Aion

“The ability to make the distinction between our own will and the unconscious is a crucial discovery in the process of an encounter with the Self. We must first realize that we are not one, but two; there is an Other inside. We discover at the same time that much of what we do in our daily life is not our choice at all. We discover ourselves doing things that we had not intended; slips and accidents. The more aware of this twoness we become, the closer we get to the reality of the Self. It is said in the Upanishads, that the Self is the inner ruler. The outer ruler would be the ego.

Carl G. Jung states, ‘The Self is a true “complexio oppositorum”… The importance of consciousness should not be underrated; hence it is advisable to relate the contradictory manifestations of #theUnconscious causally to the conscious attitude.’

Here we have a psychological Reciprocality Principle where the unconscious responds inversely to the conscious ego. The ego’s relation to any particular psychological quality or content can be expressed in a fractional term so that the unconscious manifestation of that quality will be a reciprocal. Take an archetypal victim, with an aggressiveness fraction of only 2/10. This principle would reveal that the unconscious would have an aggressiveness of 10/2. So that if the ego is very much identified with being the victim, the unconscious will have the aggressor constellated in it and will start chasing the ego—in dreams, professionally, intimately etc. This is the way the unconscious works.

Jung brings us then to the 'uncertainty relationship" by way of Werner Heisenberg's physics. The unconscious is altered by the process of observation so that there is no objective psychological data, because in order to have observed it, the observer (the ego) has seen it, touched it, and brought it back. Both the observer and the observed influence each other. Not only does the ego influence the unconscious when it observes it, but also the unconscious; the Self, modifies the ego that is observing it. There is an eye aspect to the Self which observes the ego, just as the ego, when it reaches a certain level, can healthily observe and affect the Self. Jung proceeds then with the inner quaternion.”

Excerpt from The Aion Lectures by Edward Edinger