Advertising keeps Gaia free! Interested in sponsoring us?
Unconcsious exists only for those who do not know themselves.
Therapy is, in essence, the effort to effect an adequate relationship between the ego and the unconscious needs, to bring into awareness their relative positions in respect to each other and to discover the requirements for a continuing cooperative partnership. Therapeutic progress depends upon awareness; in fact the attempt to become more conscious is the therapy.
This activity of consciousness-the establishment of control in the world of things through conceptualization, rational thought, and the development of discipline and the abstractive repression of emotions-is an utterly vital and indispensable phase of psychic development. It leads from psychic primitive infancy to adulthood. Mythological tradition likens this development to the creation of the world from the original chaos to the establishment of a foothold on dry land away from the threat of drowning in the flood waters. Yet it is not the "dry land" of rational consciousness that contains and supports the ocean but conversely: the waters of the ocean contain the dry continents, and life upon them depends upon the waters. Similarly, it it the unconscious psyche, that gives rise to and maintains the world of consciousness. Consciousness with its concepts is a relatively minor part of the total psychic functioning, and in terms of dynamics certainly not the most powerful one. It establishes fixed points of rational reference-but at the price of a loss of emotional connection. Images, on the other hand, constellate emotional and imaginative qualities and thus reconstitute a connection which the abstractive process has severed.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Spirituality resides in the unconscious mind, or heart. Rationality resides in the conscious mind, or intellect. Religion is an attempt to join the two powerful forces and is therefore fraught with peril.
"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate. "
- Carl Jung
The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.
