ABSTRACT
Karma is a traditional Eastern concept, mirrored in Western analytical psychology as ‘individuation’. These notions about how meaning is made are concepts near the top of the hierarchy of ideas in their respective traditions: both are theories about connections between a time-bound part of the mind which analytical psychologists call ego and a time-free, transcendent experience which they call Self. The concept ‘complex’ describes both a structure and a process: repetitive patterns of thought and behaviour create suffering. From stillness and clarity, Self unfolds into unresolvable oscillations; its developmental spiral is arrested, forming instead a ‘strange attractor’, ever circling and never reaching its archetypal core in the psyche (Lonie 1991).
