Erected

“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.” Robert Hunter

It’s a funny inversion in the passive voice. What do you mean I’ve been erected? Don’t you know that the ego commands and does stuff, it makes order, measures out, proclaims and shouts…and worries! Did I mention the worry?

Certainly that’s true, but how did you come into your cherished opinions?
Remember, as I’ve recently overheard, “opinions are like noses. Everyone has one, but some are snottier than others.”

The ego itself, not necessarily what anyone of us does with it, can be viewed as a complex heaved into consciousness. It’s been erected into it’s current configuration not only by the cultural encoding, but by unconscious compulsion.

As Samuels writes, “Jung saw the ego arising out of and functioning in the service of something greater than itself.” Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians, pg. 58.

That is not a widespread perspective. The effects of the rationalist split, which divorced man from nature and set him in opposition to what he essentially is, has spread throughout our culture and still dominates the collective frame.

For my part, recognizing that the ego as but a bud on the tree of life has begun to knit awareness back into reality.