Individunification:
the unifying, homeostatic and peaceable existence that emerges via the individuation process.
Peaceable bonds emerge between people whose love-and-kindness exceeds their ego’s need for self-aggrandizement and ambition. Being liberated from the encapsulation of the "self-centred" ego, and understanding the nature of the collective conscious-and-unconscious, dissolves that which separates and repels us from others.
Knowing that suffering is self-generated, individuated people take ownership and responsibility for themselves. Knowing that happiness comes from within, individuated people are able to pursue a life full of love, free of attachment to externalities beyond their control.
Unification is generated by human social needs, but is strengthened by; the freedom to pursue a self-navigated life, supported by encouragement, and free of coercion and manipulation. Because individuation is a long and arduous battle, individuated people naturally feel compassion towards others. The loving nature of individuation fuels an impulsion that promotes friendship and dissolves antagonism.
But,
as is the case with all inner processes, it is ultimately the
Self
that orders and regulates one’s human relationships, so long as the conscious
ego
takes the trouble to detect the delusive
projections
and deals with these inside himself instead of outside. It is in this way
that spiritually attuned and similarly oriented people find their way to one
another, to create a group that cuts across all the usual social and
organization affiliations of people. Such a group is not in conflict with
others; it is merely different and independent. The consciously realized
process of individuation thus
changes a person’s relationships. The familiar bonds such as kinship or
common interests are replaced by a different type of unity – a bond through the
Self.
A
human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,”
a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the
rest — a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness. This delusion
is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to
affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves
from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
It
is of supreme importance that this process should take place consciously,
otherwise the psychic consequences of
mass-mindedness
will harden and become permanent. For, if the inner consolidation
of the individual is not a
conscious achievement, it will occur spontaneously and will then take the
well-known form of that incredible hard-heartedness which
collective man displays towards his fellow men. He becomes
a soulless herd
animal governed only by panic and lust: his soul, which can live only in and
from human relationships, is irretrievably lost. But the conscious
achievement of inner unity clings to human relationships as to an indispensable
condition, for without the conscious acknowledgement and acceptance of our
fellowship with those around us there can be no
synthesis of
personality. That mysterious something in which the inner
union takes place is nothing personal, has nothing to do with the
ego,
is in fact superior to the ego because, as the
self, it is the
synthesis of the ego and the supra-personal unconscious. The
inner consolidation of the individual is not just the hardness of collective man
on a higher plane, in the form of spiritual aloofness and inaccessibility:
it emphatically includes our fellow man.
All those
who are seeking Enlightenment must understand
the
Fourfold Noble Truth.
Without understanding this, they will wander about interminably in the
bewildering maze of life's illusions. Those who understand this
Fourfold
Noble Truth are called "the people who have acquired the eyes of Enlightenment."
If
the God is a tribal, racial, national, or sectarian
archetype, we are the
warriors of his cause;
but if he is a lord of the universe itself, we then go forth as knowers to whom all men are brothers.
The
mythologems (of scattered seeds of light being unified/recollected back to the
inner unity) depict a process of re-collecting that proceeds from the god-man or
the light-man or some similar Anthropos-Redeemer
figure and that unites the many single human souls into a unity, that is, into a
genuine community. Therefore not only does the individual
become a whole in himself but a community comes into being that also represents
a whole. In antiquity this whole was called the
Anthropos.
Psychologically it means that an organically united community becomes
visible. A group of human beings of this kind is not
organized by laws or by the instruments of power; to the extent that each
individual relates to the
Self in himself he will quite naturally assume his rightful place in a
social order of a psychological kind. In the Middle Ages this
thought was expressed by the belief that the ecclesia spiritualis was the
body of Christ, the Anthropos. Hence Jung writes: “By
appealing to the eternal rights of man, faith binds itself inalienably to a
higher order, not only on account of the historical fact that Christ has proved
to be an ordering factor for many hundreds of years, but also because
the self effectively
compensates chaotic conditions no matter by what name it is known: for
the self is the
Anthropos above and
beyond this world, and in him is contained the freedom and dignity of the
individual man.” The unification or integration of the
individual and his integration into the higher unity of the many appears thus to
be a simultaneous process, as it is so beautifully expressed in “The
Gospel of Eve” when the great god-man says to the seeress: “And from wherever
thou wilt thou canst gather me, but in gathering me thou gatherest thyself.”
“In each life there can be but one of two possible supreme loves: love of God or love of self. Where love of self is supreme, love is dammed up at the borders of one’s own being; where love of God is supreme, love inundates all that is of God. There is not one love of God and one love for neighbour; there is but one love of God and of neighbour.” 2nd Joyful Mystery – The Visitation
So
we are in a terribly contradictory situation, because in order to have a
religious experience one needs some kind of absolute obligation, yet this is
irreconcilable with the reasonable fact that there are many religions and many
religious experiences and that intolerance is really outdated and barbaric.
The possible solution would be for each individual to keep to his own
experience and take it as absolute, accepting the fact that others have
different experiences, thus relating the necessary absoluteness only to oneself
– to me this is absolute (there is no relativity and no other
possibility) but I must not extend the borders into the other person’s field.
And this is what we try to do. We try to let people
keep a religious experience without collectivizing it and taking the wrong step
of insisting that it must be valid for others too. It must be
absolutely valid for me, but it is an error for me to think that the experience
which is absolute for me has to be applied to others.
In Zen Buddhist meditation the master tries to teach his pupil how he can
forever keep the inner mirror free of dust. To the extent
that he lives in complete accord with the rhythm of psychic energy and with its
regulator, the Self, he
has no projections
anymore; he looks at reality without illusion and more or less continuously
reads the meaning of all the
synchronistic events
happening around him. He lives in the creative current or
stream of the Self and
has himself, indeed, become a part of this stream.
If he remains so to speak, always in contact with the succeeding currents
of psychic energy that are regulated by
the Self, he no longer
experiences disturbances of adaptation, no longer projects, in the stricter
sense of the word, but remains at the center of the fourfold mirror relation.
Obviously, only a person with the most highly reflected concentration can
achieve this. We average human beings, by contrast, will
hardly be able to avoid the necessity, for the rest of our lives, of again and
again recognizing
projections for what they are, or at least as mistaken judgments.
It seems to me, therefore, to be extremely important to bear constantly
in mind, at the very least, the possibility of
projection.
This would lead to much greater modesty on the part of our
ego-consciousness and to a readiness to test our views and feelings thoughtfully
and not to waste our psychic energy in pursuing illusionary goals.
It was Schopenhauer who realized that Kant’s a priori forms of
sensibility and the a priori categories of logic were simply equivalent
to the Hindu idea of Maya. So these two philosophies –
European rationalism and Indian mysticism – flow together marvelously in the
work of the nineteenth-century German Romantics. Schopenhauer
asks in a beautiful paper of his called “The Foundations of Morality” how it is
that a human being can so experience the pain and danger of another that,
forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s
rescue? You see a little child about to be run over and
you’ll probably be the one who’s run over. How is it that
what we think of as the first law of nature, the law of protecting this separate
entity, is suddenly dispelled and a new law takes precedence: that of what
Schopenhauer calls Mitleid (“compassion”; literally translated as
“suffering with”)? Schopenhauer says the reason is that in
truth a
metaphysical realization has come to you and has broken through the veil of
separateness – you realize that you and that other are one.
You are, together, the one life that is showing itself in various forms.
That’s the breakthrough to where
the gods are; a god is
simply a mythological
representation of these mysteries transcendent of separateness.
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