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.

You should find a way to realize your shadow in your life somehow. Next comes the problem of gender. Every man has to be a manly man, and all of the things that society doesn’t allow him to develop he attributes to the feminine side. These parts of himself he represses in his unconscious. This is the counterplayer to the persona. They become what Jung calls the anima: the female ideal in the masculine unconscious.

Likewise, the woman carries the animus in her unconscious: the male aspect in herself. She’s a woman, and the society gives her certain things to do. All that is in her that she has associated with the masculine mode of life is repressed within the animus. The interesting thing is that-biologically and psychologically-we
have both sexes in us; yet in all human societies, one is allowed to accent
only one. The other is internalized within us. Furthermore, our imagery and notions of the other are functions of our biography. This biography includes two aspects. One is general to the human species: nearly everybody has a mother and a father. The other aspect is peculiar to yourself: that your mother should have been as she was and your father as he was. There is a specification of the male and female roles as experienced, and this has com- mitted, has determined, the quality of our experience of these great, great bases which everyone experiences. Everyone experiences  Mother, everyone experiences Father.

There’s a lot in you that’s neither being carried into this persona system nor into your ego, as part of what you perceive as “you.” Just opposite to the ego, buried in the unconscious, is what Jung calls the shadow. Now, society will give you a role to play, and this means that you’ve got to cut out of your life many of the things that you, as a person, might think or do. These potentials get shunted down into the unconscious. Your society tells you, “You should do this, you should do that”; but it also says, “You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do the other thing.” Those things you’d like to do, which are really not very nice things to want to do, those get placed down in the unconscious, too. This is the center of the personal unconscious.

The shadow is, so to say, the blind spot in your nature. It’s that which you won’t look at about yourself. This is the counterpart exactly of the Freudian unconscious, the repressed recollections as well as the repressed potentialities in you.

The shadow is that which you might have been had you been born on the other side of the tracks: the other person, the other you. It is made up of the desires and ideas within you that you are repressing-all of the introjected id. The shadow is the landfill of the self. Yet it is also a sort of vault: it holds great, unrealized potentialities within you.

The nature of your shadow is a function of the nature of your ego. It is the backside of your light side. In the myths, the shadow is represented as the monster that has to be overcome, the dragon. It is the dark thing that comes up from the abyss and confronts you the minute you begin moving down into the unconscious. It is the thing that scares you so that you don’t want to go down there. It knocks from below. Who’s that down there? Who’s that up there? This is all very, very mysterious and frightening.

If your personal role is too thin, too narrow-if you’ve buried too much of yourself within your shadow-you’re going to dry up. Most of your energies are not available to you. A lot can get gathered there in the depths. And eventually, enantiodromia is going to hit, and that unrecognized, unheeded demon is going to come roaring up into the light.

The shadow is the part of you that you don’t know is there. Your friends see it, however, and it’s also why some people don’t like you. The shadow is you as you might have been; it is that aspect of you which might have been if you had allowed yourself to fulfill your unacceptable potential. Society, of course, does not recognize these aspects of your potential self. You are not recognizing these aspects of yourself either; you don’t know that they’re there or that you have repressed them. If you think of the self as a great circle with a center, and you think of consciousness as well above that center, then the ego is up in the center of consciousness, and the shadow would be way down opposite in the deep unconscious. The shadow is interred down there for a reason; it is that aspect of yourself that your ego doesn’t know about, which you bury because it doesn’t fit how you perceive yourself to be. The shadow is that part of you that you won’t allow to show through, that includes good-I mean potent as well as dangerous and disastrous aspects of your potential.

रौशनी के डर से, मैं रातभर जागा हूँ!
ख़ुद की परछाइयों से, मैं ताउम्र भागा हूँ।

“People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that what they love is true.” -Robert J. Ringer

We have also seen that religious imagery serves certain functions in mythic systems: to present the sense of awe and mystery before the fact of the universe of being; to give an image of the universe itself, which is that of the mathematical order of the cosmos, the sun and moon in their cycles, the year and its cycles, the eon and its cycles; to relate the society to those cycles; and to relate the individual to society, that cosmos, and that mys- tery. These are the functions of the mythology, and, if they are successful, you get a sense of everything-yourself, your society, the universe, and the mystery beyond-as one great unit.

The ultimate truth, the ultimate mystery of life and being, is absolutely transcendent. One cannot define the absolute. One cannot picture it. One cannot name it. Nevertheless, that which is absolute being an absolute mystery is also one’s own inner reality: one is that. The absolute is both transcendent and immanent; that is to say, both beyond the unive of the senses and within each particle of that universe. All that can be said about it is… nothing. All that can be said points to it. Therefore, the sym bols, the rites, the rituals, and the acts are involved in a world of human experience but point past themselves to that transcendent, immanent force; the rites and symbols lead one to the realization of one’s identity with that absolute. Identity with the transcendent is one’s essence; consequently, in Eastern philosophy, the mere accident of the ego, of the personality, is quite secondary.

Over in the Occident, there is a totally different idea. It came in around 2500 B.C., with the Semitic empires of Sargon and Hammurabi. The idea, which we still adhere to, is that God makes man. God is not man, and man is not of the same substance as God: they are ontologically. fundamentally different.

Consequently, all of the symbols have to do with relationships. You don’t get that in the Oriental system. There, the gods-just like man-are simply manifestations of the greater order. That order is there, preexisting the gods themselves. In India, this order is called dharma; in China, it is called the Tao. In early Greece, it was called moira; in early Mesopotamia, it was called me. This cosmic order is mathematical and unalterable; not even a deity can initiate change. God and man are simply functionaries of that order. To become a responsible citizen, you must learn your job perfectly.