Edinger: When Eternal Entities Erupt into the Temporal Process
I pulled this quote out of my Healing Only Occurs in the Blur essay to provide more direct access, in the service of unpacking it a bit:
Edinger (1992) observes:
“… experience teaches us that the collective unconscious does transcend time and space. Time and space are categories of the ego so they are necessary for ego consciousness but they do not apply to the unconscious. … archetypes… are eternal entities that erupt into the temporal process. … On such occasions the ego is caught in a piece of the divine drama and lives it out, more or less consciously or unconsciously. Another way of putting it is that the ego is in time and the Self is in eternity. The ego is the agent of the Self in time so to speak. When certain archetypal entities erupt into ego existence, then it is the task of the ego to embody those entities, incarnate them, and realize them as consciously as possible. If there is little consciousness attached to the event, then the ego becomes the tragic victim of the archetype it is constellating. If there is more consciousness involved, then the ego does not have to be a tragic victim, because the ego knows what is happening to it. It behaves in a much different way, and can mediate the archetypal pattern much differently.” (Transformation of the God-Image, 1992, pp. 68-69)
Healing Within the Blur 
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