Muse - one of my favourite words.
muse: v., to think deeply; n., the spirit thought to inspire an artist
I would also use the word "shift" in substitution for "inspire"...
Came across something I had written long ago in 2003 cleaning up one of the old hard drives, and smiled. I can't remember what caused me to write it. The last time I had touched it, I was reading it to the last feller I had dated, another who had taken esoteric and alternative modalities courses. I had imagined he might relate and we'd have an interesting conversation on our long drive.
After the first two paragraphs, he draped a condescending smirk across his face and sarcastically said; "Wow, you're not conceited, are you?"
Without saying a word, I folded up the paper, put it in my purse, and dropped the idea of returning to university to finish my Psychology degree.
In hindsight, that individual's bullying traits expressed themselves more shortly and I was well shy of him by the end of that summer. He might have been tapping Uncle... and didn't want to delve into subject matter, what it would bring up for him. And I was being too deep, too intense, too brainy, lol.
It was a distant, silent drive.
He liked the imago he'd built up of me in his mind and did not want it threatened by the real persona.
I kept it hidden upon the poor reception.
I can still write like this but considering how long it took me to learn to speak poorly so others could understand me, it would be a backtracking of a nature. Anyway, if you want to thrash your way through it, there might be some kernels among the verbiage.
T'il later... J R
Where does your persona draw its lessons, as others react to the imago they hold of you?
We all experience the ego's basic anxiety as its conflict between individuation/separation and social conformity balances its polarities out. On one hand, we wish to be unique, free to do our own thing, and yet also considered normal, liked by others and accommodating or of service to their wishes and needs. So we all have to work through the process of resolving the truth of the internal ego and the external persona development. The persona is the personality that others perceive, and carry as their imago (not the actual you, just a comprehended representation within their mind) of who you are to them. It is the ego's drive for the dual needs of independence and relationship acting through the persona's actions that draws lessons of the soul to each of us. Have you considered how those usually manifest for you, and what further growing edges you may work on in this time?
Do you allow your persona to fold under duress, sacrificing your real truth as you adapt outward actions so your ego can live in the real world? Unless you are of an acknowledged genius in one area, with compensatory gifts to offer the world, most peoples' persona excesses are not forgiven to an exceptional degree. Those personas may be changed to adapt to situations, and the ego does not choose to identify fully with a particular persona. Think of expectations based upon gender, where girls are expected to act one way and boys another. Clothes style may also represent the persona. What we drive. Reactions we receive about the personas we are trying out, help us refine which persona to wear in individual circumstances.
Two pitfall areas with this development are that we can over-identify with the persona, or become too involved with the inner world, which Jung assigns as anima/animus possession, our inner male or female opposite sex characteristics. In the first, one becomes a pleaser or rescuer who strives to adapt so much to the external world that they believe the constructed personality is all they are. They live an external lie. In the second, the person when forced to relate in the outer external object world gets hung up in the impulses, reactions and deluded fantasies of their inner world. That may result in them being blind to what is actually there, being inconsiderate of others' boundaries, and getting jolted out of the inner state only by harsh blows of fate reality.
Both introverts and extroverts must relate to the world of objects. It's simpler for extroverts. An extroverted libido goes to the object and stays there as this externally oriented person interacts with objects (meaning people or otherwise) without much fuss or complication. The introvert bounces attention and psychic energy to the object, back to itself, and then analyzes internally the feel. In a way, they pull the object back within themselves and have the danger of incorporating it too much or losing themselves in its attitudes. The introvert's persona may seem more ambiguous or uncertain, and varies from one situation to the next, whatever helps them most combat the intimate inner threat. Most of the emerging exceedingly sensitive Crystal or Indigo children must battle and rise above this at some point in their lives, to activate the fullness of their gifts.
Typically we all go through final persona development as adolescents and early adulthood. On one side, a need to conform to peer pressure, the horde mentality, and on the other, all those invincible dreams we hold within about what we are here in the world to do. If we do not break free from parental or peer group collective values during our individuation process to compete personal autonomy, we fall back into and remain mired in childish perceptions and wounds any time majour life events come down the turnpike to challenge us. A major change occurs in the passage from childhood into adolescence, another in the passage from adolescence into adulthood, another in the course of the mid-life transition from early adulthood into middle age, yet another in the transition into old age. The external personality is there to protect us as we interweave with outside forces, expressing as well as hiding portions of ourselves. An adequate social persona is broad enough to show both communally appropriate behaviours and be genuine and plausible to the inner ego. The farther the distance between what is externally displayed and what our inner drive is, the more stress is incurred as energy is pumped into the fiasco to maintain it. New personas appear as individuals enter differing stages of life and we discard what no longer works for us, realize we are identifying too much with a character we were playing, or which is not aligned with our soul, moral ethics and ego's purpose.
Essentially, the persona, which is the psychic skin between ego and world, is not only a product of interaction with objects, but includes as well the individual's projections onto those objects. We adapt to what we perceive other people are and what they want. This may be considerably different from how others see them or how they see themselves. Wrapped into the fabric of the persona are projections that originate in the complexes, for instance in the parental complexes, and return to the subject through long held wounds. Even after wherever these wounds originated are long since outgrown and left behind, they continue to affect the persona because they are projected into the world. We cling to our woundedness for in it is a safety about not growing up and having to be responsible for and own our actions. We unconsciously search for ways to heal these wounds, the things that were done wrong to us, and which we hold because there seems to be little recompense for the original action. So we carry them over and project them out into other situations, not realizing they have nothing to do with the first wound and that we are the ones creating the projection, that the unhealed problem actually lies within us. Assumptions about what really occurred show where inner biases may still be keeping us hostage. This was Freud's observation concerning "transference." One will persevere in old habitual behaviors and place the blame externally on the projected object, as responses to the new situation with outdated methods can not change until we become aware of this.
What is it that causes personas to stick to people with tenacity? In part it is identification and sheer familiarity. A persona becomes identified with one's personality. It offers a psycho-social identity. But shame is also a fundamental motivator. The persona protects one from shame, and the avoidance of shame is probably the strongest motive for developing and holding on to a persona. Ruth Benedict's writings on shame and guilt cultures showed that western nations are characteristically guilt cultures and eastern countries are by contrast shame cultures. Shame cultures emphasize persona more than do guilt cultures, in the sense that if one loses face one might as well die. Loss of face is the ultimate crisis. The situation is quite different in guilt cultures where guilt can be assuaged or redressed: the guilty person can pay the price for their behaviours' actions and be restored to community.
Guilt involves an indiscreet action that counteracts against principles, whereas shame wipes out one's whole sense of self-worth. Guilt revolves around something we did; shame something gross we are. Shame is a more primitive, and potentially a more destructive kind of emotion. We tend to feel either guilty about or profoundly ashamed of the things we do that are at odds with the adopted persona. This is the realization of shadow in the personality. Shadow induces shame, a sense of unworthiness, a feeling of uncleanness, of being soiled and unwanted. To be well-trained is to be proud; to soil oneself is shameful. Nature has been conquered by the toilet-trained ego. Such experiences of shame include anything that does not fit into the way we were trained: to be a good person, the right kind of person, to fit in, to be accepted. Another shadow feature is aggression, for feeling aggressive, hateful, or envious are shaming emotions.
These normal human reactions tend to be hidden away; we are embarrassed by them, in the same way that we are ashamed of certain physical or character flaws that we see in ourselves. We cover our tracks to save face, rationalize what we did. The persona is the face we put on to meet the other faces, to be like them and to be liked by them. It's a hard road to walk one's truth, for being all that we can be often means being exceedingly different and that usually is not well received from the general social community, those that are not doing so - it presents a not taken up dare for them. Yet, we do not want to be too different, for our points of difference, where the persona ends and the shadow begins, make us ashamed or we let guilt and apologies grow for embarrassing others by doing more than them.
The shadow and persona are a classic pair of opposites, standing in the psyche as polarities of the ego. Since the overall task of psychological development is integration; and wholeness, healedness, awareness, enlightenment the supreme values, it can be asked: What does it mean to integrate persona and shadow, that which draws our lessons to us? Integration hinges on self-acceptance, on fully accepting those parts of oneself that do not belong in the persona image, which is itself usually an image of an ideal or at least of a cultural norm. The personal aspects of which one is ashamed are often felt to be radically evil even though that usually is not the case. It is only felt to be so because of the shame attached to it due to its nonconformity with the persona. What is it like when somebody has achieved a measure of integration between persona and shadow? A quote from a letter of a former patient of Jung's:
Jung held that if the two poles are held in tension, a solution will appear if the ego can let go of both and create an inner vacuum in which the unconscious can offer a creative solution in the form of a new symbol. This symbol will present an option for movement ahead that will include something of both - not simply a compromise, but an amalgamation that calls forth a new attitude on the part of the ego and a new kind of relation to the world. This process can be observed as people develop both in therapy and through life experience - as they outgrow their former conflicts, assume new personas, and integrate formerly unacceptable parts of the self. Shadow roles and impulses are acted out, without the appearance of a transcendent function to bring about an integration of those opposites. In other cases, the ego is too unstable and weak to moderate impulsivity enough to allow for the taking place of the transcendent function, and the woundedness and dis-ease persists.
Mostly though, we should relish the hard times as opportunities for growth, for discerning what we further need to work on that holds us back from activating our inborn divine potential. The Chinese congi for crisis is a blending of both "risk" and "opportunity". What repeatedly occurs about you as a message about a growing edge, people attacking you for speaking too non-conformist a truth, or asking boundaries to be honoured by dysfunction-beset others, or climbing back in a pity pot instead of seeking for what may be done? Think of what it is that scares one so about becoming all you can be, or how you tear down others already succeeding somewhere you internally wish for. They hold mirrors up in reverse transference for you to view the greatness that you too can actualize.
Where does your persona draw its lessons, as others react to the imago they hold of you?
We all experience the ego's basic anxiety as its conflict between individuation/separation and social conformity balances its polarities out. On one hand, we wish to be unique, free to do our own thing, and yet also considered normal, liked by others and accommodating or of service to their wishes and needs. So we all have to work through the process of resolving the truth of the internal ego and the external persona development. The persona is the personality that others perceive, and carry as their imago (not the actual you, just a comprehended representation within their mind) of who you are to them. It is the ego's drive for the dual needs of independence and relationship acting through the persona's actions that draws lessons of the soul to each of us. Have you considered how those usually manifest for you, and what further growing edges you may work on in this time?
Do you allow your persona to fold under duress, sacrificing your real truth as you adapt outward actions so your ego can live in the real world? Unless you are of an acknowledged genius in one area, with compensatory gifts to offer the world, most peoples' persona excesses are not forgiven to an exceptional degree. Those personas may be changed to adapt to situations, and the ego does not choose to identify fully with a particular persona. Think of expectations based upon gender, where girls are expected to act one way and boys another. Clothes style may also represent the persona. What we drive. Reactions we receive about the personas we are trying out, help us refine which persona to wear in individual circumstances.
Two pitfall areas with this development are that we can over-identify with the persona, or become too involved with the inner world, which Jung assigns as anima/animus possession, our inner male or female opposite sex characteristics. In the first, one becomes a pleaser or rescuer who strives to adapt so much to the external world that they believe the constructed personality is all they are. They live an external lie. In the second, the person when forced to relate in the outer external object world gets hung up in the impulses, reactions and deluded fantasies of their inner world. That may result in them being blind to what is actually there, being inconsiderate of others' boundaries, and getting jolted out of the inner state only by harsh blows of fate reality.
Both introverts and extroverts must relate to the world of objects. It's simpler for extroverts. An extroverted libido goes to the object and stays there as this externally oriented person interacts with objects (meaning people or otherwise) without much fuss or complication. The introvert bounces attention and psychic energy to the object, back to itself, and then analyzes internally the feel. In a way, they pull the object back within themselves and have the danger of incorporating it too much or losing themselves in its attitudes. The introvert's persona may seem more ambiguous or uncertain, and varies from one situation to the next, whatever helps them most combat the intimate inner threat. Most of the emerging exceedingly sensitive Crystal or Indigo children must battle and rise above this at some point in their lives, to activate the fullness of their gifts.
Typically we all go through final persona development as adolescents and early adulthood. On one side, a need to conform to peer pressure, the horde mentality, and on the other, all those invincible dreams we hold within about what we are here in the world to do. If we do not break free from parental or peer group collective values during our individuation process to compete personal autonomy, we fall back into and remain mired in childish perceptions and wounds any time majour life events come down the turnpike to challenge us. A major change occurs in the passage from childhood into adolescence, another in the passage from adolescence into adulthood, another in the course of the mid-life transition from early adulthood into middle age, yet another in the transition into old age. The external personality is there to protect us as we interweave with outside forces, expressing as well as hiding portions of ourselves. An adequate social persona is broad enough to show both communally appropriate behaviours and be genuine and plausible to the inner ego. The farther the distance between what is externally displayed and what our inner drive is, the more stress is incurred as energy is pumped into the fiasco to maintain it. New personas appear as individuals enter differing stages of life and we discard what no longer works for us, realize we are identifying too much with a character we were playing, or which is not aligned with our soul, moral ethics and ego's purpose.
Essentially, the persona, which is the psychic skin between ego and world, is not only a product of interaction with objects, but includes as well the individual's projections onto those objects. We adapt to what we perceive other people are and what they want. This may be considerably different from how others see them or how they see themselves. Wrapped into the fabric of the persona are projections that originate in the complexes, for instance in the parental complexes, and return to the subject through long held wounds. Even after wherever these wounds originated are long since outgrown and left behind, they continue to affect the persona because they are projected into the world. We cling to our woundedness for in it is a safety about not growing up and having to be responsible for and own our actions. We unconsciously search for ways to heal these wounds, the things that were done wrong to us, and which we hold because there seems to be little recompense for the original action. So we carry them over and project them out into other situations, not realizing they have nothing to do with the first wound and that we are the ones creating the projection, that the unhealed problem actually lies within us. Assumptions about what really occurred show where inner biases may still be keeping us hostage. This was Freud's observation concerning "transference." One will persevere in old habitual behaviors and place the blame externally on the projected object, as responses to the new situation with outdated methods can not change until we become aware of this.
What is it that causes personas to stick to people with tenacity? In part it is identification and sheer familiarity. A persona becomes identified with one's personality. It offers a psycho-social identity. But shame is also a fundamental motivator. The persona protects one from shame, and the avoidance of shame is probably the strongest motive for developing and holding on to a persona. Ruth Benedict's writings on shame and guilt cultures showed that western nations are characteristically guilt cultures and eastern countries are by contrast shame cultures. Shame cultures emphasize persona more than do guilt cultures, in the sense that if one loses face one might as well die. Loss of face is the ultimate crisis. The situation is quite different in guilt cultures where guilt can be assuaged or redressed: the guilty person can pay the price for their behaviours' actions and be restored to community.
Guilt involves an indiscreet action that counteracts against principles, whereas shame wipes out one's whole sense of self-worth. Guilt revolves around something we did; shame something gross we are. Shame is a more primitive, and potentially a more destructive kind of emotion. We tend to feel either guilty about or profoundly ashamed of the things we do that are at odds with the adopted persona. This is the realization of shadow in the personality. Shadow induces shame, a sense of unworthiness, a feeling of uncleanness, of being soiled and unwanted. To be well-trained is to be proud; to soil oneself is shameful. Nature has been conquered by the toilet-trained ego. Such experiences of shame include anything that does not fit into the way we were trained: to be a good person, the right kind of person, to fit in, to be accepted. Another shadow feature is aggression, for feeling aggressive, hateful, or envious are shaming emotions.
These normal human reactions tend to be hidden away; we are embarrassed by them, in the same way that we are ashamed of certain physical or character flaws that we see in ourselves. We cover our tracks to save face, rationalize what we did. The persona is the face we put on to meet the other faces, to be like them and to be liked by them. It's a hard road to walk one's truth, for being all that we can be often means being exceedingly different and that usually is not well received from the general social community, those that are not doing so - it presents a not taken up dare for them. Yet, we do not want to be too different, for our points of difference, where the persona ends and the shadow begins, make us ashamed or we let guilt and apologies grow for embarrassing others by doing more than them.
The shadow and persona are a classic pair of opposites, standing in the psyche as polarities of the ego. Since the overall task of psychological development is integration; and wholeness, healedness, awareness, enlightenment the supreme values, it can be asked: What does it mean to integrate persona and shadow, that which draws our lessons to us? Integration hinges on self-acceptance, on fully accepting those parts of oneself that do not belong in the persona image, which is itself usually an image of an ideal or at least of a cultural norm. The personal aspects of which one is ashamed are often felt to be radically evil even though that usually is not the case. It is only felt to be so because of the shame attached to it due to its nonconformity with the persona. What is it like when somebody has achieved a measure of integration between persona and shadow? A quote from a letter of a former patient of Jung's:
"Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality - taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be - by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and in this way also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I felt it ought to!"
This woman has stepped back both from the persona and from splitting persona and shadow into opposites, and she is now simply observing, reflecting on and accepting her psyche as it comes to her, then sorting, seeing what it was about, and making some choices. A psychological distance between the wounded ego complex and the persona, as well as between the ego and the shadow, has been created. She is no longer possessed on either end of the spectrum. She is living in the moment. Alan Oken corresponds this to placing ourselves in an external movie, detachedly and compassionately observing all playing the roles in the moment. Remember that we have the choice of being the next casting call director about whom we wish to have in our personal movie...Jung held that if the two poles are held in tension, a solution will appear if the ego can let go of both and create an inner vacuum in which the unconscious can offer a creative solution in the form of a new symbol. This symbol will present an option for movement ahead that will include something of both - not simply a compromise, but an amalgamation that calls forth a new attitude on the part of the ego and a new kind of relation to the world. This process can be observed as people develop both in therapy and through life experience - as they outgrow their former conflicts, assume new personas, and integrate formerly unacceptable parts of the self. Shadow roles and impulses are acted out, without the appearance of a transcendent function to bring about an integration of those opposites. In other cases, the ego is too unstable and weak to moderate impulsivity enough to allow for the taking place of the transcendent function, and the woundedness and dis-ease persists.
Mostly though, we should relish the hard times as opportunities for growth, for discerning what we further need to work on that holds us back from activating our inborn divine potential. The Chinese congi for crisis is a blending of both "risk" and "opportunity". What repeatedly occurs about you as a message about a growing edge, people attacking you for speaking too non-conformist a truth, or asking boundaries to be honoured by dysfunction-beset others, or climbing back in a pity pot instead of seeking for what may be done? Think of what it is that scares one so about becoming all you can be, or how you tear down others already succeeding somewhere you internally wish for. They hold mirrors up in reverse transference for you to view the greatness that you too can actualize.
