Dr. James Hollis

The sense of self is who I think I am.

In any given moment, that's very fluid, of course.

Now, we have all kinds of internal clusters of energy.

They are called complexes, a term that Jung popularized.

And complexes are splinter personalities, he said.

So a person might say, why did I get so upset yesterday?

What came over me?

Or I don't know what I was thinking when I made this important decision.

And that's our recognition that we were in an altered state at that moment, that something within us had been triggered, had sufficient energy to come up, usurp ego consciousness and take it over.

Actually, the term that Jung used in German meant possession.

It's a state of psychic possession temporarily.

We joke that lovers are fools or lovers are blind.

So we know that people are in a certain, they're caught in a certain projection onto the other.

And that ultimately gets resolved into some sort of reality through time and experience with that individual.

But in that state of being, one senses that one's making the right decision.

And no one wakes in the morning and says, for example, well, today I think I'm going to do the same stupid counterproductive things I've done for decades, but there's a good chance we will.

Why?

Because we have certain clusters of energy in us that are regularly triggered.

When triggered, they catalyze a response in the ego that enacts that program.

So it affects our body, it affects our script, and of course it affects our perception of self and world.