To start this talk I will put a proposition to you.....

That is, that at the core of the symbolic nature of Christ's life, lies the problem of the ego, if we may call it a problem, and that this revolves around the answers to two questions:

(1) Who am I?

and

(2) What am I?

So I will start by imagining how a number of ordinary people in different walks of life might answer these questions and what they might consider the ego to be.

I have chosen the following as a cross section, a philosopher, a social worker, an alternative health practitioner, a successful business person, a (westerner who is a) monk or swami, and a Jungian.

Now we'll ask them the questions, and please forgive me if I am deliberately a bit simplistic

The Philosopher.
I have deliberately chosen as our philosopher Rene Descarte
"Now could you tell these people who you are?"
"Well yes, I am the French philosopher Rene Descarte."
"And could you tell them what you are?"
"Well as I have already mentioned I am a philosopher,.......I attempt to apply the faculty of reason to understanding existence......
"Could you say something briefly for us Mr Descarte about how you see the human ego?"
"Oh its what carries the faculty of reason for us, you know how I put is it all those years ago, `I think therefore I am'. Its necessary to have the ego well developed in order to be rational about life."

The Social Worker.
- who?
- gives name
- what?
- I am a social worker with the Department of F.A.C.S. and I ......
- How do you see the ego?
- Well its that part of us that knows who we are and has a lot to do with our self esteem because how we feel about ourselves affects how we see ourselves.
Its probably very affected by the self image we developed in growing up.

The Alternative Health Practitioner.
- who?
- gives name
- what?
- naturopath and herbalist, I attempt to look at health and healing in a holistic way.
- how do you see the ego?
- Well maybe we're all too caught up in the ego. It would probably be better for us all if we could just get out of our egos a bit, and take a more holistic view, in which the body and spiritual values got more say.

The Successful Business Person.
- who?
- gives name
- what?
- I'm the managing director of Enterprise Enterprises a nationwide chain of enterprises worth $2billion.
- how do you see the ego?
- Well the ego may get a bit of a bashing these days but you cant do without it. Its what gives people the drive and ambition to get on in life, to aim for the heights and make a success of their lives. You need a good strong ego to cope with the pressures of competition and success.

The Monk or Swami.
- who?
- gives new name
- what?
- could get different answers:

i) I am a devotee or initiate of such and such an ashram or guru.
ii) I am part of a greater whole and my journey or path is to re-unite myself to that whole from which I have become separated.

- how do you see the ego?
- Well its our ego that's really the biggest problem. Its only in an egoless state that we can be re-united with the whole so we need to find a way to become less and less attached to our egos.

The Average Jungian.
- who?
- gives name
- what?
- Well in outer life I'm a musician but really I'm a bit of an introvert so there's another side of me. I suppose I'm a bit of a dreamer or a philosophical type, I like to try at least that I pay attention to my inner life........goes on at some length.
- how do you see the ego?....its even more dangerous to generalise here, but here I go....and I'll partly quote myself from my early teaching notes.
- the ego is the centre of my conscious personality and the seat of my subjective identity. I have trouble with the ego, it seems to get me into all sorts of strife and be very resistant to my struggle for wholeness. .....I used terms such as cult of the ego and egocentric a lot.....and generally used a somewhat negative tone in speaking of the ego's denial of or resistance to the urgings of the Self.
As Jungians I feel we generally get a bit too caught up in the view of the ego as being its attachments to outer life and see ego consciousness as somehow antithetical to inner life.

Now I would like to look at these responses a little more closely.

Firstly the "who are you?" question:

- this is generally answered by the giving of a name, which most of us would consider distinguishes us as a unique individual. We may add further distinguishing information based on what we do in outer life.

Secondly the "what are you?" question:

- one can see that this is generally answered from the perspective "what are you (doing)?" rather than "what are you (or is your) Being?" - this reflects a strong cultural bias towards outer life and how we are reflected in it through what we do.
- those with a more introverted outlook may add a little that is less external in describing themselves but it generally still reflects an identity that is based on how one sees oneself in terms of the outside world as a reference point.

Thirdly the question about the ego, where I see the responses falling into two clear categories:

1. The philosopher, the business person and the social worker.

These three answer from the broadly accepted cultural perspective which associates the ego with rationality and sees a well developed ego as connected with a strong sense of identity in outer life terms. Here the ego is defined in terms of what one does and how one is seen by others in the light of that.

This is the group that sees the "ego" and ego development as essentially positive.

2. The alternative health practitioner, the swami/monk and the average Jungian.

This group answers with a more or less strongly negative feeling about the ego and one gets to a lesser or greater extent a sense that we'd be better of without that problematic ego.

However both sets of answers have very much in common that they see the ego essentially as to do with our identity as we define it in outer life terms.

Two things emerge here;

Firstly that we define the ego mostly in terms of who we are (in the outer world), and secondly that culturally we have real difficulty with the question of what we are.

So how might Jung have answered these questions?

Who? - "I'm professor Jung but you probably know that..."

What? - "Oh well you know that's not such a simple question to be answered in just a few minutes."

The rest of this talk is an attempt to explore and provoke answers to these questions in the spirit in which Jung would have approached them, if they were put to him.

Jung saw the ego as a pre-existent archetypal factor in the personality - an objective reality which contains the potential for consciousness - but also as the seat of our subjective identity.

The ego awareness that goes around in our daily lives is the seat of our subjective identities and is built up through our life experiences. This is what I will refer to as the adolescent ego, and what Edward Whitmont refers to as

"the ego conditioned by the collective consciousness and persona of the time"

and about which he remarks: quote p337 para 2 (1).

"the ego that came into being during the patriarchal period was conditioned by the collective superego and persona of that time. Our identity, our personal choices, decisions, and value judgments are determined - certainly initially and, to a large extent throughout our lives - by the ways we endeavour to be seen. We express the ideals of our family group and cultural environment, even when we hate or rebel against them or consciously disre- gard them. Genuinely individual values are more often than not carried by the shadow."

This matter of the shadow I shall return to later.

Jung as we all know gave great value to the life of the individual and saw it as the focus upon which the survival of humanity as a whole depended. He said

"the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul."

and it is the individual ego as the carrier of consciousness that this rests upon. This individuality itself, according to Jung, is for each of us an innate reality in the psyche. That is, our individuality is not acquired thro life experiences and the exertion of our will, but is in fact, realised in the process of developing mature ego consciousness. Jung says: Quote Edinger "Ego and Archetype" p158 (2)

"The psychological individual, or individuality, has an a priori unconscious existence, but it exists consciously only in so far as a consciousness of its peculiar nature is present, i.e., in so far as there exists a conscious distinctiveness from other individuals."

and

"Individuation therefore is a process of differentiation having for its goal the development of the individual personality."

A dream may further elucidate this proposition. A woman in her early sixties who is rather bitter at her lot in life dreamed:

"I enter a room where I see a beautifully set table. It has a white cloth and a beautiful silver service setting. The place is set for me and is far more beautiful than I could ever have managed. Then I feel resentful that my place has been set for me, even though its so beautiful. However I then realise or am told that the eating of the meal is for me to make whatever I can of."

Elsewhere Jung makes a clear connection between the ego and the Self, relevant in this context of the ego as the carrier or vehicle of individuality and consciousness.

"The Self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego."

Clearly if the ego remains stuck at its adolescent stage - unable to mature beyond unconscious adherence to, or reactions against, collective conscious- ness and values - we cannot develop that truly individual standpoint upon which Jung saw our survival as depending.

It seems that we collectively and individually must take up the burden of allowing and bringing to consciousness a new stage of ego development. And in this regard the questions of who and what I am are central. Whosoever undertakes this journey of freeing him or herself from this state of unconscious identity with collective consciousness will suffer an identity crisis of frightening proportions. Jung in "Aion" quotes a C17 alchemical text in which it is stated that: Quote "Aion" p164 para 2 (3).

"No one can know him(or her)self unless he/she knows what, and not who, he is, on what he/she depends, or whose he/she is [or: to whom or what he/she belongs] and for what end he/she was made."

This refers to the need of the ego to realise its objective rather than subjective identity. That is, to know oneself as more than simply a reflection of that which is outside and with and thro which one has discovered ones "who I am". It is to know oneself as an objective reality aside from the acquired masks or personas of outer life. One might put it as to know oneself one's eternal nature or, as Jung called it, his number two personality. In "The Psychology of the Transference" Jung put it as follows: quote p35 para 2 (4).

"Is there anything more fundamental than the realisation `This is what I am'? It reveals a unity which nevertheless is - or was - a diversity. No longer the earlier ego with its make-believes and artificial contrivances, but another, `objective' ego...."

Here I am proposing an immature ego identified with the persona, and that this is only a stage of ego development. How then does the ego emerge from this state of unconscious identity with the personas? What we shall see is that the ego in its emergence from the unconscious unity of childhood undergoes a process of confrontations with the external world as other. In this process the developing adolescent ego experiences itself via reflections thro which it begins to develop the personas with which it becomes identified - a subjective identity.

As personas develop, through which the ego develops a sense of subjective identity, the world outside becomes a sort of circular hall of mirrors at the centre of which the ego stands seeing itself reflected. The ego usually tries more or less successfully to adopt personas that render the reflections comfortable to itself and pleasing to others.

This is to a very large extent an unconscious process through which we adapt to the collective values of our social reality.....even for the apparent rebel.

So how are we impelled to break free of this unconscious identification with our personas, for it is only through this process that we can enter the next phase of ego development.

Edward Whitmont points us in the right direction in his remark that:

"Genuinely individual values are more often than not carried by the shadow".

The ego identified with personas must have the integrity of its self image challenged. It must meet with an opposition within capable of creating self doubt which demands a re-evaluation of its notion of `who it is'.

This is only usually possible through some shocking confrontation with one's shadow!!!!

The shadow must become a conscious counterpoint to the persona for the immature ego, and as this happens it creates a terrible dilemma for the ego. The ego's identity with its socially constructed persona's is threatened and the following questions press in to be considered:

- can it shore up the its cracked and crumbling self image, or, if not
- what is it to do about this new information that is forcing its way into consciousness?

The adolescent ego thus exposed may cover up thro angry reactions, denial and renewed projections, or it may lapse into a see-saw of vacillating ident- ifications - swinging from the old to the new, with re-emergence of the personas/attitudes, then fits of despair over -negative feelings when the exposed shadow cannot be denied or hidden.

However this is not a deep enough change, but a response of the adolescent ego to its previous illusion of unity being smashed. A strong inner duality has been set up which the ego can no longer completely deny, and with it a deep feeling of inner conflict and splitness will keep breaking through into awareness.

This is a crucifixion image and experience which we shall return to later.

Increasingly as the ego admits these two realities or experiences it feels caught by the conflict and pulled between them, and it cannot endure this for very long and remain properly functional in outer life. In order to avoid the complete collapse of a functioning personality something has to give.

It may be the old personas or it may be the newly emerging awareness.

If we can stay long enough with this conflict, not resorting to shoring up the old face, or lapsing into morbid negativity, if indeed either is available to us, something does give. Pulled from us on the cross of this inner crucifixion, or squeezed from us by the vice like pressure of it, is the germ of a new state of ego consciousness.

This is the beginning of a process of disintegration of the old persona identified attitude of the adolescent ego through which a truer more objective identity can emerge. If the ego can withstand this shocking state of inner conflict, with the tension created by the cracking of the persona image and the emergence of the shadow - a state with strong echoes of Jesus Christ's journey - then much is possible.

When the old `who am I' is exposed as a sham and the other `who I might be or am unconsciously', is an unacceptable and threatening possibility, the ego may be forced into a new state of objectivity. This is the observer ego, both subjective in a new fashion, and capable as it develops and evolves, of a true objectivity, of self consciousness. In the act of surrendering to the state of inner conflict produced by the persona-shadow opposition, the new ego may eventually find itself in a state of overviewing awareness totally new to it. Here it can both acknowledge the subjective limitations of the persona view, and admit the objective reality of the shadow. It is developing a synthesising consciousness, a third, more objective standpoint in which the `who I am ' of the persona moves towards the `What I am ' of the emerging mature ego. (In the painful development of this new perspective one is often inclined to wonder who one is and wish it were possible just to be who one used to be again.)

This is not a freedom from the inner turmoil, for as we know Christ's life involved a full living out of his fate. Subjectively the ego still experiences the tension and torment of the new awareness of its inner splitness. The more objectively ego, however, may begin to experience itself as both the venue in which this drama is being played out, and at one and the same time as the audience to that drama.

What has emerged strongly here for me both in individual therapy work and in teaching about the ego, is the analogy of the gate or threshold and the gate- keeper as images of the mature ego and its relationship to the unconscious psyche.

I would like now to read the lyrics of a rather obscure song of the late 1960's, by the Incredible String Band.

When I was born I had no head
My eye was single
And my body was filled with light
And the light that I was
Was the light that I saw by
And the light that I saw by
Was the light that I was.

One light, light that is one
Though the lamps be many.
And many's the time
That I crossed the river
And I saw no tollman
And I needed no ferry man to cross
And I enjoyed the world aright
For the sea itself floweth (in my veins) And warm I was and crowned.
One day walking towards the river
I saw a tollman with an angry face
And many's the time
That I passed his tollgate
And I payed no silver and I paid no gold
Rather did I hide my sheep and goats
Under the bags of oatmeal
And cold I was, no crown did i wear.

But if you're walking down the street
Why dont you look down to the basement
For sitting very quietly there
Is a man who has no head
His eye is singly
And his whole body or soul is filled with light.

One light, light that is one
Though the lamps be many.

And as he sits there
So he will walk all among you
And the streets are his
And all the people and even the temples
And the whole world.

And many's the time
That he walks to the river
And seeing the tollman
And seeing the ferryman
The light within him leaps to greet them
For he sees that their faces are none but his own.

One light, light that is one
Though the lamps be many.
(Warlock Music/Electra Records 1968)

If we are essentially unconscious, as in childhood, things pass to and fro from outer to inner and vice versa, to all intents and purposes unhindered and even unheeded. There is no tollman or gatekeeper, we are an open interface between inner and outer. Here I am taking the gatekeeper image as symbolic of the ego.

As we adapt to outer reality and develop personas we create or invoke and angry tollman (gatekeeper) and the interplay between inner and outer is a crossing for which we need a ferryman. A judging attitude oriented towards collective values censors our awareness of our greater identity. Our true individuality, present unconsciously in childhood, must be hidden, and life becomes cold.

But our true individuality, that gift and unique expression of the Self, remains alive in the basement of the unconscious, awaiting our acknowledgement. It is a symbol of our wholeness and oneness with all being.

With the recognition of this aspect of ourselves the gatekeeper is recognised too, as a part of our own makeup, and a new relationship between inner and outer is made possible. When the gate keeper can value both inner and outer realities a new conscious exchange between inner and outer is possible.
Obviously the ego cannot prevent the interplay between inner and outer realities, and so consciousness can always be impinged upon by the Self or the unconscious. If, as seems very common, the ego attached to personas and outer concerns acts like an unconscious gatekeeper who closes the door and turns his back to it, the unconscious must by rights play tricks. It will lure us away in order to slip things through that consciousness needs to be made aware of. If we are so stuck to the door that we cannot be lured away then the unconscious must resort to even dirtier tricks:

- break ins or outs
- bowling over the ego and breaking down the door
- hiding the sheep and goats and sneaking through

In this analogy the ego is paradoxically both the threshold/gateway between the inner and outer, and the gatekeeper. And it would seem the precondition for consciousness is that the gatekeeper be in attendance at the threshold. If it is absent with the door closed, distracted by the outer world of persona, breakins are necessary to balance a onesided personality . If one is absent with the door open much unconsciousness spills out into life, disrupting things or catching one up in various complexes with little hope of sorting out the ensuing mess.

Some people, probably rarer cases can be absent inwardly, locked away from dealing with outer life and again breaches of the threshold are necessary to redress an imbalance - here the inner fantasy life may draws too much energy away from outer adaptation and the Self/unconscious may have to open a flow into outer life.

It would seem that the ideal condition for the mature ego as gatekeeper is to attend the threshold properly. Not obsessively with that self consciousness that may become a sort of paranoia about whether I am getting it right, but with a measure of detachment that allows the ego to bring what Robert Johnson calls ethical considerations, to the interplay of conscious and unconscious life.

A woman struggling to deal with a lifelong grief that she knows she resists allowing into her life fully, asks an inner feminine guide figure in dialogue,

"Is there a way to transform my grief?". The answer come back:

"Know it, have it, look at it from all sides until your fear is knowledge".

In our discussion of this advice it became clear that the grief must be allowed to pass through her, through the threshold, in order to become consciously known so as to be transformed. In this process fear becomes knowledge. The ego must be present at the threshold despite its fear. If the gatekeeper is absent there will be no transformation on a conscious level.

Such powerful unresolved unconscious contents as deep grief, or any other power- ful emotion that has been blocked will cross the threshold regardless of the ego/gatekeeper's presence but experience suggests that it is only in his/her presence that they will be transformed and released. Without the ego as gate- keeper in attendance they seem doomed to haunt us, making repeated passages, disruptive or even destructive, until hopefully we are called back to our post.

Part Two

In essence the life of Christ is an archetypal pattern relating to the relation- ship of the ego to the self. That is, the life story Jesus Christ the man, describes symbolically the nature and development of the consciously under- taken individuation quest. We are shown there-in, on all levels, how the ego experiences that quest, and the trials and tribulations that it entails. This is an outline which applies both to ones life as a whole and to particular phases within that whole. It is a complex and detailed story and here we can only look at a few selected aspects of it.

This story is however an exemplary or ideal statement of the ego-Self relation- ship, and cannot be properly understood through the attempt to imitate that ideal. It is something that must be personally experienced in order to release its transformative reality into the individual psyche.

Throughout the biblical story of Christ's life he repeatedly refers to himself as being both the `Son of God' and the `Son of Man'. And as Jung observed:

" .....since Christ as man corresponds to the ego, and as God to the Self, he is at once both part and whole......" and that "...this would be equivalent to the highest possible state of completeness or perfection".

Which would be an ideal state of full and conscious attunement of the ego to the requirements of the Self. However the story of Christ's life itself is not one of an orderly procedure, through which one is freed form all pain and suffering, happily ending in a life of bliss.

In the Christianity of the churches Jesus became an amulet against confrontation with the archetypal powers. Through the simple act of belief in Him, one was freed of all responsibility for sin, He died for our sins and we were to be set free by belief in that. Yet as Jung also noted that very confrontation can and does:

"Happen to everyone in whom the Christian dominant has decayed. For this reason here have always been people who...set forth under cover by devious paths ... to seek direct experience of their eternal roots, and, following the lure of the restless unconscious psyche find themselves in the wilderness where, like Jesus they come up against the son of darkness."

Or as Patti Smith put it:

"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. My sin's my own, it belongs to me."

Which is an expression of the fact that the path of individuation requires us to take conscious responsibility for our sins, or for dealing with our shadow. In that process, to which many of us here would aspire, the stages in Christ's journey represent not particular jewels in a protective amulet, which Christianity has built them into, but windows opening into deeper understanding one's life journey.

The symbolism of Christ's life journey has a dual quality that Jung and Edward Edinger both refer to, and which is vital to its aspect of guiding individual egos on their personal journeys of finding relationship to the objective psyche and the Self. Here-in Jesus suffers not just as the divine Christ being, suffering for humanity in order to free it from the need for individual suffering. He suffers also as Jesus the man, undergoing the actual human experience that we all undergo in some degree or other at some time in life.

This fact came home to me in a particular way as some-one raised in an non- religious family and who felt little personal connection to the Christian myth. Leonard Cohen's song ("Suzanne" MAM/CBS Records) expresses the problem of Christ's humanity, which is the central paradox of the Christian myth as follows.

"And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see Him
He said "All men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken long before the sky would open
Forsaken almost human He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.

" When Cohen says "Forsaken almost broken/He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone", it echoes Jung's statement that: "the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego", and that is something we can all humanly relate to..... We experience that defeat initially in the process described earlier of the ego- persona identification being broken open, but it continues and deepens.

Christ's life involves a series of stages or significant events, starting with the virgin birth and taking us through to the resurrection and ascension. We cannot here address all of these stages so I have chosen ones which, probably in part for personal reasons, give an overall picture. I am very aware of having omitted reference to the virgin birth, and other significant ways in which the feminine appears or is absent in the story. I have done this knowingly as I think that it deserves a whole talk, and must draw from other contemporary mythic stories such as the Eros and Psyche myth.

The stages I have chosen are as follows:-

Baptism/Temptation
Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem
Last Supper
Gethsemane
Crucifixion
Resurrection and Ascension

A. BAPTISM

"Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, suffer it to be so now; for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him, and Jesus, when he was baptized, went straighway out of the water; And lo the heavens were opened unto him and he saw the spirit of God descending unto him and he saw the Spirit descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: and lo a voice from heaven saying, this is may son in whom I am well pleased."

(Matthew 3:13-17)

If the life of Christ is an image of the individuating ego it is also one which reflects the overall processes of ego development. We all must pass through all the stages of the development process and in the image of the baptism we see Jesus submitting to the collective authority of the time. Symbolically this can be seen to have many levels but at each level it represents the relationship of the personal to a higher authority. It is an image of initiation and there are many forms that this process takes in our personal lives. In our own lives these initiations are firstly into areas of life defined by collective consciousness - family, school, peer group, jobs, university, career, marriage etc. Jesus becomes a rabbi, and despite intimations of his greater calling submits himself to John the Baptist. In this he dons the persona appropriate to the collective consciousness of his time. In it he is also exposed to the temptation to power inflation....after his baptism he goes off into the wilderness where he is confronted by the devil and tempted with offers of power, which he resists.

We each face such temptations in smaller of larger ways through-out life, succumbing to many at first maybe, and hopefully developing greater resistance as we mature......in a new job we may unconsciously get carried away with new found power and authority, make out of hand judgments and be `too big for our boots' until the situation brings us down to size.

At a deeper level the baptism symbolism represents an awakening of our true individuality, that core of the ego complex which knows itself as the vehicle of the Self, and feels called to begin a spiritual or individuation journey. When we enter this phase, as Christ's life amply demonstrates, conflict and clashes with collective consciousness are inevitable. Our emerging individuality clashes with the persona complex we have built up in adaptation to outer life, and the path to our eventual crucifixion experience becomes inevitable. Whilst we remain contained within the persona complex adapted to collective values we have a degree of protection against inflation. When we are spurred on by our emerging individuality a new form of hubris, not containable within the old forms becomes a real danger.

In his temptation "dialogue with the Devil" Jesus resorts to the standard Judaic responses and they afford him ample protection, but we shall see that later in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem the problem of temptation re-emerges.

B. TRIUMPHAL ENTRY

"And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the Mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, saying unto them, go into the village over against you and straightway ye shall finds an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them and bring them unto me and if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, the Lord hath need of them; and straight- way he will send them. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, they King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting on an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. And the disciples went and did as Jesus commanded them,..."

(Matt. 21:1-9)

As Edinger puts it about Jesus entry to Jerusalem,

"His manner of entry into Jerusalem indicates that Christ explicitly identifies himself with the messianic King foretold in Zechariah".

He deliberately chooses the mode of entry foretold, interestingly an image of humility. Then he falls into a rage and angrily deals with the money changers in the temple.

The next day he curses the fig tree that has no fruit. His behaviour is anything but humble and meek and contradicts his own teachings. This is a confrontation with the shadow to which, in identifying with the archetypal urge to serve a higher spiritual authority, the Self, we necessarily expose ourselves.

How many of us in setting of on our own individuation journeys or quests for spiritual growth, have not fallen into self righteous condemnation of others, and a `holier than thou' attitude at times?

The ego setting out on this journey sets itself in opposition to the collective consciousness and adopted personas with which it has identified, and in so doing exposes itself to them in new way. If we are to set up an inner spiritual kingdom we feel we must overthrow the old regime and in so doing we meet it within as well as without. Edinger says:

"Exposure of the ego to such unconscious forces always generates some degree of possession or identification even if only partial or temporary".

And Jung:

"Egocentricity is a necessary attribute of consciousness and is also its specific sin".

We must necessarily expose the emerging new ego to these dangers in order to strengthen it. We have to deal with our inflated notions that we now have the answers to all life's problems.....Jungians in analysis often experience this early in the piece and many people finding a new therapeutic approach see it as a panacea and think its for everyone. Or one gets a new job as coordinator of a section or service and wants to re-organise everything and everyone.

Each failure to weather such a storm is like an injury sustained in physical life, it must be healed by withdrawal and gentle treatment preparatory for a re- entry into the fray.

We turn next to a further stage in the development of this process.

C. THE LAST SUPPER

"And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessing it, brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins."

(Matt. 26:26-27)

Here I would like to share a dream of a woman in therapy (interestingly had just before Easter).

" A man had just died and was being eaten by children and adults. They were enjoying it - lovely fresh meat. A man stands apart and refuses to eat.

A voice says of him to me, that he hadn't loosened from the constraints of his religion or beliefs and he couldn't find his individuality because he wasn't willing to face it. He would get that from eating the meat which was raw."

This dream has a clear and powerful connection with the Last Supper and with Dionysian rites in which the flesh was eaten raw. It also links eating of flesh directly with finding of individuality, and resistance to it with the inability to `loosen oneself' from the collective values to which one is attached. I will not say too much of a personal nature about this woman, but suffice it to say that she has a great struggle to realise and express her true individuality. Family and parental images and social expectations weigh heavily upon her, and it is indeed at times a daunting struggle to loosen herself from those constraints. In the Dionysian rites the worshippers in eating raw flesh are invested with the divine nature of the god. Christ says:

"Whosoever eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life."

If Christ is an image both of the Self and that aspect of the ego which is our unique individual reflection of the Self, or true individuality, then to eat his flesh is to take in, ingest and integrate, those very qualities.The dream clearly points this out, along with how we are blocked from this possibility - by being unable to loosen ourselves from the constraints of collective values.

To have eternal life means to have consciousness of the Self, and thereby to see things `under the aspect of eternity', or in a framework beyond the confines of the immature ego bound in outer reality. In John 6:56 it is put even more succinctly as:

"He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him."

This process of eating the flesh and drinking the blood ensures an ongoing indwelling of the consciousness of the Self and of containment by it.

I have not dealt specifically with the blood, for reason of keeping within time limits. However the raw flesh of the dream and Dionysian rites contains the blood, a substance often drunk by primitive hunters in order that its primal life giving powers not be lost. Blood was considered the seat of life or the soul, that which flows through the flesh carrying the essence of life.

As such the combination of flesh and blood seems to represent the interplay of matter and psyche in which the blood as psyche carries the life giving reality of the Self in its interplay of manifestation in the ego as flesh, or outer

life. The woman who had this dream later reflected upon it, "I feel a need to eat myself more, its something about accepting myself more wholly".

D. GETHSEMANE

"Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful, and very heavy. Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here and watch with me. And he went a little further, and fell on his face and prayed....And he cometh unto the disciples and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?....He went away again the second time and prayed.....and he came and found them asleep again....and went away again and prayed the third time saying the same words."

(Matt. 26 36-44)

In the garden of Gethsemane we enter still more deeply into the experience of the ego in this fateful collision with the Self. The Last Supper over, the flesh and blood eaten, the ego is confronted with the `aweful' and terrifying reality of what has been set in motion. Jesus faces the inevitability of his crucifixion as the Christ.

At Gethsemane the ego faces its inevitable tearing apart by the inner conflict between an illusory identification with personas adapted only to outer life, and the reality of the shadow as its first taste of the unconscious as a living reality. Here the point of no return is passed and what has been set in motion can only be gone through with.

In Gethsemane whilst Christ prays, offering himself up to God or the Self, several of his disciples, chosen to watch with him, are plagued by sleepiness, despite his exhortations to wakefulness. If the process of re-orientation set in motion by the persona/shadow conflict, and the breaking up of the immature ego's illusions, is to be taken up success-fully, great watchfulness is essential.

We often enter our Jerusalem, the arena of deepest transformation, in a slightly inflated state. A counterpoint to this inflation is often doubt and despair at the magnitude of what we face. In prayer Christ faces this deep doubt and despair, an all too human experience, and as the ego struggling to realign itself asks that the cup be taken from him. The cup is our allotted portion, our individual fate in giving unique expression to the Self out of which the ego has been manifested. And how often in facing our fate in the daunting task of bringing our true individuality to expression do we cry out "Why me?", or "Its too much, I cant go on!", or "I cant bear it!"?

In order to deal with these times the knowing aspect of our ego complex must post guards to watch while we grapple with this thing, and seek the courage to face it. We must exhort ourselves to be aware, to watch our step, to stay awake to the old traps and pitfalls, and how many times do we find that we've fallen asleep on the job?

And yet if we somehow stay in touch with the underlying urge towards conscious- ness, to the need for the Self to guide us, we eventually say in our own way, as Christ prayed in the garden at Gethsemane:

"Oh my father, if this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, thy will be done".

Here we have a striking link to the response of the inner guide asked by the woman mentioned earlier how to transform her grief;

"Know it, have it, look at it from all sides until your fear is knowledge".

She must drink the cup of her grief if it is to pass from her........

And even then, having made that connection and accepted the inevitability of our fate, when we go back into life we find our watchers asleep. Those parts of us still not fully transformed that we nevertheless must trust to guard our backs, to give us time and space to pursue our inner work, lapse into unconsciousness. They are like the apostles, aspects of our outer life personas that have always in some way reflected our deeper individuality, and are deeply drawn to it, but still apprehensive about full commitment to it. In that state they fall into fear of the collective consciousness and betray us. It is not so much the flesh that is weak, but the attitude of the old ego which cannot free itself from its old personas and collective values. E. CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION. Eventually we must face our crucifixion, and the in the image of the crucifixion and resurrection we have the culmination of this fateful journey of the ego. That the cup was not taken from Christ is the inevitable fate of the ego follow- ing its individuation path consciously. What we have chosen cannot be taken from us. In choosing to live our individuality we choose a "path of blood and suffering" as Jung calls it, that leads irrevocably to our crucifixion. And it is no surprise that the agents of this final humiliation are none other than the old collective values of our chosen milieu. For Christ Judaism and the Romans - they are the spiritual and secular realities we have internalised, and which will put us to the ultimate test - can we remain committed to our emerging individuality in the face of the inevitable crucifixion that it will lead us to? Can we realise that it is out of this crucifixion that our true individuality is in fact born?

For crucifixion is not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of marriage, or the union of opposites.

Our old conscious personality is split asunder by the emergence of and conflict with unconscious forces, crucified on the cross of experience. The crucifixion abounds with symbolic dualities, the juxtaposition of opposites. Edward Edinger says:

"It is the moment of intersection between the human and the divine. Ego and Self are superimposed. The human figure representing the ego is nailed to the mandala cross representing the Self. Around it various pairs of opposites are constellated. For instance, on either side of Christ two thieves are crucified."

(Edinger, "The Christian Archetype", p. 98)

In the two thieves we have an image of that split within us with which the emerging new ego state must contend. On the one hand the thief who mocks Christ along with the bystanders saying, `Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!'. This is that in us which either doubts or undermines our new attitude, or which expects it to miraculously free us of all pain in order to prove its worth to us. That which desires miraculous cures or fascinating phenomena which lift us out of our necessary suffering; the quick fix. It seeks "inflation not illum- ination", to borrow from Robert Johnson.

It is this part in us that of course condemns us to the hell of repeated pain or meaninglessness. How often have we wondered why we are going over and over the same old ground, repeating the same old patterns? If the first thief in us has the upper hand, and the second is unable to cut in and remind us that we indeed suffer justly, as due reward for our deeds, we are condemned to remain split. We must honestly face and name that which has been unconscious and shadowy in us, not expecting easy solutions, or falling into self mocking or undermining attitudes.

Here we face death. On a personal level this is the death of the old, one sided attitude of attachment to outer life personas, an attachment to one pole of the duality, and a denial of the other, our shadow and inner life. The Christ aligned ego in us knows the necessity of this crucifixion and death. It goes willingly, but not without doubt and fear, for both aspects, the two thieves, must be known and fully acknowledged in us. When Jesus cries out; "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He echoes the doubt of the first thief and the very human fear and doubt in all of us faced with this total surrender which the crucifixion demands.

When he says to the second thief; "Truly I say unto you, today you will be with me in paradise.", and later "Father, into thy hands I comment my spirit.". he offers his faith in the reality of a transition beyond this experience of crucifixion, faith in the resurrection.

In the image of the resurrection we have a promise, the fulfilment of which only experience can testify to. The truth of the resurrection does not rest on faith, rather it produces faith as a reality that arises from personal experience. Here I quote from H.A. Williams, an English Anglican contemplative,

"The prelude to resurrection is as we experience it in this life is always powerlessness.",

(H. A. Williams: "True Resurrection".)

and that is the powerless state we are brought to in the crucifixion, and as Jung puts it:

"The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realise what they meant. Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion. He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation. On the cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body."

(Quoted in Edinger, "The Christian Archetype", p118)

On a personal level this `Resurrection Body' seems to refer to a new state of ego consciousness, it is a more mature ego alive to the reality of the Self and the renewal which come through the crucifixion experience of facing ones own splitness. In the smashing of our illusory state of oneness - of identification with outer realities and personas thus defined, no matter how truthful - we are brought to the possibility of faith, a step beyond belief, for as H.A. Williams says:

"Faith is evoked only by the particular situation in which it is needed.... When the occasion first arises, we feel likely as not, that our faith is too weak to begin to cope. Then slowly we discover that our faith is matched to our need. And the sign that it is so is seldom any glorious certainty or sense of uplift, but simply the fact that however much we are wounded and hurt, we are not overwhelmed, we still retain that spasmodic glimmer of hope."

(H A Williams, "True Resurrection", p 180)

In this sense I see faith as both a central reality of the Crucifixion/ Resurrection experience and paradoxically a product of it. The renewal and transformation taking place in our lives is not always easy to recognise and integrate. In the story of the Resurrection and Ascension the resurrected Christ is very hard for the disciples to recognise. Mary Magdalene, the first to see him, and other disciples, repeatedly fail to recognise the resurrected Christ. This suggests that those aspects of us which remain functioning in the old life, which of course goes on heedless of our inner transformations, will not always find it easy to incorporate the transformed values or new ego attitudes.

So how do we know the Resurrected Christ within us??

One way in which the Resurrected Christ is identified is through his wounds. The resurrected body is not born anew unmarked, but retains the imprints of the painful process of transformation. And it is through these wounds that the `doubting Thomas' in us is convinced of the reality of our transformation. H.A. Williams speaks of our need to accept the pain of our transformation process;

"It is not that we love the pain so that we hate the self which the pain is destroying (that is masochism), but that we love ourselves, diminished, maimed, tortured, made ugly by the pain though we are....since our pain is the agent of this discovery, the agent of resurrection, we love our wounds not for their own destructive selves, but because we see in them the hope and promise of transformation. They are the harbingers or abundant new life."

(H A Williams, "The True Resurrection", p.161)

In this loving acceptance of the pain what is meaningless is transformed. What is felt as a penalty (pain is from the Greek for penalty) becomes a suffering, a burden that we must (and can) bear. And when the old scars are touched and the wounds recalled, what is awakened is not only the pain, or the weight of the burden we bore, but that "spasmodic glimmer of hope" which is the vestigial faith which can be rekindled to meet each new call to transformation - the promise of The Resurrection. For, to quote H A Williams in ending, (True Resurrection", p149)

"The suffering is the raw material of the happiness. The achievement is wrenched out of the despair. Suffering, despair, doubt, evil are received and assimilated, and thus are transposed into another key where they are experienced as fulfilment and joy. It is, as always, the woundprints them- selves which are raised in glory."

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