Author Topic: center  (Read 5595 times)

Sealchan

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center
« on: July 23, 2007, 04:55:34 PM »
One important concept in many contexts is the idea of the center.  Often the center of something is taken to be the most significant point with respect to the location of that thing.  We have the idea of the center of gravity as a point, which if all an object's mass were concentrated there, the object would still retain much of its physical properties. 

It has been supposed by Daniel Dennett that our idea of self is equivalent in many ways with the idea of a center of gravity.  Perhaps the self (ego for Jungians) is the center of narrative gravity as Dennett suggests.  What is gained by saying this?  In an intuitive sense when you focus on the center of something you are coming to a simpler, and therefore less energic, view of something.  This is the value of the idea of center of gravity in physics.  One can largely ignore the shape of an object in many physical situations and consider the object only as a point in space with certain other characteristics rather than an more or less irregular blob, which is what it really is.

In the economy of psyche, it could be surmised that a similar benefit exists in seeing the self as a center.  Countless mandala have been created which feature a constellation of images arranged all around a center.  Typically the center is vacant of an independent image.  I suspect that it is more often the case that items in the center of spaces in dreams or images are, upon closer inspection, always displaced in some sense.  (Here is an invitation for evidence in contradiction of a definition if there ever was one).

The center is an organizing principle of an abstract character.  Both the ego and the Self in Jungian terminology are considered psychic centers.  The ego is the center of consciousness while the Self is the center of the whole psyche.  In the process of relativization, the center becomes blurred.  Also, the idea of ego or Self as a singular character is both upheld and contradicted in dreams and myths in that the ego may stand alone against an unconscious in the early stages of conscious development (or in "low res" views of psyche (not to be confused with "low quality" views)) but more and more the ego is seen as part of a continuum between characters with whom one identifies and characters with whom one does not identify.

The granularity of the ego I have referred to as the ego-team.  The psyche is a wide, wide field of grass where each blade may give rise to a potential center of ego consciousness.  Other "personality centers" as I have called them arise around other centers.  One's conscious perspective can shift from ego to anima and possibly to shadow and, perhaps, a range of other ego-team members that define some middle ground.

Maria

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Re: center
« Reply #1 on: August 03, 2007, 06:06:08 AM »
(So we have two centers, the ego and the Self, which are relatively aware of each other... As I was reading you, I had an image the Self being pregnant with the ego who is pregnant with the Self. this sort of rhymes to mandalas... but also, about a year or more ago, I had a dream in which I was at a forest stream, and I saw two suns rise side by side each other...

just musing

love,

Maria)
"Thou speak'st aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night."

(Puck)

Sealchan

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Re: center
« Reply #2 on: April 28, 2011, 12:16:22 PM »
I find that the limit to any definition of a motif is that containership relationships are always reversable.  So I think your statement...

Quote
As I was reading you, I had an image the Self being pregnant with the ego who is pregnant with the Self.

...rings true...ego and Self co-create each other.  In fact, I suspect that Self is more like the sum of all ego-personality-centers, rather than a truly separate system.  The ego centers on one personality center or another but the long term trend is that there is a more constant center and that, when we intimate it, is the Self.  But just as there is no central control room in the psyche, there is no Self-center in fact.  This is always a symbolic reference to an unrealized ideal.