{"id":151990,"date":"2016-01-11T18:21:14","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T16:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/espirited.com\/inflation-of-the-ego\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T15:22:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T13:22:52","slug":"ego-inflation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/espirited.com\/en\/ego-inflation\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cEgo Inflation\u201d and the Dangers on the Path of Individuation"},"content":{"rendered":"

“To activate the unconscious means to awaken the divine, the devi, Kundalini<\/i><\/span>\u00a0\u2013 to begin the development of the suprapersonal within the individual in order to kindle the light of the gods.Kundalini, which is to be awakened in the sleeping Muladhara world, is the suprapersonal, the non-ego,\u2026 For this reason Kundalini is the same principal as the Soter, the Savior Serpent of the Gnostics.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

C.G. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Lecture 4<\/em><\/p>\n

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The collective unconscious<\/h2>\n

We owe the recognition of the enormous importance of the unconscious in the psychic life of man to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. However, the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, went even deeper. Beyond the personal unconscious, he says, there is a world that is vast and fantastic. This is the world of the objective psyche – the ‘collective unconscious’. Its roots go back to eternity and infinity, where time and space do not exist. It is also the world of archetypes – those primal images and ideas that are not personal, but shape the psyche of each person. Under certain circumstances they can reach human consciousness in the form of mystical visions or shattering experiences ranging from ecstasy to agony, from unearthly bliss to the feeling of being buried alive underground.<\/p>\n

Jung knew from personal experience what the infinite depth and power of the collective psyche looks like. It is in proving it, knowing it, and interacting properly with “its contents” that his most important scientific contribution lies. And the encounter with these contents is at once a great danger and a blessing. A blessing because it bestows the experience of the immortal part within us and the ignition of the divine spark in our heart. A danger because our little self may identify with them and think it is a god, or, at the very least, god-chosen. Jung called this danger “ego inflation,” and in the modern classification of mental disorders (DSM-IV) it is seen as “mystical experience with psychotic features” (in the new diagnostic category “Religious or Spiritual Problem” added in 1994 by Dr. David Lukoff<\/a>).<\/p>\n

It is the reason I want to present what “ego inflation” is. When one is warned, one can avoid the danger and turn it into a blessing. He will be able to navigate the primordial ocean of images and powerful experiences, but without the threat of having the small boat of his self capsized by strong waves.<\/p>\n

What is “Ego Inflation”<\/h2>\n

The shortest definition of ego inflation is the identification of the conscious self with contents of the world of the collective unconscious (Jung). And what the “collective unconscious” is has already been made clear. Each of these words refers to it: ‘objective psyche’, ‘superhuman’, ‘gods’, ‘archetypes’, ‘transpersonal’, ‘superpersonal’, ‘primordial images’, ‘prima materia’ (in alchemy), ‘pleroma’ (in Gnosticism), ‘kundalini’ (in yoga). Its contents are felt as a powerful rush of energy, of images and dreams, of visions and ideas, of strong inspiration and the feeling of being special and having a mission. But they also appear in the opposite way – through the feeling that you are extremely insignificant, extremely inferior and unworthy, intensely unhappy, empty, lonely, disconnected from the world and meaningless, without energy and desire for life, inhumanly irritable and equally inhumanly frightened.<\/p>\n

When one is in the heightened state of this condition it is difficult for him to realize that he has a problem. The collective unconscious has lifted him up and he feels winged. The problem comes when the pendulum starts swinging in the opposite direction and he falls back to earth with a thud. This is the problem of encountering archetypes – they manifest in matter as duality. When they “enter” the human body, they “split” into two opposite parts that alternate in time.<\/p>\n

Madness comes when a person identifies with experiences from the deeper layers of his personality. He vacillates between the opposite states without questioning the “truth” his mind is presenting to him at that moment. When he is at the pole of mania and ecstasy, he does not remember that so many times he has been in agony, at the bottom in hell. And when he is in hell, he forgets about his experiences of heaven, where he has also been many times. It is only when he starts remembering that the inner center is born – the point that holds the pendulum, but is not the pendulum itself.<\/p>\n

It becomes clear why in cases of encounter with contents from the collective layers of the psyche it is critical to develop the inner observer and non-identification. It is the only guarantor of not going to the extremes of madness, for which the words of Tadeusz Golas are particularly appropriate: ‘When you observe the lake, it does not get wet in your head… Awareness of madness is not madness.’<\/p>\n

The problem is that if we do not know about the existence of the supra-individual layers in the human psyche, we cannot avoid the danger of identification with them. The experience is so personal, and it won’t even occur to us that it is not just ours, but comes from the deeper, collective unconscious.This is the direct path to obsession with the contents of the objective psyche – the idea that the experience in question is PERSONALLY about you, that YOU caused it, that it is YOUR personal failure if you cannot subdue it to your personal will, and that IT WILL CONTINUE FOREVER. But it doesn’t.<\/p>\n

Those who have read Eckhart Tolle’s books and know the description of the “dense pain body<\/a>” have another example of what this phenomenon looks like from the world of the superhuman. It invades from within our own psyche so real and so personal. At the same time, it is so strong that it is a real ordeal to endure.\u00a0Tolle, who had suffered from suicidal depression for many years, was only able to dissociate himself from identification after being struck by the insight that there were two people inside him in a moment of extreme inner tension. He thought that if he could not bear himself, then there were two of them and therefore one of them was false. At that moment, the “peeling off” happened.<\/p>\n

However, others do not have the strength to withstand the pressure and commit suicide. This is why it is so important that one is cautioned not to identify with experiences from the world of the inhuman. Then they will not destroy him. They will kill his false self and the desire to identify only with the bright side of God-the-Sun, but they will not take away his life. They will destroy his false pretensions, but they will not devastate his soul. They may separate him from the things he loves and is connected to, but they will not separate him from the love that is beyond duality and the swing between opposite states.<\/p>\n

We used to associate inflation with grandomania (the manic pole of the pendulum), but in reality it equally encompasses its depressive end. Sometimes the latter is called “deflation of the ego,” but the principle is the same: instead of differentiation, we have fusion; instead of diminution of the self, we have inflation of the self.<\/p>\n

“My Kundalini”<\/h2>\n

I hope that it is now clear what “ego inflation” means and how such knowledge can protect one from being “torn apart by the wild beasts” that inhabit the dungeons of one’s own psyche. El Collie, for example, knew about ego inflation. In the last chapter of her book, Branded by the Spirit<\/a>, entitled “Help or Self-Injury,” there is an entire paragraph devoted to this topic. Nevertheless, she committed suicide. And any such suicide is the result of ego inflation – an unheard of “detachment” of identification with the super-personal. Then, instead of death and transformation of earthly identity, there is death of the body.<\/p>\n

After initiating the translation of her book, and subsequently finding out that the cause of her death was suicide, I became alarmed. Obviously something had broken her, and evidence of this had to be contained in her book, which I had not noticed until then. At that moment I felt my sense of duty and responsibility weighing heavily; I now knew I had to read her writing again very carefully, this time looking for the “evidence” of ego-inflation. And once I found them, to inform. If I wanted to turn lemons into lemonade, I needed to use the translation of the book in more ways than one – not only as a valuable source of information about what awakened kundalini looks like, but also as a warning about how to protect one’s life and soul when confronted with the forces of the unconscious.<\/p>\n

Ironically, I found the proof I was looking for of the “theft from the gods” in the last chapter, that is, before El Collie committed suicide. In it, she writes that her experiences of encountering the divine proved healing to her innate sense of inferiority. The problem is that healthy self-esteem rests on real accomplishments in the material world, not in superpersonal spiritual experiences. Even the slightest theft from the world of the supermundane, used for personal ends, is then punished. And there is nothing personal in this punishment. There just comes a point when the pendulum swings the other way and the archetype shows its other face. This is the moment when we thump the ground and realize that the upward flight did not come from the strength of our own wings. And therein lies the first warning – if you stole water from the sea when you were riding the crest of the wave, that same wave will submerge you when it starts to go down.<\/p>\n

We also find a contradiction when El Collie writes that she “surrendered to kundalini energy like a loving mother.” However, she cannot say the same loving attitude about the relationship with her own birth mother, which was very estranged. Two further cautions follow from this fact. One is that relationships with the collective unconscious are relationships of conscious choice, not of blind submission or surrender. One retains the right to choose even in the face of forces that repeatedly overwhelm one (this is the story of Job in the Old Testament). The other is that if one is not mentally healthy (no healthy ego-center, no healthy sense of inner worth, no healthy relationships with other people, including one’s parents) when the tidal waves of the cosmic mother ocean come, one will not be able to defend oneself against them. If the awakened kundalini initially looks like a loving mother, the time is not far off when it will show its other face.<\/p>\n

This is why Jung viewed the influx of Eastern spiritual practices into the West with suspicion. These practices may trigger spiritual experiences, but if one has not first developed a stable inner center, these experiences become psychoses. Moreover, spirituality, instead of being a means of solving the problems in our lives, becomes just the opposite-a means of escaping the demands of life.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, El Collie speaks of “seeing nothing spiritually incorrect in not pretending” that there is something special about you because you have had mystical experiences and vivid visions of the divine. According to her, “the mistake comes when the sense of specialness turns into a desire for homage from others.” I’m afraid that’s not the mistake. I believe that El Collie has fallen prey to the same “strange double message” that she herself writes about, namely that “the beginner should not take himself too seriously while secretly convinced of his advanced spiritual status.”<\/p>\n

One can want no homage from other people and at the same time feel special because of one’s spiritual experiences. So here is another warning: it is not important what attitude we expect from others; what will save our lives in the encounter with the unconscious is whether we ourselves have the right attitude toward our own experiences. The sense of specialness that draws strength from experiences in the world of the gods not only has nothing to do with mature forms of spirituality, but is also a “higher deviation” (Maslow). The best criterion of spiritual progress is ordinariness, not specialness.<\/p>\n

We can also judge of the inappropriately derived sense of intrinsic value and specialness from Elle Collie’s account of her encounter with a psychotherapist. She sought him out “to help her own process,” and he responded with “an exaggerated boredom that seemed designed to convey his indifference to the bright light of mystical experiences.” I also don’t think a display of exaggerated boredom is the best way to help the person who has sought your help. At the same time, I think that if he’s too elated that he’s finally found a reason to feel special in his mystical experiences, even the most glib explanation won’t do. It will be challenged and dismissed as misunderstanding by those who have not personally experienced “their bright light.”<\/p>\n

Examples of ego inflation are most clearly seen in what El Collie calls the awakening of the kundalini in his body. She writes, “when my kundalini began to awaken.” However, words like “my” are highly inappropriate in reference to the superpersonal “kundalini.” It is indeed ironic that the evidence of El Collie’s ego inflation is found in the very chapter in which she recounts her visit to a psychotherapist and we understand that she was aware of the dangers of ego inflation. For me, this is also the most valuable thing her experience can teach us. From it also comes the most important warning: even if we know about the dangers, even if we are informed about them, if there is a hidden attitude within us to compensate for our own inferiority through experiences of the world of the gods, nothing and no one outside will help us.<\/p>\n

“This is the Collective Unconscious”<\/h2>\n

I have a client who, after dealing with panic attacks, went on to have other experiences of awakened kundalini. This naindividual energy in her body would give her breaks from time to time, but then would push her into the deep waters again. She is the person who made me start reading books intensively about awakened kundalini – I didn’t understand her experiences, and I wanted to help her.<\/p>\n

At one of our meetings she told me that she went through a period of supreme ecstasy and bliss at night and inhuman irritability and short temper during the day. It was a very distressing experience which she managed to cope with on her own. One night after another wave of unearthly bliss came, she REMEMBERED to say to herself, “This is the collective unconscious.” The next morning her “inhuman” irritability had melted to “human proportions”.<\/p>\n

When she told me about how she handled this situation, I went into raptures. She had saved herself from irritability by refusing to identify with the experience of divinity! She had remembered to make the “unplugging” from the world of the gods the pleasant part of the pendulum, not the unpleasant part. To me, this is a prime example of how to free oneself from the grip of the unconscious.<\/p>\n

The other thing that stuck in my mind after our meeting was when she showed me her copy of Jung’s book, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga. The pages were riddled with underlining, exclamation points and notes in the margin. And that’s the other thing I want to pass on by sharing her experience – it’s not enough to know. What gives our lives true value is the personal effort to live what we know.<\/p>\n

Here are some of Jung’s thoughts that she had highlighted:<\/p>\n

“Now, if the yogin or the Western person succeeds in awakening Kundalini, what starts is not in any way a personal development, though of course an impersonal development can influence the personal status, as it does very often and very favorably. But it is not always so. What starts are the impersonal happenings with which you should not identify. If you do, you will soon feel obnoxious consequences \u2014 you will get an inflation, you will get all wrong. That is one of the great difficulties in experiencing the unconscious \u2014 that one identifies with it and becomes a fool. <\/em><\/p>\n

You must not identify with the unconscious; you must keep outside, detached, and observe objectively what happens. But you then see that all the events that happen in the impersonal, nonhuman order of things have the very disagreeable quality that they cling to us, or we cling to them. It is as if the Kundalini in its movement upward were pulling us up with it, as if we were part of that movement, particularly in the beginning.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is true that we are a part, because we are then that which contains the gods; they are germs in us, germs in the muladhara, and when they begin to move they have the effect of an earthquake which naturally shakes us, and even shakes our houses down. When that upheaval comes, we are carried with it, and naturally we might think we were moving upward. But it makes, of course, a tremendous difference whether one flies, or whether it is a wave or a great wind that lifts one. For to fly is one\u2019s own activity, and one can safely come down again, but when one is carried upward, it is not under one\u2019s control, and one will be put down after a while in a most disagreeable way \u2014 then it means a catastrophe. So, you see, it is wise not to identify with these experiences but to handle them as if they were outside the human realm. That is the safest thing to do \u2014 and really absolutely necessary. Otherwise you get an inflation, and inflation is just a minor form of lunacy, a mitigated term for it. And if you get so absolutely inflated that you burst, it is schizophrenia.” <\/em><\/p>\n

C.G. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Lecture 2<\/em><\/p>\n

And so there’s a huge difference between that little drop in the ocean saying, “I am the ocean<\/em>” instead of “The ocean and I are one<\/em>“. In this I see the meaning of the words of Jesus, who says of himself, “I and the Father are one<\/em>.” There is no inflation in these words. They are the truth of the drop in the ocean that we all are. This truth is therefore an affirmation of our ordinariness, not our specialness.<\/p>\n

To have “Ten Years”<\/h2>\n

The psychological term for spiritual initiation is “confrontation with the forces of the unconscious.” And when we speak of spiritual initiation, we must be prepared that we are entering a world where less is more.<\/p>\n

In the last ten years of her life, my client had gone through a lot of suffering – a long series of getting smaller, getting humbler, letting go of control, learning to be ordinary and finding joy in the little things in life. At one of our meetings she told me, “The others have things I wanted so badly to have but never got. Instead I got my ten very difficult years. If someone had told me before what was in store for me, I wouldn’t have believed that I would be able to experience what I did. However, I made it through, I survived. And not only did I survive, but I became a better person. I let go of so many things that were keeping me from seeing others for who they were, accepting and loving them. If god himself came to me now and offered me a deal to give me the material things I want but don’t yet have, if in return I gave up ten hard years and the experience they gave me, I would refuse him. I know I couldn’t have become the person I am now without them.” <\/em><\/p>\n

This is the paradoxical logic of life in a human body. After every shrinking we feel bigger and more grown up. We think we are weak and will not make it, and find that our strength has grown in the meantime. We separate ourselves from others, and find that our relationship with them has become much better. Our ego becomes small, but there is more space inside us for the Whole.<\/p>\n

Kameliya Hadzhiyska<\/p>\n

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Further on the topic:<\/p>\n