The stuff we post and preach and spout to others, thinking we are teaching others, but really it is a projection of the very same advice that is meant for us. What do you guys think?
Found this in my rock garden!
Ego death can itself become an ego project. The ego discovered spirituality, nonduality, Jung, Rami Dass, meditation, psychedelics, enlightenment, whatever the current human species has decided will deliver it from itself, and then announces that it must destroy the ego.
But who exactly is making that announcement? The ego.
That is the paradox. What we call the ego isn’t some evil little entity sitting inside us that needs to be assassinated. In Jungian terms, the ego is the center of conscious identity. It has a legitimate function. The problem is identification with it, not its existence. In Advaita Vedanta, the separate ego-self is distinguished from the deeper Self. In Buddhism, anatta points toward the absence of a permanent, independent self. Christian mystics speak of self-emptying and union with God. Sufi mysticism speaks of fanā, the dissolution or passing away of the individual self, followed by baqā, abiding in God.
So when someone tells me that they have transcended their ego, I consider the possibility that what actually happened was that the ego acquired a new identity as someone who transcended the ego. Now it gets to be spiritually superior instead of merely socially superior. Same landlord, different apartment. Ego wearing ceremonial robes. I think the impulse to kill the ego arises from the ego’s inability to reconcile its own contradictions. The ego encounters parts of itself it doesn’t like such as shame, aggression, envy, sexuality, vulnerability, dependency, fear, grandiosity and grief.
Instead of integrating them, it says “this isn’t me. I need to transcend this.”
But enlightenment isn’t about annihilating the ego. It’s about putting the ego into a relationship with the larger Self. The ego becomes less tyrannical because it realizes it isn’t the whole psyche.
Maybe what mystics have discovered is not that the ego must die, but that it was never the sovereign entity it imagined itself to be. There was no ego in the first place, no I, nothing to annihilate.
This is why I avoid most mainstream media, TV, the news, doomscrolling, etc. I even avoid certain music because what we expose ourselves to, doesn’t go away, it remains in our psyche, in our subconscious mind. I try to avoid excessive mental “noise”. When I am not careful, exposing myself to mental noise creates a “hum” in my mind that wouldn’t go away until I started meditating and learned how to streamline my thoughts and watched what I exposed myself to.
“The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.” - Carl Jung, CW 8, para 342, The Structure of the Psyche.
Our psyches carry an ancestral inheritance, expressed through archetypal patterns. It took me a while to reconcile with that fact.
Ugh. Some people though!
Sorry for being pessimistic but this is my mood today. I don’t like this game, I didn’t ask to play their game.
As an end-of-life doula, I’ve spent time with people as they approach death. It has made Rumi’s words feel a lot less like poetry and more of an invitation to loosen our grip on what we believe is permanent.
Perhaps that is part of what Rumi meant. Maybe we spend much of our lives asleep to what really matters, and only when the dream begins to dissolve do we recognize what was always real.
I’ve noticed that many people become less concerned with status, possessions, and old grievances as life draws to a close. What remains are love, presence, forgiveness and connection. Usually around that time they report that they see their deceased loved ones hanging around, beckoning them to come back Home, wherever that is. I’ve seen many clients reach out with their arms saying they see a loved one, and I usually feel a PRESENCE, like someone else is also in the same room as the client and I. One time I was talking to a client, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked behind me, nobody was there. Then my client points her finger behind me and said that her mom (long deceased) was there, standing behind me.
The more I work with the dying and terminally ill, the more I realize that life is but a dream and when we die, we wake up.
The more time I spend with animals, the more I realize that they have something many of us spend our lives searching for. They don’t obsess over status, or don’t curate identities. They don’t cling to yesterday or rehearse for tomorrow.
They respond to what is here, now. The present moment.
We think wisdom is found in having more knowledge, more techniques, more philosophies. But I feel sometimes wisdom is quietly sharing space with another living being, without trying to own it or change it. We’ve never been separate from nature, we only became distracted enough to forget.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 10, paragraph 126
When I dove inwards, I wasn’t just sightseeing. I discovered why I kept dating the same person in different costumes, why certain dreams wouldn’t leave me alone, and why that one embarrassing memory from 2007 still lived in my psyche rent-free.
Happy individuating! The meme made me giggle, hope it brings a smile to your face too!
I don’t know whether to be excited or scared.
I really like this meme because it aligns with Jungian thought and my own beliefs.
I didn’t find my purpose in this life until I met and made friends with my shadows. And it made me realize that the purpose of living is to be our whole actualized selves. Living in the moment, the present, seems to be the purpose of the soul because when we are in the present moment, we’re connected to our subconscious self, where I believe intuition rises from. The western world loves to make us feel like we need an external identity to have a purpose, like being a parent, or a career person, becoming a graduate, etc. I don’t think those are soul purposes. I think reconciling with ourselves is.
The shadow is there to guide us to reconciliation and self-actualization. Our shadow is self-love. Accepting our shadows is self-love. And when I stopped seeing my shadow as an enemy, it showed me how much I actually truly love myself, I just didn’t know how. And when I loved myself properly, I stopped being ruled by my unconscious and I ceased to do stupid shit that sabotaged me.
“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular. - Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 13: Alchemical Studies, essay: The Philosophical Tree, paragraph 335.
What do you think?
Biblical end times or just another day in Winnipeg?
I used it too before I noticed the dick print. I feel violated. And I need a bleach bath.
Whatever angers us or saddens us, becomes the master of us.
Feelings are snippets of information, not our reality. I used to let my feelings rule me and therefore create my reality, one in which everybody was an asshole and I was the blameless victim. It took years of self-reflection for me to realize that I was letting my inner shadows determine my feelings. It wasn’t even about the other person “hurting” me, it was about me reacting to an unintegrated aspect of myself when someone triggered it within me.
But yes, sometimes people are just assholes. But I find that for the most part, people aren’t TRYING to be assholes. Sometimes we just want an excuse for our own inner turmoil, and the easiest way to soothe ourselves is to absolve us of our responsibility to our feelings, by blaming others.
I became a lot more enlightened when I stopped blaming others. It’s peaceful not having to constantly scan the room looking for something or someone the blame my shadows on.
One who blames others, is not there.
One who blames himself, is halfway there.
One who blames nobody, is already there.
🤍
I painted this landscape as closely as I could to the way I perceive it. I’ve long suspected I may have tetrachromacy because I consistently perceive far more subtle colour variations than most people around me, though I haven’t been formally tested (there are no instruments for such test except for the colour bar spectrum test). The purples, cyans, pinks and golds in the mountains aren’t symbolic. They’re an attempt to paint what I actually experience. I see rivulets of colours in everything, even white isn’t sometimes just white to me, white sometimes looks like a rainbow to me at times, depending on the lighting. I broke every art rule in the book on how to combine colours and how to get the right shades for the mountains, clouds, etc but I decided I needed to paint exactly what I see, instead of following the rules that society instilled in me.
I’m curious whether anyone else has had experiences where the world seems far more colourful than the people around them describe it. Whether it’s tetrachromacy, differences in perception or just the way my brain processes colour, painting has become my way of expressing it.
It also makes me wonder how much of reality is shaped by the limits of our perception. If people can genuinely experience colour differently, that raises all kinds of interesting questions about what else different brains might perceive.
It left me wondering whether human perception is more varied than we first assume.
What if I see is blue, is red to someone else?
Jung likened climbing a mountain to his solitary journey after his break with Freud. For him, the mountain symbolized individuation, the difficult ascent toward becoming oneself.
From Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Chapter XI, On Life After Death, Vintage Books Eng edition pp. 325-326:
“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?”
While he didn’t mention mountains explicitly, Jung connected mountains with encounters with the numinous, places where we confront something larger than the ego, like an ascend into higher consciousness.
A mountain isn’t conquered because it stops being tall. We grow into someone who can climb it.
My painting of mountains, symbolic of my own arduous trek into individuation and I still have lots more mountains to climb. Hope you enjoyed my painting and musings. It’s how I channel and transmute my psychic energy (libido) and access my shadow materials. Alchemy.
I’m an end-of-life doula, a yoga teacher and a Reiki master. I used to be all laugh light and love, thinking that positivity was the pinnacle of enlightenment. I would coo at my clients and tell them everything will work out. I attended Buddhist retreats and went to ashrams because I’m spiritual like that 🙄
Then I did some shadow work and integrated them and individuated ala Jungian analysis. I got real. I became more whole. And disillusioned with the whole New Age movement (although shrooms were a lot of fun) and decided it was a marketing strategy, repacking spirituality into something you can attain as long you buy the right crystals, books, malas, etc. and just stay positive and ignore the toxicity simmering in our psyches—and blame someone for it because they have bad energy, that’s why I must have that simmering discontent, it’s because of all the negative energy from others! Tip: that negativity was coming from my suppressed emotions and energies.
It was during a meditation session that made me realize that negativity within me is also attracting negativity. I had to learn how to transmute the negativity and take responsibility for my own inner shadows and wounds. I learned about myself, to the very core. I peeled off the layers of selves until I reached my Self, the essence.
When I self-actualized, I stopped caring about a lot of things that I couldn’t control. Not depersonalization, or derealization, but more of an acceptance that there are things beyond our control. So all of my energy went into the things I did care about, like helping people die in peace and I became a much more present doula and teacher.
It feels solid. Not like I’m standing on a waterbed trying to find my footing. I stopped searching externally and searched within. Enlightenment came when I realized the freedom of not giving a shit about if I am enlightened or not. It’s liberation from the ego that was telling you a narrative about yourself, a deceitful one too because ego doesn’t see the truth, ego seeks coherence and safety.