Who is in charge? The Ego or The Self

“The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego” C.G. Jung CW14 para 668

The Self

It is possible that C.G. Jung’s greatest contribution to the experience of meaning in the modern-day was creating a bridge between spirituality and psychology.

Jung’s conception of the Self is akin to the God-image within, the inner divinity, and the transcendent center of the personality. It is the archetype that infuses us from deep within with a sense of meaning and purpose.  It also surrounds us in a larger universal context that materializes in synchronicity and a connection to something larger than ourselves.

The Self is the inner directing centre, the mover of our lives and our personality that seeks wholeness, and development over the course of our lifetime. It is the nascent and impersonal drive for self-realization, psychic wholeness and order.

The Self materializes as spontaneous symbols of a quaternity (square) or a mandala (circle) that are the deepest striving for balance and wholeness.

Here is how Murray Stein in Map of the Soul

“The emergence of unity symbols and of integrative movements in the psychic system generally are marks of the action of the self archetype. The self’s task seems to be to hold the psychic system together and to keep it in balance. Its goal is unity. This unity is not static but dynamic.”

 

The Self’s experiment in life

Nathan Swartz Salant is quoted as saying that “the Self wants to live its experiment in life”.

Within us,  there is a pattern of psychological unity and wholeness that forms the foundation for our personality. James Hillman used the term daemon to convey the same idea – i.e. that the inborn image of wholeness, the seed of the acorn that will grow into the fullness of our personality.

In the process of self-realization, the Self will push the ego beyond its comfort zone to demand that it confronts all the problems and issues that it would like to avoid. It will be ruthless in its goal. Jung identifies the Self as any energy that crosses out path, disturbs our intentions and seemly pulls us off track.

Our experience of the Self is through its numinously and energy which I have often called inner compulsion towards some end. In Jungian literature, it is called teleology, which is an underground river focused on a particular pre-determined end or ultimate fulfillment.
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We ignore it at our peril.

The defeat of the Ego

In our present day, we are inundating with self-help books and belief systems that reinforced the false belief that we are the sole creators of our lives. The paramount of the ego that emerged in the Copernicus revolution that placed human beings, the human mind and the ego at the centre of the universe.

The rational ego falsely believes that it exists separate from nature and other creatures. Our current world circumstances and climate crisis demonstrate the fallacy of this belief.

In any encounter with the Self and the psyche, the ego, our conscious reality must confront its limitations and that is co-exists in a dance with all creation.

Any encounter with the Self, the ego will feel defeated. Its grandiosity will burst like a balloon as it accepts its inability to control the inner reality of the psyche and the outer world.

It is through that special act of self-reflection where we create a link to our spiritual core and accept life on its terms. When we orient ourselves to the Self, our ego becomes relativized and develops a more meaningful relationship to that what we must do. We recognize that our egos are the vehicle and the means for living the destiny that has existed before we were born.

Copyright Christina Becker
August 2021

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