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In Jung's conception, the archetypes are "contaminated with each other" -- which is to say that they, like the pseudopodia of an amoeba, are merely extensions of a single, trans-existent entity, namely the Self, or God. (Similarly, in the Ten Sefirot each Sefirah "contains" all the remaining nine others, being only a "specialization" of the whole totality. This is, of course, very much like the "fractal" images created in chaos-theory physics, in which each separate "piece" of the image contains the whole.)
Thus, we see God referred to in the opening passages of Genesis as "Elohim", a Hebrew word that is both singular and plural at the same time. Moreover, as I point out in a previous lecture, this amorphous, nonspecific pluralism of God's identity (as reflected in His name) gradually coalesces into a singularity through His ongoing collisions with man until, in His encounter with Moses, He reaches that place of self awareness where, for the first time, he finally exclaims, "I AM." (Exodus 3:14)
STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE EGO
Viewed in this light, the human "ego" can be seen, in itself, as an "archetype" of sorts, in the sense that it is a special case -- an extrusion, if you will -- of the Self. In earlier lectures, I call the dynamic process by which this birthing of the ego takes place, "psychic mitosis." It can be summarized as occurring in the following stages:
STAGE 1:
STAGE 2: ( )
STAGE 3: (o)
STAGE 4: ( )o
STAGE 5: ( )<---->o
STAGE 6: ( ) o
STAGE 7: ( )<---->o STAGE 8: ( )o
STAGE 9: (o)
STAGE 10: ( )
STAGE 11:
To understand these stages, we must place ourselves within the context of human reproduction . . .
. . . Stage 1: that point in the evolution of the ego just following gestation, but prior to consciousness. It is comparable, of course, to Ayn-Sof in the Kabbalah.
. . . Stage 2: the undifferentiated state of Consciousness, surrounding the fetus, creates a space within itself, much as Ayn Sof does in the process of TzimTzum described by Lurianic Kabbalah, in which to create the ego by "reproducing" itself in miniature.
. . . Stage 3: here we see the process of Psychic Mitosis in which the Self, within the individual consciousness it has created, reproduces itself in miniature through Psychic Mitosis. This is comparable to the creation of Adam Kadmon, the primordial Ten Sefirot, in Kabbalah.
. . . Stage 4: this represents the moment of actual birth, where the newly-formed "chip off the old block," the ego, leaves the "inner" world of the mother's womb
and enters the "outer" world of empirical reality. At this point there is still no separation between the ego and the Self, the former still being a special case of
the latter. For this reason, Yeshua haNotzri continually points to infants as examples of the Kingdom of Heaven. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew he says, "I tell you solemnly, unless you change and become like [newborn] children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3)
. . . Stage 5: here, the ego, like the Self from which it came, begins to encounter the Existential "Other." Out of this encounter the enantiodromia of "I" and "You" takes place, out of which the infant ego's illusion of separation from the Self begins to emerge. Nevertheless, the ego remains connected to the Self by what Edinger calls the "ego-self axis," comparable to the center column of the Ten Sefiroth, of which he writes, "The experience of consciousness is made up of two factors, 'knowing' and 'withness' -- i.e., knowing in the presence of an "other" in the setting of two-ness." (The Creation of Consciousness, page 17).
. . . Stage Six: at this point, and out of its experience of "two-ness" with the external world of Others, the ego loses its connection to the Self, and deduces itself to be separate from and even equal to the Latter. Nevertheless, Jung states,
"The Self is a quantity that is supraordinate to the conscious ego. It [the Self] embraces not only the conscious but also the unconscious Psyche, and is therefore, so to speak, a personality which we [the ego] also are." ("Two Essays on Analytical Psychology," Collected Works vol. 7, par. 274)
. . . Stage Seven: this is the crucial point in the spiritual process of individuation -- in which the ego is awakened to its connection with the Self and slowly engages it in what Jung calls a "tete-a-tete." Gradually, through this process, the ego becomes both see-er and Seen, which leads to the "Job Experience" described in Jung's Answer to Job.
PRE-NATAL AND POST-NATAL CONSCIOUSNESS
In previous lectures on Jung's Answer to Job I discussed the book's central theme of the Continuing Incarnation of God and its relationship to Kabbalah. Here I would like to briefly introduce the underlying intra-psychic process for which that concept is
a metaphor -- which is to say, the differentiation of consciousness in order to understand Jung's notion of the Self (i.e., "God") and the relationship to it of the individual Ego, we must first differentiate between pre- and post-natal consciousness. In summary,
the former is vast and undifferentiated, while the latter enters into a gradual process of ego differentiation which ultimately separates and disconnects it from the Self, as shown in the following sequence of diagrams in which the upper-case "S" represents the Self, the lower-case "s" represents the Ego, and <> represents the personality:
1. [S]
2. [S=s] PRE-NATAL CONSCIOUSNESS
============================================
3. [S]------s POST-NATAL CONSCIOUSNESS
4. [S]-----<s>
5. [S] <s>
Next, I'll discuss diagrams 1 through 4 separately, following which I'll introduce Jung's resolution the Ego-Self split they show.
STAGE 1: The Pre-Natal Undifferentiated Self
Before birth, probably by the 3rd or 4th month of gestation, the infant is a fully-conscious entity. However, since it see a nothing and hears nothing of the external world -- since there are no in-utero visual or language impressions to disrupt its perception -- there exists for it only a consciousness of Consciousness itself in its fully undifferentiated, non-dualistic state.
This is a literal condition of being. The pre-natal consciousness has neither the language nor sense-impressions with which to conceptualize the visual images and words that will later fragment its self-contained unity in the post-natal state. The pre-natal
consciousness neither "sees" nor "thinks" of trees, for example, since it has not yet been exposed to the physical object and word for "tree." This pre-natal state of consciousness is what various esoteric systems refer to as Eyn-Sof (Kabbalah), Tao (Taoism), Brahman (Hinduism), Buddha (Buddhism), etc. It is a state of total wholeness, undifferentiated by language or sense-impressions from the larger Consciousness of which it is a part. It is what Jung means when he refers to the "Self" by which he also means "God."
STAGE 2: Pre-Natal Psychic Mitosis of the Self
Through a process I call "psychic mitosis" the Self reproduces itself to form the Ego, much as one cell forms another by going through the mitotic division of its chromosomes. Thus, we see in diagram 2, above, that during the pre-natal state of consciousness, the Self (S) reproduces itself to form the Ego (s). In Hinduism, for example, the former is referred to as the
"Self" while the latter is the "Atman."
STAGE 3: Post-Natal Ego-Self Differentiation
After its birth, the Ego begins to move away from the self to meet the empirical world of images, language and others. Nevertheless, it maintains for a period what Jung calls the "Ego-Self Axis" that connection to the Source from which it comes that connects it to the universe. It is this that "Jesus" (whoever he may have been) refers to when he speaks of "little children" still "inhabiting the Kingdom of Heaven."
STAGE 4: Post-Natal Formation of the Personality
As the post-natal infant develops the perceptual and language concepts of "you" and "that" it begins to also develop the inner constructs of "Me" and "Not-Me" which subsequently form the so-called personality. This "personality" encases the Ego, separating it from the Self, of which it is a mirror image. In Lurianic-Kabbalistic terms, the Ego (s) is a "spark" of the Self (S) around which the personality is the Kelipoth ("shell").
STAGE 5: Loss of the Ego-Self Axis
Ultimately, this personality dissolves the Ego-Self axis, creating the illusion of the Ego's independence and cutting it off from its connection to the Self -- or what the esoteric traditions call the "Higher" Self.
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