On the loss of the self
Jung says we all are series of masks that we are constantly pulling off during our lives. Upon a false belief we tend to think that our personalities are built up on a central entity, a “nucleus”, around which we wear our masks and roles as layers. In fact, this nucleus itself is made of masks as well. Except for the profound self because that is the divine part of us which is not part of the personality, though, as it is rather a metaphysical than a psychological matter. The mask, that Jung called persona, is similar to the layers of an onion.
Peer Gynt is struggling to find out who he is at the end of Ibsen’s famous drama. He brings the metaphor of the onion as an example too, and he gets to the point where at the center of his personality there’s nothing but love, as in what remains if we remove all our layers is love. In his case, his young love it is who he kept at the bottom of his own personality. This is where we arrive to the conclusion that love is a kind of loss of the self, or a desire to lose ourselves in the other person.
As we are falling towards a center that we never achieve, we want to hold on to something or someone. While falling, we hold on to the loss of self as we are getting less and less under the layers of our personality.
Previously, religious beliefs served as some kind of handrail in our loss of self but since Diderot, religions have expired, lost their importance in our lives and love has taken their place, which resulted in the idea of the redemption in love. Our world of love and relationships clearly shows how harmful this is. And one of its derivative symptoms is none other than Hollywood romantic comedies, by which many still measure and compare their relationships, unfortunately.
Another literary example I’d like to mention here is The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe. In nutshell, Prince Prospero attempts to survive plague by hiding in his palace in Venice along with many other wealthy noble hosts. At their masquerade ball a mysterious guest turns up. In order to discover who this guest is, they pull off his mask just to find out there is nothing tangible behind it and all the guests including Prince Prospero die.
The reason why I brought this example is Erwin Schrödinger’s theory. Schrödinger was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, also deeply involved in Eastern philosophy, the matter of ‘self’ and the conscious(ness). He says that the self and the personality are similar to the one depicted in Poe’s short story. We take off the masks until there’s nothing left behind them. It’s scary if you think about it as this is everything. Basically, everything is nothing.
And yet what are we afraid of? Death. Why? Based upon these theories, we face pure truth when we die. I’m talking about a non-religious concept of death, of course – no after-life, reincarnation etc. – when basically everything ends. In terms of reality to be precise, because truth itself does not end. This is truth; nothing but emptiness. If we leave the circle of reality because we are not real anymore, we enter truth. In this sense death is the ultimate truth that makes human life possible. After all if there is no death, there is no life either.
This is how everything changes and the only thing that never changes is change itself. The fact that we are here and now is just a temporary status and a temporary conjunction and the fact that two people hold on to each others’ loss of self that we romantically tag as love, is just a matter of chance. It is completely unintended.
