Self knowlegde

Carl Jung has stated that most people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities, so that anyone with any ego at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. Actually, he knows only the ego and its contents and seldom has little if any knowledge of the vast and shadowy areas of the subconscious from whence all the impulsions and compulsions that form his active life spring. No man is free who feels that his motivations originate in his conscious ego personality. He is moved about in life like a puppet by the subconscious, and all his elaborate reasoning’s and painful arrivals at conscious perception are made after the fact of his commitment to certain ideas and actions, never before. Between the surface self and the Secret Self lies an opaque wall, impenetrable to the gaze of the ego and yielding its secrets only to one who has expanded his consciousness beyond the limits of his conscious mind. The materialist who prides himself on never accepting anything but a proven physical fact has merely accepted blindness as a condition of his being, and what he thinks is freedom is simply servitude of the highest degree.

Turning ones back on the subconscious does not obliterate it. The individual is sprung into being not by an effort of self, but comes performed by something other than the ego that fronts his consciousness

during life. The question is, who is the true resident within, the ego that grows from experience, or the life force that animates from the beginning? Reflection leads us inescapably to the conclusion that the true person within is the hidden dweller in all things, that the ego is only a mask donned by this out for its secret delight. The constant search of the psyche of man, as long as it confines itself to the ego and the surface nature, must continue to be fruitless, for it concerns itself with a wraith.

To truly know man, his actual nature, origin, purpose, destiny, the deeper regions of consciousness must be probed. These are all subconscient, make up the vast, jumbled, tremendously powerful, even frightening mental area below consciousness. Who knows what things are possible to this area of man’s being? Sigmund Freud, having exposed its awesome powers, is reported once to have confessed that he created the dogma of his sexual theory of human behavior because some powerful bulwark of reason was needed against the black flood of occultism that might spring from the subconscious. Yet it is just that occultism, just that black flood that most needs to be studied, for the Secret Self lies there.