ESSAY I: THE PYSCHE. Pt. 1

Most people move through their entire lives skating on the surface of awareness.

Most people believe they have a personality and that is what makes them who they are. Most people believe that life happens to them.

And they blindly accept that.

They stick to what they learned in childhood with a persistent stubbornness. Dedicated to suffering and mundaneness. Loyal to the concept that “life’s a bitch and then you die.”

Without ever asking why.

But if you are someone who questions the status quo; someone who asks why.

If you crave truth and depth

if you aren’t satisfied with the surface of what is

if you want to learn why you are the way you are

why everyone is the way they are

the hidden truths of reality

and most importantly how to actually have free will 

and how to make reality bend around that will

keep reading.

Release everything you currently believe to be true.

Your level of understanding of reality is a small fishbowl. To escape this jump current fishbowl of reality you have to be willing to leave what feels safe. You have to be willing to break down the walls of beliefs that currently stand around you. Because what you think is the structure of reality, is just the structure of a cage that is holding you captive.

Take the leap out.

And trust that there will be something bigger that catches you when you do.

ESSAY I:

Foundational Understanding Pt.1

THE PSYCHE

When we think of someone who has a “big ego” we think of someone who thinks very highly of themselves. Someone who is cocky. Arrogant. The term ego typically has a negative connotation.

I am going to ask you to redefine the word ego.

Ego in Jungian terms is not negative at all.

The ego is just you who believe you are- your identity, your “personality”.

It is what you reference when you say “I”.

Your ego is your preferences and aversions (your likes and dislikes), your tastes, your favorites, your sense of humor. “I am this” , “I am that”.

The “I” is the ego.

Carl Jung’s Model of the Psyche

The ego is not fixed. It is just a pattern that started in childhood. When someone has an “ego death” nothing actually dies except the illusion of solidity. An ego death is just an internal realization that the “I” someone has been identifying with their entire life is just a construct.

The ego is a perspective. The small limited lens from which the psyche gazes out of. (I will expand upon the ego in a separate essay that I will come back and link here.)

The psyche is the entirety of who you actually are.

The psyche consists of:

1. The Conscious

   1. Ego

   2. Persona

2. The Unconscious

   1. The Personal Unconscious

      1. Shadow

      2. Complexes

   2. The Collective Unconscious

      1. Archetypes

      2. Symbols

      3. Anima and Animus

If ego is the small perspective from which we look, the persona is the mask that we created to present to the world.

Jung got the word persona from the Latin term for mask.

One’s persona is crafted in childhood as the shield that we develop to keep us safe. It is the social role that we are trained to play, shaped by a number of factors- birth order, parents, caregivers, teachers, neighbors, music, books, shows we watch, all cultural conditioning, etc.

By adulthood we have a well established arrangement of personas that we rotate through. We can switch between personas depending on which role we are playing at any given time. We can wear the serious persona at work, or the sexy one with our date or the fawning one or the assertive one. The construction of the persona is a psychological adaptation that allows us to function “normally” in society. But, when we identify too closely with a singular persona and start to merge the persona with who we are instead of seeing it as aspect of who we are, we can become constrained, repressed and resentful.

When we are always acting how we think we should act instead of how we actually, authentically feel- this is how the unconscious gets created.

The unconscious becomes the place where we push away the parts of the psyche that don’t match the persona. If we were raised to be hard-working, laziness gets repressed and becomes an aspect of our shadow, a part of our personal unconscious…. to be continued.

Okay ran out of writing time today but if this is your first experience with Jung and the psyche this should be enough to chew on for a little bit. I’ll send part 2 within the next few days and all 10 essays over the next few weeks.

In tandem with this essay - I implore you to look at whatever it is you reject in others.

This holds the key to your own shadow.

When you can get comfortable with your own shadow, only then can you be comfortable to expand into who you are meant to be.

Xx, Bella