Constellation process using the Human Template Model – [A Being Human series]

The idea that humans are modeled after some sort of template is not new. Spiritual teachers, philosophers, and biologists, throughout the ages, have all put a teleological model of human epigenesis. They have all sought to explain away the order, unity, coherency, design, and complexity, of who we are as a species.

In all the great Religions there is a constancy in the idea that we humans exist as a three-part system. We exist in the material world and are made of matter. We illustrate form and function. This is the body, aka person, that we meet in everyday life, and as we get to know each other, their other self appears. This other self metaphorically resides within this form, an interior world. This interior is not made of matter per se, but of narratives, and stories – whether ancient or new. This interior world is accessed through our right brain, whereas the ordered, structured world is made sense of, through our logical left brain. These two brains co-exist, and usually, one is dominant – the left brain normally, as we live in a highly technological world; sophisticated, learned, and shaped by our creativity. However, separate but part of us, as we do not inhabit an empty container, there resides within us, an inner life. This goes on despite what is going on with our narratives or situation in the world. This inner life is our essence, soul, “Djiwa” or any of the countless words used in other cultures.

Aristotle – Plotinus – St Augustine – Hypachia – Lamblichus – Tomas Aquinas – St Teresa de Avila – Al Kindi – al-Ghazali – al-Farabi – Moses Maimonides – Isaac Luria – Ibn al Arabi – St Tomas More – Leo the mathematician – St John of the Cross – St Justin Martyr – Goethe – Hegel – Schumacher – Mohammed Subuh – Master Eckhart – Vladimir Lossky –Teilhard de Chardin – Rudolph Steiner – Carl Jung – Clare Graves – Ken Wilber

These illustrious people, all have something in common. They understood empirically, mentally if not spiritually, that the human is an extension of what has been, and what we are supposed will be. Aristotle and Plato first brought the idea of a Great Chain of Being to their students, and the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus codified it. The Great Chain of Being is a perennial philosophy that purports that we have emerged from all the kingdoms, and will ascend to more elevated ethereal kingdom(s), not by ditching our physical bodies, but by transcending who we are now. We will expand our noosphere – a word coined by Teilhard de Chardin – to illustrate that there are other bio-systems within our particular earth. The noosphere suggests that there is a collective field, out ‘there’, which holds the sum of human’s intellectual capacity, and this field gradually expands as our minds do. Other philosophers saw that from the differing kingdoms, we have taken, possess, and still utilize the phylogenetic substance of the past. Consequently within us, they said, are four realms, made of matter, and a fifth (and up to seven) which lie within us. They divided humans into two parts. The material form, and then the content. Each realm illustrated a beingness; a spiritual state. These states were seen as low or high, dependent on their relationship to each other. Muslim theologists and philosophers named these “Nafsu”, or lower aspects of the soul. The soul was seen as an essence that is hierarchically developed, However, different aspects of the soul could take over and become a nuisance, an enemy so to speak, a renegade. It could sabotage the human and life.

Using this metamodel I developed in partnership with a teacher and psychotherapist pal back in the UK, Francis Reynolds, and then with my wife, Alicia the Human Template Model was slowly created over many years. We use this model to illustrate the previous model that the ‘chain of’ philosophers had suggested.

Initially, our collective constellation concepts came through German philosopher Bert Hellinger, a psychoanalyst, and ex-priest who has developed much of his latent understanding in South Africa, and through workshops where he understood a phenomenological understanding of group dynamics. I was often in Austria in the middle eighties, as his ideas were being formed. I had no idea of Hellinger’s work, out of which Family and Systemic Constellations arose and out of which a whole plethora of related models to facilitate change and healing arose. Recently, a Netflix film called The Other Self was an instant hit in Turkey and introduced the Turkish population to the idea of how past events, namely family patterns, color our own lives.

Constellation work is governed by a locus or point through which action and reaction occur. The locus point in our work is a subtle and yet tacit agreement that there is a Higher Order of Reality. Around this loci, we ask an individual, who wants to see what underlying pattern affects them, to enter the space. The loci are placed by them in any particular position–they feel where to put it. The person is named a ‘human’ – that is the fourth level of order. They then talk about the particular problem, situation, and dynamic. As they speak, the facilitator listens carefully to the language. If the person does not speak English a translator would help, but how we go about filling the constellation would be different. In this case, various elements, representing either state (feelings) behavior (instincts), history, or substance (matter) are brought out and then placed in relationship to them. These people are now seen as representational; in that they are in this person’s field, and when in a silent, receptive, open place, feel the forces in action within the person. The facilitator then asks what the people ‘felt’, or ‘wanted to do’, to articulate what they received, Some may have moved spontaneously to a differing position, or, that what they voiced illustrated a dynamic which the facilitator then illustrates by either bringing someone else out or moving them into a position which mirrors what they experienced when in a place of surrender to the Higher-order. We call it a stop-motion process, as each ‘presentation’ is like a film slide, gradually revealing what is missing in the human being, that precludes order, structure, alignment, and what may be missing in terms of Love.

The two principal elements in the work involve the Caduceus and the psychospiritual idea of the 5 hearts – each is hierarchical yet horizontal in nature, supplanting and developing the order and shape of both the human’s outer body as well as their interior, to enable an opening to essence.