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