In an interview with Edward Edinger on Carl Jungs answer to Job, he points to and highlights a section in its last paragraph;
”The reciprocal action between two relatively autonomous factors which compels us when describing and explaining the processes to present, sometimes it is the one and sometimes the other factor who appear as the acting subject.”
Edinger himself has beautifully formulated this in this way;
”Since there are two centers, if that comes into conscious realization, then those two centers must collide; they must have an encounter with one another. That’s what happens when the Ego, which is the little center, has an encounter with the Self, which is the big center.”
What I like so much about these descriptions is that they express that what we are, is this living process between these two entities in our minds. Such as the experiences described by writers, poets, schamans, mystics, holy men and peoples of all kind in their encounters of this since the dawn of time. In its form of an outer reflection of an inner fact Edinger formulates this in his seminar about the defeat of the Ego in the encounter with the Greater personality like this;
“We are confronted with that inner friend or foe, and whether he is our friend or foe depends on our selves. The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the Ego.”
The experience we have of our meeting with this other psychic entity in us is something truly terrible. It completely shatters our personality and forces us down to our knees. It is the raw violence of an unconscious dynamism that roars up from the depths. A manifestation of the absolutely overwhelming power of the Self;
The absolute intensity of this experience, in its crushing onslaught is well described by Antonin Artaud in his ’The Umbilical Limbo’.
A sharp, burning sensation in my limbs, muscles knotted, as if raw, feeling like glass, brittle, fear, cringing at movement or noise. Unconsciously confused steps, gestures and movement. Willpower forever keyed up to make the simplest gestures, renunciation of simple gestures, stunning, focal fatigue, a sort of exhausting fatigue. Movements have to be reorganised, a sort of dead tiredness, the mind tired by the exercise of the simplest muscular extension, the act of grasping, unconsciously hanging on to something, sustained by continuous willpower. Genetic fatigue, the feeling of dragging one’s body about, the feeling of unbelievable fragility becoming splitting pain, a state of painful numbness, a sort of numbness localised in the skin which does not hinder any movement but changes the sensation within the limbs so that the simple act of standing up straight is achieved only at the cost of a victorious struggle. Probably localised in the skin, but feeling like the radical removal of a limb and offering the mind nothing but tenuous, woolly pictures of limbs, pictures of distant limbs out of place. A sort of inner breakdown in the entire nervous system. Variable giddiness, a sort of oblique dazzling accompanies each effort, a thickening heat band gripping the whole surface of my skull, where heat patches detach themselves and move about piece by piece.Painful inflammation of the skull, gasping nervous tension, the back of the neck doggedly suffering, temples glassy and blotched, head trampled by horses. Here, we should mention the disembodiment of reality, that sort of break, intent it seems on self-proliferation between objects and the feelings they exercise on our mind, the place they belong. This instantaneous classification of objects in the brain cells, not so much in their own logical order but in sensed or emotional order, (which no longer occurs). Objects now have no smell or gender. But their logical order is also sometimes broken, precisely because it lacks an emotional odour. Words rot at unconscious commands from the brain. All words for no matter what type of mental operation, in particular those which trigger off the mind’s most common and active responses.
And in ’NERVE SCALES’
I really felt you break down the environment around me, I felt you create a void to allow me to progress, making room for an impossible space, for what was then only potentiality within me. For an entire, virtual germination yet to come, drawn into the spot that presented itself. I have often got myself into this impossible, absurd state, so as to try and create thought within me. There are a few of us in these times, who want to cut things down and so create areas for life within us, areas which did not exist and did not seem to belong in space. I have always been struck by the mind’s obstinacy in wanting to think in terms of measurement or areas, in fastening on arbitrary states of things so as to think.Thinking in segments, in crystalloids, so that each form of existence remains fixed in the beginning and thought does not communicate with objects instantaneously and uninterrupted. But this fixation, this immobilisation, this sort of monumentalisation of the soul occurs BEFORE THOUGHT, so to speak. Obviously these are the right conditions for creativity. But I am even more struck by those unrelenting, meteoric illusions which send us predetermined, limited, planned constructions, those clear-cut segments of the soul, as if they were a great plastic page, porous to the rest of reality. Surreality is like a sort of osmotic contraction, a sort of inverted communication. Far from seeing any weakening in control, on the contrary control seems to me more assured, but control which instead of acting remains on guard and prevents contact with day to day reality and allows more subtle and rarified contacts, contacts reduced to a thread which catches fire but never breaks. I picture a soul, worn down and as if changed into brimstone and phosphorous by these contacts, as the only acceptable state of reality. But I do not know what unknown, unnameable clearsightedness furnishes me with their tone and sound and makes me feel them myself. I feel them as a certain insoluble whole, I mean doubt never affects this feeling. As for me, in relation to these disturbing contacts, I am in a state of almost complete immobility. You might look on it as an arrested void, a mental mass buried somewhere, become virtuality. An actor, seen as through crystal. Inspiration in stages. Literature must not show too much. I have only aimed at the mechanism of the soul, I have only transcribed the pain of abortive adjustments. I am really abysmal. Those who believed me capable of consummate suffering, great suffering, sustained, fulsome anguish, anguish which is a mixture of different things, an excited grinding of powers and not a suspended point-yet with lively, uprooting impulses, stemming from the confrontation of my powers with these proffered supreme depths, (the confrontation of great and mighty powers) there is nothing now but unfathomable depths, cold, a halt, -thus those who attributed more life to me, who did not think me so far fallen within myself, who believed me submerged in agonizing noise, violent darkness against which I struggled, -are lost in the shades of man. In sleep, my nerves are taut down my legs. Sleep came from the shifting of belief, the tension relaxed and absurdity irked me. We must understand intelligence is only an enormous contingency, we may lose it, not like a dead madman, but as a person living in life, who feels its pull and inspiration (not of life, that is, but intelligence) . The titillations of intelligence and this brusque reversing of roles. Words half-way to intelligence. The faculty of hindsight, or suddenly railing against our thoughts. This dialogue in thought. Absorbed, breaking off everything. Then suddenly this trickle of water on a volcano, the mind’s slight, slow slip. Finding oneself in a state of extreme shock, enlightened by unreality, with fragments of the real world in a corner of oneself. To think with the minimum of discontinuity, without any traps in our thought, without one of those sudden disappearing tricks my bones are accustomed to as energy transmitters. At times my bones take pleasure in these games, delight in these games, delight in ·these stealthy abductions presided over by my mind, my head. At times I am only at a loss for one word, a simple unimportant little word, to be great, to speak in the tone of the prophets. A corroborating word, an exact word, a subtle word, a word thoroughly steeped in my bones, come out of me to stand at the furthest limits of my being, and which would be nothing to most men. I am the witness, the only witness of my self. This covering of words, those imperceptible whispered changes of thought, this smallest particle of my thought which Iassert was already expressed yet which miscarried. I am the only judge in gauging their scope. · A sort of continuous wasting of the normal level of reality. Inside this crust of skin and bone which is my head there is a constant anguish, not like having a moral dilemma, or like the thought processes of those ridiculously fussy natures whose worries, like leaven, are continually rising to the top, but like a ( decantation) within like the dispossession of my vital substance like the physical and essential loss (I mean loss of essence) of a sense. A powerlessness to fix unconsciously the point of rupture of automatism at any level whatsoever. The difficult part is to find out exactly where one is, to re-establish communication with one’s self. The whole thing lies in a certain flocculation of objects, the gathering of these mental gems about one as yet undiscovered nucleus. Here, then, is what I think of thought: INSPIRATION CERTAINLY EXISTS. And there is a luminous point where all reality is rediscovered, only changed, transformed, by-what ?-a nucleus of the magic use of things. And I believe in mental meteorites, in personal cosmogonies. Do you know what suspended sensitivity is, this sort of tremendous vitality split in two. This necessary, cohesive point to which being no longer rises, this menacing, crushing place.
To call this anxiety. Is to watering it down with words and rationalize it away, which only deprives it of its true value of experience. In Antonin Artaud’s words we do come very close to experience his meeting with himself in his ”answer to Job”, similar to what Edward Edinger makes perfectly clear in his seminar on the experience of ’the encounter with the Greater personality’.