Our journey toward wholeness is a return to wholeness. Some psychologists say that we start our infancy in the oceanic wholeness of the Self, where we do not recognize ourselves as being distinct from our surroundings and our mother; eventually, we discover that we are a separate individual. (However, we can be skeptical regarding the ability of anyone to know exactly what an infant is experiencing.) During the first half of life, we develop our ego and its outer manifestations -- career, home, family, and social presence; during this ego-building phase, we claim particular traits to constitute our ego, and we push the opposite traits into our shadow. At midlife, the ego reaches its zenith; generally, we have attained somewhat of our peak in career, and we have settled into our home-life, our habits, and our social milieu. After midlife, the psychological and spiritual cycles propel us back toward wholeness, as we re-integrate whatever we separated out from ourselves during the ego-building stage; now we draw back the shadow, the anima or animus, etc. -- and we encounter the Self. But this regained wholeness is not like the amorphous, oceanic wholeness of infancy; instead, it is a crisply defined system based upon consciously integrated relationships among the distinct elements of ourselves and the outer world.
