Up: [[Jungian Glossary]] Created: 2022-11-05 Updated: 2025-09-11 When [[C. G. Jung]] explored [[mandala]]s from around the world, he found that every culture created images that showed their longing for centeredness and wholeness. He believed that these images represent our longing for something entirely meaningful at the centre of our lives. Externally and internally, this is the God-image. So when Jungians speak of the Self with a capital S, they’re referring to *the divine within that mirrors the divine without*. ([[Marion Woodman]], *Dancing in the Flames*, p.3) The idea is that each of us are born with a spark of divinity within us and that our ego evolves from that, not the other way around. As a result, says Jung, we don’t *create* ourselves so much as we *happen to* ourselves. Another word for Self is soul. Self or soul is what pushes us toward [[Individuation]], but not in a linear, step-by-step way. Uniform development, insists Jung, exists, if at all, only at the beginning of life. After that, we are always at different points of relationship to the Self. When we ask ourselves, *Who am I?* our answers usually come from our [[Ego]]. As the inevitable process of individuation takes places within us, our ego loses its dominance and we begin to more fully live the true nature of our Self. This is able to happen because the Self includes our unconscious, so it can give us a larger sense of ourselves than can the ego, which resides only in our consciousness. The Self is the [[Archetype]] of wholeness, and source of our life energy. It is the totality of conscious and unconscious, *connecting us with all beings in all space across all time* (Ken James). [[There are No Opposites in the Self]] While there are [[Dream Images of the Self]] that we might recognize, we can’t ever hope to **know** the Self, just as we can’t ever truly know whatever God-image we might embrace in our religious traditions.