“They discover that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness… the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends.” C.G. Jung CW 13 para 197
When the light goes out . . Jung’s Dark Night
There are periods in life when our centre no longer holds. The structures that once gave our lives meaning begin to lose their vitality. We may still be functioning, still doing what we have always done, yet something underneath has become uncertain. The old orientation no longer works, and the new one has not yet appeared.
This is a universal journey.
It is a journey that C.G. Jung chronicled in the Red Book (1).
Following his break with Freud in 1913, Jung entered a prolonged period of confrontation with his unconscious. Dreams, fantasies and powerful inner images emerged with an intensity that sometimes made him fear he might be overwhelmed by them. Much of this material eventually became The Red Book.
During those tumultuous years, he described, in the recently published Jung’s Life and Work, (2) that the image of the mandala began to appear repeatedly.
At first, he did not understand what these circular images meant. He simply knew they were important. In the interviews with author Aniela Jaffe, he described tending the emerging mandala images “like a precious pearl.” He felt that something within them seemed to contain a message he could not yet decipher. As he continued painting them, something changed within him.
“It was then that the living idea of the self came to me for the first time.”
The mandala showed Jung something that would eventually become central to his psychology: beneath the ego’s attempts to organize and direct our lives lies another centre.
Jung called that centre the Self.
The ego is the centre of our conscious personality. It is the “I” who makes plans, establishes goals, develops an identity, and decides where life should go. The Self, however, represents the larger totality of the psyche, encompassing consciousness and the unconscious.
During his crisis, Jung discovered that he could not simply decide where his psychological development should take him.
“I could not choose a goal of my own volition,” he recalled. “I saw simply that I must completely give up.”
This was not passive resignation. It was the recognition that something within him seemed to possess its own direction.
He wanted to return to his scholarly work and intellectually understand what was happening. But the unconscious would not cooperate. Instead, Jung wrote, “I had to allow myself first to be carried away by this stream without knowing where it was leading me.”
The Path that the ego does not choose
One of the most difficult moments in psychological and spiritual development is to accept a path that we do not choose.
We are accustomed to thinking of growth as something we direct. We establish goals. We identify what needs changing. We decide who we want to become and then try to get there.
Jung discovered something different.
As he continued drawing mandalas, he noticed that regardless of where the images began, they continually returned to the same place.
The centre.
“All paths that I trod and all steps that I took led back again to one point: namely, to the center.”
Eventually he understood that the mandala was showing him the underlying movement of his own psychological development.
“The mandala became an expression for all paths.”
This realization profoundly changed Jung’s understanding of individuation. Psychological development was not simply a linear journey from one stage to another. Something more circular was happening.
“There is no linear development,” he concluded. “There is only a circumambulation.”
We circle around the Self.
We encounter the same questions repeatedly: relationship, vocation, belonging, power, love, loss, creativity, meaning. Sometimes we wonder why we are confronting something we thought we had already resolved.
But perhaps we have not returned to the same place.
We have returned to the same centre from another position on the circumference.
This is why the mandala became such an important image of individuation for Jung. Its wholeness does not eliminate difference. The circle contains opposing points, different directions and multiple paths, yet all remain related to a common centre.
Our psychological lives may work in much the same way.
At one stage of life, we may need to develop independence. Later, we discover the limits of independence and must learn about relationships. We may need to develop authority and then discover that authority must eventually be surrendered. We may spend decades constructing an identity only to discover that becoming more fully ourselves requires loosening our attachment to the person we have become.
The Self appears to contain these contradictions.
Paradoxically, the way toward it begins when the familiar centre goes dark. The identity, purpose, or direction that once organized our lives stops providing orientation. Our instinct may be to restore it as quickly as possible. Find the answer. Make the decision. Establish another goal.
Jung’s experience suggests another possibility.
There are moments when we may need to stop choosing the destination. We may need to tolerate the darkness long enough to discover where the psyche itself is trying to take us.
The mandala offers an image for precisely this experience. When the ego can no longer see the path ahead, perhaps the task is not immediately to find another path. Perhaps it is to begin circling. To pay attention to what keeps returning. To notice the dreams, images, conflicts, desires and questions that continually draw us toward the same mysterious point.
And eventually we may discover, as Jung did, that beneath the apparent disorder something has been quietly organizing itself all along.
The Symbol of the Mandala and the Self
Jung’s psychology introduces this important distinction that is different from common psychological perspectives. The ego may be the centre of consciousness, but it is not the centre of the whole psyche.
That distinction lies at the heart of Jung’s understanding of the mandala.
The Sanskrit word mandala means circle. Jung encountered mandalas in religious traditions, particularly Buddhism, Hinduism and medieval Christianity, but he became fascinated by something else. People who had no knowledge of those traditions spontaneously produced circular and fourfold images in dreams, drawings and active imagination.
Jung came to understand the mandala as an archetypal image of psychic totality. It represents what he called the Self, the organizing wholeness of the psyche that includes both consciousness and the unconscious.
The ego says, “This is who I am.” The Self asks a larger question: “What is the whole of me becoming?” That difference becomes especially meaningful during an eclipse. These images appeared most frequently during periods of psychological disruption.
What happens to the ego when the centre goes dark?
Jung observed that mandalas often arise precisely when the personality is threatened by fragmentation or disorientation. Their circular boundary creates what he called a temenos, a protected inner space. Rather than allowing psychic energy to scatter outward, the mandala draws attention inward toward a deeper centre.
The mandala gives us an image for that process. It may be a symbol of reorganization.
Its centre does not represent the triumph of one part of the personality over all the others. Rather, it gathers opposites into relationships: conscious and unconscious, light and shadow, thinking and feeling, intuition and sensation. Jung frequently observed the number four within mandala structures and associated it with psychological completeness.
Eclipses and Surrendering to a New Order
Individuation requires a strong ego. But it also asks the ego to recognize that it belongs within a psyche far larger than itself.
The task may therefore be less about creating a new identity and more about discovering a deeper centre.
Something in us may already know how to do this.
Jung believed the psyche possesses an innate tendency toward wholeness. The spontaneous appearance of the mandala during periods of upheaval suggested to him that when consciousness loses its orientation, the unconscious may begin producing images of a new order.
Perhaps eclipse periods invite the same attention.
Rather than immediately asking what comes next, we might allow ourselves to remain for a while in the darkness.
To notice what no longer needs to remain at the centre.
To listen for what is quietly reorganizing underneath.
And to ask:
If I no longer have to organize my life around maintaining the person I have been, what deeper pattern is trying to emerge?
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- W. Norton & Company Publication date : Jan. 1 2009
- Princeton University Press Publication date : Dec 2 2025