The storm to come…

“I only want to hold you,
I don’t want to tie you down.”
- John Perry Barlow

It’s a hard pill to swallow the first time. Oh, it’s easy enough to entertain the possibility, but the experience? Now just one second. What’s going on around here?

Jung teaches that we are not singular but a multiplicity. I am us…me is we… However you want to crack the lid on this one is up to you. The specific challenge of the corner we collectively find ourselves in is that a few thousand years a momentum have strengthened our egos into the current fantasy of identity, autonomy, isolation and widespread egotism. The ego has propped itself up as king.

A widening of consciousness to include the energies beyond the ego leads to the discovery of a new center of the personality, an archetypal reality Jung calls the Self. A life directed toward this reality is anything but the self-centeredness we equate with egotism run a muck.

Paraphrasing Jung, each “encounter with the Self is always a defeat for the ego.” These experiences tear into the fabric of how we frame reality. And our framing of reality, fantasy that it is, is also where we hang the hat we call sanity.

The interesting thing to consider if you’re compelled to explore the psyche is that the ego need not dissolve or crumble when it gets dislodged from it’s current stronghold on identity. Instead, it can realign it’s obligations with relationship to the realities it encounters.

It’s helpful to remember that everyone has these energies pulsing through them. Is it possible that some day, perhaps a dozen generations down the line, everyone will relate to them?