Unity

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. 

Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.

Is there anything more fundamental than the realization, “This is what I am”?  It reveals a unity which nevertheless is – or was – a diversity.  No longer the earlier ego with its make-believes and artificial contrivances, but another, “objective” ego, which for this reason is better called the “self.”  No longer a mere selection of suitable fictions, but a string of hard facts, which together make up the cross we all have to carry or the fate we ourselves are. 

… the united personality will never quite lose the painful sense of innate discord.  Complete redemption from the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion.  Christ’s earthly life likewise ended, not in complacent bliss, but on the cross.  … The goal is important only as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime.  In its attainment “left and right” are united, and conscious and unconscious work in harmony. 

In our time, when such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals, and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without.  Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy.    Emma Jung 1955