Deeper awareness of ourselves

A leap of faith
I was just reading Kierkegaard, and something he described really hit me. I recognize my life in it. To see yourself going through these things is quite striking.
I will post it here to share it with more of you, and if this can help anybody like it does for me , I would be very happy.
- Aasa

Kierkegaard, in "Sickness until death" analyzes despair as a dis-relationship to the Self, to the source of being human. For Kierkegaard there are three major forms of despair :
first, despair that is subconscious;
second, despair that is conscious and which manifests itself as weakness;
and third, despair which is conscious and manifest itself as defiance.

In the subconscious form of despair, the person is out of relation to the Self, but is unaware of it. Such a person, according to Kierkegaard, tends to live a hedonistic life, dispersed in sensations of the moment, having no commitment to anything higher than ego-impulses.
This is the stage of aestheticism and Don Juanism.
Here one can see a type of existence in which people not consciously realize they are in despair, although as Kierkegaard points out, the compulsiveness for infinite sensation and pleasure together with intruding dark moments of boredom and anxiety reveal that all is not well.

If the person allows the dark moments of boredom and anxiety to enter fully into consciousness, then comes the awareness of de-relationship to the Self (Jung), and the feeling that one is too weak to choose the Self since that demands the acceptance of one´s strength to make that decision.
Here the person despairs over weakness to commit to something higher than ego-impulses.
But if the person penetrates more consciously into the reason for weakness, then comes awareness that the excuse of weakness was really only a way of avoiding the strength already there. What the person originally took to be weakness is now understood to be defiance, i.e.,a refusal to commit!
For Kierkegaard,the despair of defiance is a higher consciousness, a realization that one has the strength to choose the Self, or in his terms, to make the leap of faith which requires acceptance of the uncontrollable and transcendent, but that one chooses not to do so in dark defiance against the powers which transcend reason and man´s finitude.

In defiance, one refuses to change! In the despair of defiance, one refuses possibility and infinitude. In the despair of weakness, one refuses actuality and finitude. To refuse one is to refuse both.
Those caught in the despair of weakness need to become aware of their strength and shake of their victim identity. Those who control need to see how control can be a false strength and to value the openness to what cannot be controlled.

For Kierkegaard, resolution and transformation come ultimately when despair in all stages is overcome through a leap of faith. In this leap one accepts at the same time one´s weaknesses and one´s strength, the inter mixture of the finite and the infinite realms in being human, and the realization that human beings must move between the opposites rather than identifying with an absolute.
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The famous psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung also had similar thoughts on the last stage of this inner journey. He thought that the life of each person was a complex and mysterious whole. But the particular course of their development coming from personal family experiences, cultural influences, and innate temperament, tended to lead a person to emphasize one part of the personality and to de-emphasize the conflicting part

Yet, that other opposing, unaccepted side was there wanting to be acknowledged and often intruded upon the consciously accepted side, affecting the person´s behavior and disturbing his or her relationships.
Jung thought the task of personal growth was to see the value of both sides and to try to integrate them so that they could work together in a fruitful way for the person.