42. Look at this world and tell me what you see

January 18, 2018 Sticky Thoughts No Comments

Television is an ‘eye upon the world’. When I turn my set on, I see war, famine, terrorism, bad politics, children’s forced labor, people being hurt, tortured, coerced, discriminated… You know, the usual stuff in-between commercials. No, I make no joke about this. I see it each day again and it’s terrible each day again. The human race is a wonder, but it’s also a disaster. however:

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what I really see, is ‘dissociation’.

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Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss depth psychologist who died in the year of my birth and who therefore saw only part of what is to be seen now, already called this human’s world a disaster, born out of ‘dissociation’. He was also the one who coined the term for it. What the smart fellow saw, was humans who each within them have an ‘ego’ (broadly: conscious) and a ‘self’ (broadly: subconscious) that act very much apart from each other, or even against each other. The ubiquitary ‘dissociation he saw in cultured, ‘domesticated’ people was between ego and self. Frequently, he denoted this intra-psychic phenomenon as the real cause of what happens in the big world. Therefore also the possible solution or at least alleviation of the world’s problems. I think he was very right in this.

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The ego has many opportunities to strengthen itself nowadays. It doesn’t make good use of these, since it mainly strengthens itself against ‘the other side’: the self. Generally, there is not enough integration and also not enough longing for integration. The ‘other’ inside, is seen as the enemy, the one to be feared, the one to be coerced and brought down.

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In projection, this is precisely what happens in the world. Ego-people need an enemy in the world to wage their internal war against. This is an ice-cold war. We emerge from decades of East versus West, Communism versus Capitalism. Now we have terrorism and ‘axes of evil’ versus ‘the good guys’. We have witnessed that when one ‘grand enemy’ fades away, it doesn’t take long to find another one. Or several, kind of having an insurance policy. This serves a need, but it’s a need born out of dissociation and therefore very dangerous and disastrous indeed.

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So when I look at this world, I see a big need for re-integration of ego and self. They are not made to be dissociated. This is a mistake. They are made to be closely integrated. One may note that the term ‘religion’ also has this notion inside, coming from the Latin ‘re-ligare’: ‘to connect again’ the ego and the self or if you want, in religious terms, the ego and the ‘soul’ and therefore ‘God’.

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We are on the biggest possible scale desperately in need of such ‘religion’. Not an organized religion based on power and intra-individual dissociation of course. Just the opposite! We need true religion in the broadest sense. One that is at the same time completely emotional and rational, symbolic and ego-friendly.

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We need it completely. And we need it now.

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