71), the pressures of survival, and the mystery of forces they cannot control, with a desire to create structure for the purpose of imposing order. The underlying hope becomes one of attaining safety by making things subject to their whims, commands, and dictates to describe them; regardless if they incorporate what-is, they prefer to declare how things are. Yet any deviation from the group is very small and hardly noticeable. This is the way of the Baby Soul – take a few steps forward then wait and see what happens.

Advancement comes with the requirement that things conform. Religious and social orders are structured as authoritarian hierarchies. This vertical, top-down, binary presumption, creates the imperative to discover ones’ place in that structure. But if possible, try to construct it so that one is at, or near, the top, insuring one’s power and safety. In fact, what identity one forms in life is almost completely defined by their place or compartment in that society: farmer, fireman, lawyer, preacher, mother, etc.

The standards around any of these social stations are generally narrow, fixed, ill-defined but held as absolutes and inviolate.  The Baby Soul rests its faith in the belief in outside authority.  Thus, those who are seen as leaders are assumed to be sanctioned by higher authorities like God or Nature endowed with some superior tenets and therefore infallible.

Moving from the Infant to Baby Soul is one that we might psychologically compare to Freud’s development of the Super Ego, the self regulating or parental aspect of the human personality to control the impulses and reactiveness of the ID.  Suppression of some aspects of Self, give rise to the expression of others, taking that energy and producing tools, theologies, laws, social orders, architecture, and organization which gave them an outlet to refine and strengthen their sense of power in the world.

Thus, all the early civilizations sprang from the structures of the Baby Soul. One’s that later emerged as empires would have been more likely driven by the emergence of as the Young Soul desire for expansion, and acquisition leapt atop the structures put in place by the stability seeking Baby Soul orientation.

Famous Examples and Icons

Cultural Meaning

Mall of America (all strip malls and chain stores), Sphinx, Cross, Angels with wings, Mickey D’s Golden Arches, Sword, Neck tie, Eye for an Eye, Mickey Mouse, “cute” of any kind, picket fences, bake sales, arranged marriages, bound feet, national anthems, a punishing God, death penalty, anti-abortion, uniforms, religious fundamentalism, slavery, beatings, order,

Movies about, appealing to, or made by Baby Souls: Birth of a Nation, Greatest Story Ever Told, Wizard of Oz,

Rigid beliefs, coupled with a ruthless sense of entitlement to status, and a disrespect for anything that is not like yourself.

You might be at this Soul Age if….

• You believe the best way to be safe is to follow the rules.
• You save stuff because you believe money doesn’t grow on trees.
• God is on your side and you are his servant.
• People will try and get the better of you so better not to trust them.
• Things from the past are always better than the new.
• Parents should have total control of their children.
• It is morally right to obey authority.
• You believe in the notion “an eye for an eye.”

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