“Our soul … mediates the unconscious to the ego.”
Jung’s Soul Archetype has a tendency to define our personality. It’s easier to view this through the prism of one of the typologies (personality assessments) available today, such as Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram.
A typology assessment is simply a reference that helps attain greater self-knowledge. The self-knowledge gained might be a good first step to understanding our collective unconscious, but probably won’t lead us to an awareness of our True Essence.
The word “soul” is used in many diverse ways and for this reason the word can be confusing or misleading. This essay is by no means an exhaustive review, but briefly, Jung defines it from a psychological perspective in our insight below; we find it in typologies as noted above; in some Christian religions the soul is divine and survives the death of the body; in Buddhism the soul or “self” is merely a collection of sensations and thoughts, and it ceases to exist at death; some writers refer to the soul as “spirit” and others as “body.” Good grief!
For our purposes in this book, let’s turn to our helpers for guidance. Deepak Chopra says the soul is “the junction point between my virtual self and my physical self. It is the organizing intelligence that keeps me intact.”[i]
Seth tells us that “the soul does not exist apart from nature. It is not thrust into nature. Nature is the soul in flesh [body], in whatever its materializations. The flesh is as spiritual as the soul, and the soul is a natural as the flesh.”[ii]
Insight # 73 comes to us from C. G. Jung (1875-1961). He was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy and religion.
The soul is “a psychological reality, an organ of the psyche; it lives on our unconscious side, but it affects our lives profoundly. Our soul is that part of the unconscious that is outside the ego, out of sight, yet mediates the unconscious to the ego.”[iii]
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Additional Reading:
- The Soul, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
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[i] Chopra, Deepak. How to Know God. New York: Random House, Inc., 2000, p. 285.
[ii] Roberts, Jane. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam, 1974, p. 124.
[iii] Johnson, Robert. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. New York: Harper, 1983, pp. 64-65.
