As long as we continue to relate to our problems from a purely personalistic, or reductive perspective (reducing the cause of our problems to a past historical event), we will be endlessly cycling and infinitely regressing, trying to empty out a pot of water which has no bottom. It is only when we recognize that we are playing an active role in what Jung would call a "divine drama," that we access the healing waters of the unconscious. 

This is a key moment, as our particular life situation with all of its unique problems, is seen to be a lower level reflection of a higher dimensional reality, which we've found ourselves drafted into. Our personal process is seen to be the perfect doorway into a deeper, archetypal, mythological, eternal realm, where we realize we are playing a role in a deeper dream. Jung, commenting on this moment, says, "It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on my life belonged to the generality." 

We begin to realize that the ego, with all of its problems, did not create itself, but is itself a creation, or a dream, of something deeper. This is the moment where we are beginning to break the spell we have been under, as we are snapping out of the trance of identifying ourselves with an arbitrary, fixed and limited reference point called the separate self, which experiences itself in opposition to the rest of the universe. We are beginning to experience a radical shift in our sense of identity itself, one in which we are not separate from, but on the contrary, connected to, the whole universe. We are waking up and becoming lucid in the waking dream called life. 

We've stepped through the looking glass and entered a totally magical, symbolic and synchronistic universe, where there is a fluid boundary between the inner and the outer; there is a spontaneous mirroring between the goings on inside of our psyche and what is happening in the seemingly outer universe. 

We begin to have the astonishing realization that we have become the very vehicle through which, what Jung calls the Self, and what I would like to call the Godessence, is incarnating and becoming conscious of itself. This is Jung's great insight, and this is exactly what he meant when he describes the individuation process as the incarnation of the Self. This is the magnum opus of alchemy, where the ego becomes deified, and the Self humanized, as the Self and the ego mutually redeem each other. This is what Jung means when he says, "Man is no more an end in himself, but becomes an instrument of God, and this is really so."

For more articles about dreaming, see www.communityconnexion.com/levy