In the end a person must lose that which is most precious, that to which one's whole life has been devoted. The treasure is consciousness; it is the ego's final sacrifice to the Self. This sacrifice must be offered before the ultimate moment when the individual merges with the unconscious and stands before God.

The work of a lifetime, the process of individuation, is widening of that spotlight so much that everything is illuminated and you are conscious of and can see your All.

Jung called this process I'm describing individualism, becoming an individual, a real person not continually swept away by his passions of influenced by his culture. Each person has a unique opus, a soul work, because each has a particular makeup and history. For Jung the opus was a process of getting to know yourself deeply, not only a psychological process of painful advance in self-knowledge; but a religious initiation involving spiritual ideals and the search for meaning.

She was my mother. Never before this had I looked at her and thought of her as someone separate, as someone else. Now, so near to her that I could smell the subtle scent of her perfume and see the clear, faint texture of her skin, I realized for the first time that I was looking at another human being who was complete within herself. She was my mother, but she was more than just a loving and convenient extension of me and my needs.

The paradox of individuation is that we best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.

Many marriages dry up and miss the path to individuation because the couples try to ease their situations through excluding and representing their most essential characteristics, whether these be peculiar sexual wishes, neurotic traits, or whatever. The more one confronts everything, the more interesting and fruitful becomes the path to individution.

The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes provided an exposition of the collective, suprapersonal, absolute unconscious—these terms being used interchangeably. Jung argued that one needed to separate oneself from the unconscious by presenting it visibly as something separate from one. It was vital to differentiate the I from the non-I, namely, the collective psyche or absolute unconscious.

He was no marionette after all, but an autonomous individual in a staged performance; a production carefully arranged and assembled on his discrete behalf.And he, Mario Fantoccio, had been invited on-stage to perform.

No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself. No man is free who cannot command himself.

The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.