Esoteric Psychology, Part II: The Personality, Persona and Collective Unconscious

Personality and Psyche              

                The human psyche, according to Carl Jung, consists of three parts – the conscious, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The conscious is that which is awake in man, the one that perceives. The personal unconscious lays near the surface, which contains the “shadow,” the primitive, uncivilized part of the human species, which usually appears in dreams as a person of the same sex.

                                                                                                                                      

Below the shallow waters of the personal unconscious lies the collective unconscious, which contains the dreams and symbols from the whole history of mankind. It also contains man’s religious aspirations, his need to define his existence, his soul. When these deeper aspirations appear in dreams, they manifest as a person of the opposite sex, called the anima, the Latin word for soul. For females, the soul being is male and called animus.

                The person already have these parts at the time of birth and are stored in both the DNA and the brain, waiting to express themselves, depending on the trigger mechanisms in the environment, the circumstances which would make them manifest. This relates to the eastern concept of karma, which may be defined as the momentum for potential action, generated from past actions. They were deeply ingrained as patterns of behavior of the person drawn from both the collective memory of the species and the personal circumstances (and actions) of previous incarnations of the individual.

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The ego is the conscious mind, made up of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts and feelings. It is responsible for feelings of identity and continuity. From the viewpoint of a person, it is regarded as the center of consciousness, what the person thinks he is. It does not mean egotistical, but a sense of “I-ness,” the chief executive officer of the personality.

The ego is apparently already born with the personality. It is the personality, as the personality consciously knows it. It is, in fact the core of the personality, drawing to itself a cohesive and rigid energy patterns from the subtler realms of the physical (etheric or quantum realm), emotional (or astral) and mental worlds.    

                                                                                                                                             

            The personal unconscious consists of experiences that were once conscious, but which were repressed, suppressed, forgotten or ignored; or experiences that were too weak to cause a conscious impression.

           A complex is an organized group or constellation of feelings, thoughts, perceptions and memories that exist in the personal unconscious, attracting to it or constellating various experiences. A person is born with a set of patterns in the personal unconscious, reflected in his deepest memories. However, as he interacts with the social environment, he accumulates experiences that add on the composite personal unconscious or release some complexes. The content of the personal unconscious is accessible to the ego.

Collective Unconscious and Persona

                                                                                                                                        

               The collective unconscious is the storehouse of latent memories inherited from one’s ancestral past that includes the racial history of humans as a separate species, including their pre-human or animal ancestry.

             Archetypes are the structural components of the collective unconscious. An archetype is a universal thought form (idea) that contains a large element of emotion. It is a permanent deposit in the mind of an experience that has been constantly repeated for many generations.

                                                                                                                                            

The animus and anima are the male and female archetypes respectively in a person. These archetypes, although conditioned by the sex chromosomes and the sex glands are the products of the racial experience of man with woman and vise-versa. The shadow archetype consists of the animal instincts that humans inherited in their evolution from the lower forms of life. It is responsible for the conception of “the original sin.” When projected outward, it is the conception of the devil or the enemy.    

The persona is the mask worn by the person in response to the demands of social convention and tradition and to his or her own archetypal needs. It is the role assigned to one by society, the part that society expects him to play. In practical terms, the persona is the composite of the various roles that the person plays in his lifetime – a good boy or girl, the parent and spouse, the employee or supervisor, all roles which relate to conforming to socially accepted norms.

In ordinary living, an individual may become so attached to the roles he plays to the point that he equate the persona with his ego. In experiencing setbacks with respect to any one role played in life, only then will the ego reflect and acknowledge that he is not his role, that there is indeed a distinction between the role and the actor of the play.