Truth and meaning can be enemies—but they can also be partners. At their best, they function like a heartbeat: systolic and diastolic, contraction and release. One grounds us in reality; the other animates that reality with purpose.
They are like a married couple on a dance floor. Sometimes truth leads, sometimes meaning does. Harmony doesn’t require sameness—only coordination. When the rhythm holds, movement feels alive rather than forced.
Carl Jung called this process individuation: the integration of what is known with what is felt, of fact with value, of the conscious self with what lies beneath it. But like a shadow that doesn’t always move in perfect unison with the body, truth and meaning can fall out of sync.
When they do, illusion begins to grow—quietly, like mold in a dark basement. Jung called this the shadow: not evil, but unacknowledged reality. Transcendence is not escape from the shadow, but its integration—where truth and meaning converge rather than compete.
Dissociation occurs when illusion wedges itself between our performative self and our authentic self. These selves are not always cleanly separable, but when their divergence widens, meaning becomes theatrical and truth becomes hollow. Individuation is the closing of that gap—not by erasing complexity, but by holding it consciously.
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