Society has a number of roles it needs us to play. We assume these roles just as an actor might slip into the different pieces of a costume. Society im- prints on us its ideals, a wardrobe of acceptable behavior. Jung calls these per- sonae. Persona is the Latin word for the mask worn by an actor on the stage.

Say you’re a teacher: when you’re at work, you put on a teacher mask-you are a Teacher. Suppose you go home and think you’re still a Teacher, not just a fellow who teaches. Who would want to be around you?

Sometimes, in high school dramatics, some poor kid plays the role of Hamlet, and his aunt tells him he did it wonderfully. Well, he’s Hamlet from then on. He’s identified himself with the role.

There are other people who find that they have become, to their own amazement perhaps, executives. They are executives at the office. They are executives when they are at home. They are executives when they go to bed-which is disappointing to their spouses.

The mask has to be left in the wardrobe, in the green room, as it were. You’ve got to know what play you’re in at any one time. You’ve got to be able to separate your sense of yourself-your ego-from the self you show the rest of the world-your persona.

You find this first big tension within the psyche between the dark inner potential of the self’s unconscious portions on the one hand and the per- sona system on the other. The ego learns about the outside and inside and tries to reconcile them.

Now, one of the great dangers, from Jung’s standpoint, is to identify yourself with your persona. In dramatic contrast to the aim of education in the Orient, Jung declares the ego must distinguish itself from its role.

This is a concept that does not exist in the East. As Freud put it, the ego is that function which puts you in touch with the empirical actualities of the world in which you live; it is the reality function. And it’s from de- veloping ego that you develop your own value system. Your judgments, your critical faculties, and so forth are functions of your ego. In the Orient, the individual is asked not to develop his critical faculties, not to observe the world in a new way, but to accept without question the teaching of his guru and to assume the mask that the society puts on him. This is the funda- mental law of karmic birth. You are born into exactly that role which is proper to you. The society will give you the mask to wear. You are to iden- tify with it completely, canceling out every creative thought.

In traditional India, China, or Japan, you are your role. The secret is embody that role perfectly, whether mendicant monk as a or a grieving to widow throwing herself on the pyre. You are to become sati.

What Jung says is that you should play your role, knowing that it’s not you. It’s a quite different point of view. This requires individuation, sepa- rating your ego, your image of yourself, from the social role. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t play the social role; it simply means that no mat- ter what you choose to do in life, whether it’s to cop out or to cop in, you are playing a role, and don’t take it too damned seriously. The persona is merely the mask you’re wearing for this game.

The people who know best how to change roles are Occidental women. They dress in a different costume and step into a transformed personality. My wife, who is a dancer, is a past master at this. She’s much inclined to be very cold when it’s snowy. But when she dresses with almost nothing on and goes out in the middle of the winter to a party, she does not shiver at all. She is completely there; her whole personality has put itself into the role and voilà.

It goes even further than this, because the whole persona complex in- cludes your moral principles. Ethics and social mores are internalized as part of the persona order, and Jung tells us that you must take that lightly, too. Just remember, Adam and Eve fell when they learned the difference between good and evil. So the way to get back is not to know the differ- ence. That’s an obvious lesson, but it’s not one that’s very clearly preached from pulpits. Yet Christ told his disciples, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”36 You judge according to your persona context, and you will be judged in terms of it. Unless you can learn to look beyond the local dic- tates of what is right and what is wrong, you’re not a complete human

being. You’re just a part of that particular social order. So, here we have the self with all the potentialities. You have a grow- ing ego consciousness with which you identify yourself, and this is devel- oping in relation to the costumes you have to put on, the personae. It’s good to have a lot of costumes, so long as each costume fits your science. The moral order is part of your persona.