There are four kinds of crisis that can bring about a very serious enantiodromia.

One is that you have passed from one life stage to another and you didn’t know it-the late-middle-aged gentleman who’s obsessed about his golf score and has not moved into the phase of the later half of life.

Jung says life is like the day of a solar journey.

The first part of it is up  moving from birth to the society. And the second part of it is down, moving from participation in the world and the society to death. And whereas the threat of the first half of life was life, the threat of the second half is death, and all the symbols are changing meaning.

Through the remaining part of life, Jung says, the great problem is integrating the inferior with the superior functions. That’s the great task of your later years. So let’s just think of the imagery of the union of opposites. The same symbol that for an extrovert will have sexual content, for an introvert will resonate with battle. Once one begins to reach individuation and integration, one finds the conjunction of those two aspects of one’s own psyche.

The crisis of passing from one life stage to another without being ready to move on arrests this process. This is the difficulty for the forty-year-old infant and for the sixty-year-old who thinks he is still thirty-five. Life brought you up to the solar apex, then it began to curve-and you think you’re still up at the peak? Oh, no, boy. You’re way down here. And what a drop you’re going to have. Much better to know when you’ve started down and enjoy the ride; there are nice things down here, too.

The second kind of crisis is a relaxation of life requirements. You worked like hell to become the shoelace czar of the universe. You own every shoelace factory in the world. And now, at the age of forty-odd, you don’t have to put that energy into it anymore. The thing’s going all by itself, and you’ve got secretaries who are not only taking the job in hand but also looking a little better to you than you thought little girls should look, and suddenly there’s a lot of distraction. You have all of this disposable libido. And where does it go?

The eros-oriented extrovert turns around and suddenly becomes a power monster. Good old Uncle Harry, the shoelace king, the introverted power man, becomes an old lecher that kind of thing. But the tragedy about this crisis is the deep sense that it’s all too late. Nothing is as it should be, and it’s because you’re doing the wrong thing.

Another kind of crisis is the loss of confidence in your moral ideals; this form of enantiodromia is something that one finds often among young people in college. The young person is living with a roommate who comes from another order of society altogether, either the poor person who’s living with the wealthy or the wealthy with the poor, or the Christian with the atheist, or the Jew with the Buddhist. You find out that here is a perfectly decent person also. It’s not that the other person that getting to seduces you into sin; it’s know them makes you question your own moral principles. And since those moral principles-the persona complex-are holding your ego in place, when they relax all the rest comes out. There’s the threat of the allure of becoming a terrible person: what I call the knock knock of the shadow from underneath. That’s your own dark person talking. You might also get what I call the twinkle twinkle of the anima/animus: come, little boy, it’s interesting around the corner. You’ve never seen girls like this.

Well, says Jung, let it come. Let it go. But don’t do it with such aban- don that your ego is entirely shattered. Imagine one of my college students. She’s had her first few classes in a sociology course, and she discovers that her father’s fortune is built on blood and bones. She goes home for the Thanksgiving dinner, and the family wonders what has happened. The student begins coming to her conferences and classes looking like a wreck. She lets her hair go. She has gone over to the other side. She has tipped over. It’s enantiodromia. She has assumed partisanship for the opposite side- she’s waving the banner of the downtrodden proletariat. And that’s just as extreme as being on the side she was on before, in blissful ignorance.

Well, it’s not a bad thing to happen, because you do get to experience all that’s over on the other side. It’s just like the underside of the rug com- ing up. In fact, my students sometimes looked a bit like the underside of a rug. And it’s good to have a thing like that happen in an institution like a college, where you can somewhat protect the person, because the idea is, eventually, to integrate the two halves.

Now, there’s one other crisis, and this is a very serious challenge: the intolerable decision where you really have to do something that you regard as immoral, beneath your dignity, something you’re totally ashamed of. The great example, of course, is Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. The voice of God invited him to kill his son, and he faced an impossible decision. He was forced either to disobey what he took to be God or to kill his son. If he didn’t sacrifice Isaac, he would have disobeyed God, and if he did kill Isaac, he would have violated the first principle of human decency. Fathers should not kill their sons.

Well, this is an intolerable decision. And intolerable decisions may meet you. I had friends during the Depression who had families and no jobs; they had to do some things that they would not, as people in charge of their own lives, have wished to do for the maintenance of their families. These are the sorts of things that bust up your ego and bring up the whole content of the unconscious.

Now the problem of individuation for Jung, the challenge of the

middle-life crisis, lies in cutting these projections loose. When you realize that moral ideals-the moral life to which you are supposed to be com- mitted-are embodied in the persona, you realize the depth and threat of this psychology. You are to put your morals on and take them off accord- ing to propriety, the propriety of the moment; you are not to identify these morals with cosmic truths. The laws of society, therefore, are social con- ventions, not eternal laws, and they are to be handled and judged in terms of their appropriateness to what they are intended to do. The individual makes his own judgment as to how he acts. Then he has to look out to be sure that the guardians of the social order do not misunderstand or make things difficult for him because he is not totally playing their game. But the main problem of integration is to find relationships to the outside world and to live a rich life in full play.

In effect, the individual must learn to live by his or her own myth.

Now, down in the subconscious is an “I want” machine that Freud calls the id. The id is what you’re born with. When you’re just born, the id within you doesn’t know the date. It doesn’t know whether it is the period of the ordination caves in the early Neolithic or the height of the modern age; it doesn’t know whether you’re born in Timbuktu or Washington, D.C. All it knows is that you are a human animal and that you have human needs. In other words, it is sheer organism, wanting something.

The environment says, “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” This interplay is the wish-prohibition conflict we talked about earlier. So you begin to take a lot of “I mustn’ts” down into the unconscious; the society’s “I mustn’t” coun- ters the id’s “I want.” What Freud calls the superego provides the stream of “I mustn’ts.” The superego is the internalization of the parental, societal voice, balancing out the id by saying, “Don’t do this, do that.”

According to Freud, ego is the function that relates the individual to reality. Reality in this terminology is nothing metaphysical whatsoever. It is empirical reality: what is here around you now, what you are doing, what your size is, what your age is, what people say to you and about you. Ego is a function that relates you to reality in terms of your personal judgment-not the judgments that you have been taught to make but the judgments that you do make.

You can judge a situation in terms of how you know you ought to judge it, and then you realize, I don’t think of it that way at all. You may consistently differ from the judgment system that your environment has given you. Only if you have made the transition to adult responsibility are you able to make your own judgments and let society’s judgments drop. Of course, if you are not really detached, they’re not going to drop; they will keep drumming back at you with feelings of guilt.

Traditional cultures in the West differ here from those in the Orient. Oriental religious instruction tells one to cancel ego. In this tradition, one is told to behave in terms of the societal ideal dictated by the superego. There is no systematic development of the ego in relationship to reality or the individual situation. Often, in conversation with someone from the Orient, if you ask a question having to do with now, the response is a deluge of all of the clichéd answers you can imagine. It is very, very difficult to get a reality judgment in terms of the immediate situation. Since the ego is not devel- oped in the Oriental traditions, you don’t get the same kind of response that we would expect in the West, with the individual taking responsibil- ity for his own judgment, his own discernment.

Well, let me give now as an illustration of the very formal attitude, the classical Indian social structure. I’d like to look at the classic notion of individual life and its development.

Of course, there are four castes or classes. In India, the four castes are the brahmin, the ksatriya, the vaiśya, and the śūdra.

Brahmin means “related to or in touch with brahman,” the cosmic power. Brahman is a genderless noun for the power that infuses and suffuses the whole world. The brahmin is the one who knows that and tells the truth about it and interprets and writes the holy books. The brahmin is the head of the social order.

The ksatriya is the one who administers the true law. He administers what the brahmin tells him to administer; this is the ideal, at any rate. The ksatriya is the sword-bearing arm of the order.

The vaisya is the citizen or merchant. The word comes from the root vis, which means “neighbor.” He is the man of money, the property owner, the landowner, the employer, and so forth. He pays his taxes, he pays his tithes, and he employs the sudras. He’s the body of the society, the guts.

The sudra is the servant, who is excluded from the religious order. He has his own religious teachers and village priests and so forth, but the Vedic and traditional Hindu Brahminical order concerns the upper three castes only; these upper three castes are called the twice born. The śūdra is the legs of the outfit, carrying the rest of the society along.

Now the goal, as I’ve said, of the Oriental society is always to cancel ego, that ego should be wiped out. The śūdra cancels ego by doing what he is told. The vaiśya cancels ego by serving, by doing as he is told, by paying his debts and bringing his family up; his goal is to make money. The ksatriya serves by administering the law with justice, without prejudice, and without favoring himself. He’s supposed to represent the perfect administration of the law. The brahmin is to know the law.

This system has excluded the majority of the people, who are called the outcasts. In a census recently made of a Bengali village community, it was found that more than half of the people were outcasts; they are simply out. The only way they come in is in extremely menial and untouchable social functions. Otherwise, they have villages of their own, living, as it were, lives outside of the domain of the holy order.

The sūdras are the craftsmen and the peasants and so forth who function within the society. Of the remaining half of that village, so percent were sudras, so that the group served by the outcasts was actually this peas- ant class. And you realize the fierceness of these divisions when you read one of the texts in the Manava-Dharmaśāstra, the “Laws of Manu.” It says if a sudra heats a recitation of a verse of the Vedas-even by accident he shall have boiling lead poured into his ears.

The aesthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he calls pornography. Nor does the aesthetic experience move you to criticize and reject the object-such art he calls didactic, or social criticism in art. The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. Joyce says that you put a frame around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing, you then become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts. This is the essential, aesthetic factor-rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany. And that is what might in religious terms be thought of as the all-informing Christ principle coming through.

The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony of being .

The aesthetic experience transcends the ethics and didactics.

“It is my belief that there is a very strong movement today to find – or at least for the individual to find in himself – that center, that centered and centering Eye. And perhaps if enough people discover it in themselves, it may be put to work in the government as well. But unless there are people who have come to the realization in themselves of the point at the center, beyond pairs of opposites, and the way of thinking in such terms, the principle of evenhandedness is not going to operate in public life. It has to be found first in private life. I would say that whatever is about to occur in the way of transformation of consciousness will have had to have occurred, first, in the hearts of individual human beings, who will then have had – as a result of their very presence – an influence in the larger community.”