Bridger of Worlds

The Unconscious as Cosmic Connection: Exploring the Ego, Shadow, and Soul

• Ioannis Kokkinos

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In this episode, Ioannis Kokkinos explores the interplay of ego, shadow, and soul—three essential forces in shaping human consciousness. Drawing from Jungian psychology and spiritual wisdom, he unpacks:

  • The origins and functions of the ego and its role in suppressing shadow material.
  • The shadow as a hidden reservoir of primal energy, unintegrated truth, and healing potential.
  • The cosmic essence of the soul and its call to higher remembrance and awakening.
  • The symbolic meanings of light and darkness, and why duality is vital for realizing unity.
  • The path of shadow integration and the transformation of unconscious material into self-awareness.

At its core, this conversation is a guide for those seeking deeper spiritual growth and soul awakening, practical tools for ego and shadow work, and embodied practices for transforming shadow into wisdom and power.

Step into the paradox, embrace your primal nature, and awaken to the fullness of your being.

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Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Bridger of Worlds podcast. I'm your host, Ioannis Kokkinos. Thank you so much for joining me. If you're on YouTube watching, thank you for tuning in and if you're on one of the podcast platforms, thank you for tuning in as well. 

Deep Dive into the Soul

So today I wanna deep dive into the soul more.

I've been talking about the soul for the last few episodes. I think this is such an important, um, aspect of our humanity because it really is the piece that makes our humanity worth experiencing. Um, so, I will touch base with last week's episode, the episode before that. I'm gonna talk again about the shadow.

I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the ego today, right? So these are all psychological aspects of our human condition. 

Exploring the Shadow and Ego

So the shadow is very much Jungian. The ego, of course, is a part of Jungian psychology, but there are a lot of other psychoanalysts that have also talked about the ego, and I want to talk about the soul today, the wild, the wild soul, of course, this wild aspect of our human nature from a more cosmic approach. Because it is cosmic, it is a thread of the cosmos, just like everything here on the planet. Um, so let's see. Let's see what wants to come through. As always, I know what I wanna talk about. Let's see how it's going to unfold and unravel.

I don't have a script. I never have a script. This is a podcast that I've, uh, you know, I keep saying time and time again. I want it raw. I want it real. I want it like someone's coming over and we're just having chats about the deep, hard, taboo, difficult, uh, tough stuff of life. Um, so yeah, let's go. So I guess I'll start with just basically maybe a little bit of a review.

I was talking about the difference between the soul and the shadow. I would love for you to touch base with the previous two episodes. So the difference between the soul and the shadow was two weeks ago and last week I talked about the wild child, which has the shadow aspects as well, and that also ties in with our soul self.

So the shadow's origin story is the pain of separation. It is the realization of duality, and this is why we're hurting, right? So we all have a shadow. It is the denied, rejected, abandoned, neglected part of us. We are conscious to some parts of it. We are unconscious to other parts of it, right?

So when triggers happen, when we have reactions in present circumstances and scenarios, that is shadow material that is coming up  and this is all a part of the unconscious. So now when we talk about the unconscious and when we talk about consciousness, this is all from the ego's perspective. So I wanna talk a little bit about the ego. Because we're always hearing about the ego, right? From the psychological standpoint, even in spiritual communities, um, the etymological meaning of the ego comes actually from two ancient Greek words, and it is important to look at the etymology of any word because that carries a vibration. So maybe, you know, in our modern day world, the ego, we really know like what the ego means, especially from the psychological standpoint, but it's root from ancient Greece as the two words are 'e' and 'go' which is I, and ge I of Earth means basically the experience of self from the earthly condition.

So ego is I of earth, I of the material, physical experience. So whatever knowledge I have from my ego's perspective is based on what I can see, smell, hear, taste, and touch.  Now that will make you think of the animal, right? The animal is very much about the sensory experience. Animals too witness and, um, perceive and move through life with their five senses.

But we have a conscience, whereas animals have not evolved to the point of having a conscience. They are conscious, however, they are conscious because consciousness gave life to everything. So even though animals probably cannot think right the way we think, I mean there's still probably all kinds of like research that needs to be done there.

But from what I've gathered and understood that animals don't think the way that we think. That does not make them any less conscious than we are because animals are conscious. Animals are very much connected to the consciousness of life just like we are. Now, the issue with humans is that we have an ego.

And we feel this tension, we feel this battle. We feel this strife within ourselves with the ego because we are conscious beings. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and the ego does not understand that because the ego bases itself on what we've went through, on what we've experienced. So of course, we all have a name. We know where we're born. We have our personality traits, we have our story, we have our baggage, we have our good experiences, our painful experiences, joyful moments, not so joyful moments, right? So the ego renders conclusions based on our life experiences.

So the ego compartmentalizes very well, labels, right, um, organizes and basically distributes its information across our system.

 But there are other things going on apart from what the ego can just smell, hear, taste, and touch, and that is a higher awareness, the higher intelligence and the higher consciousness that life is. And that we are as well. So as we are evolving, the idea is to head towards this higher consciousness and higher awareness because we are not meant to stay at the egoic level. Now, what the ego does is basically suppresses all of the material it does not want to experience. So the reason why we actually have a shadow, right? We because is it exists because of the experience of duality.

The ego will not want to feel that pain, right? So the ego will do whatever can among the physical and material experience in order to not feel that pain of separation that the shadow feels. The ego and shadow are very much intimately connected. So a lot of the times we blame the ego for certain shit happenings in our life. It's actually our shadow because that is the unconscious material coming up and the ego actually doesn't know what to do with it. So it suppresses, the ego will survive by any means necessary, and that will be suppression, that will be like to shove it back into the unconscious.

But of course, the shadow is very powerful. The shadow wants to be made known and it will wreck havoc in our lives from that manner, right? So addictions will develop compulsions, obsessions, um, things we can't explain that we say and do, right? That is shadow material. And even though the ego's trying to take it under control, quote unquote, it doesn't have control because the unconscious is incredibly powerful.

Understanding the Unconscious

And I guess this is a good time to talk about the unconscious. So it is important to mention again that the shadow and the unconscious are not synonymous. The shadow resides in the unconscious. So even though we say we're unconscious to shadow material. That doesn't mean that the shadow is solely the unconscious.

So from the ego's perspective, the shadow is unconscious, right? Because it is not a part of egoic consciousness. And then the unconscious is what I like to also call the soul. So I talked about the soul. I talked about the wild self, the wild soul that is very much a part of hearing our inner call, answering a call, realizing destiny, realizing purpose through that inner guiding and inner knowing and inner following, and that is the unconscious.

So the soul is the center of the psyche, and that is the unconscious. And what did I say before? We are here to evolve into consciousness. And when I say consciousness, I don't mean egoic consciousness because we're all conscious, right? I'm conscious right now. I'm talking, I'm speaking. You are conscious, you're listening, you're breathing, you are engaging in this, uh, video, in this, um, podcast episode. But there's also uppercase c consciousness, which is the higher intelligence, the higher awareness, and the higher

 information that is the cosmos. That is the creative thread of everything and we are all a part of that. And how we are a part of that is our unconscious is actually the thread of that cosmic intelligence.

The Journey from Darkness to Light

So I've talked about darkness and light, and I'm gonna talk about it here again because it's very relevant.

So darkness and light, obviously there are scientific explanations of what darkness is, what light is, but there is also symbolic explanations of what darkness and light are. Darkness is something we cannot see So that would be the unconscious. Light is something we can see. That would be consciousness. The idea is to go from darkness to light.

Darkness is not evil, it's just unconscious, and that is where the shadow resides. From higher consciousness perspective, from light's perspective, the ego too is unconscious because the ego is only conscious of the physical experience. I of Earth, right? Remember that I of Earth means who I am based on the material experience.

It has nothing to do with the spiritual experience. That is higher consciousness. Upper case C Consciousness's perspective, thank God there's a transcript 'cause. I hope I'm not losing you here.

So why this is important is because obviously what we're moving through the day, we're having our triggers, we're having our reactions, we're having experiences. Um, things are not going our way. A lot of that is obviously shadow material. And that shadow material needs to be transformed and needs, from the unconscious to become conscious.

This is essentially the path for every single human being. No matter what the contracts, no matter what the experience is. Darkness from the symbolic, poetic perspective, darkness is to transform into light. We can only expand into consciousness through the unconscious. And guess what? This is the ego talking, right?

Because as I said, the ego labels, the ego compartmentalizes. The ego says, this is good, this is bad. And that's all coming from the shadow. Because the shadow is the realization of duality.

In the void, in the great void of creation, there is no duality. And here the great void is the great darkness, right?

But that great darkness, that great dark void of creation is conscious. It's not unconscious from creation's perspective, it's conscious. How do we know? Because it created all of life, and life is conscious. We're conscious. The plants are conscious, the flowers are conscious, the elements, the mountains, the seas, everything is conscious.

Everything is communicating through information, and I'm talking about divine information. I'm talking about information that is  also a part of our higher experience or is meant to be a part of our higher experience because again, we are not meant to stay at the egoic level.

We cannot just stay within the experience of materiality. We are to evolve spiritually. We are to realize our spirituality, and this happens by becoming conscious uppercase C through the unconscious. Which is where the shadow resides and is basically the center of our soul, right? The unconscious is our soul.

So what did I say last week? It's the soul that spiritually awakens. It's the soul that realizes its inner divinity and its connection to the source, to the great cosmic void. So from the ego's perspective, the soul is dark, right? The soul is the unconscious, the soul is that wild, untamed nature that we all have.

And the ego will also want to repress that because the ego needs to maintain a certain level of dignity and pride and have a sense of knowing who we are, right? Like our name, our education degrees, our cvs, our experiences, our talents, our skills, what we've achieved, what we've accomplished. This is all important.

The Role of the Ego in Spiritual Growth

I'm not saying these are, this is not important because they're at the egoic level, but another very important aspect about the ego is that it's self-serving, right? That I of earth means me. It's self-serving. We need our ego in our lifetime. No matter how spiritually aware we become, we still need our ego.

But as I've said in previous episodes, it is not to drive in the driver's seat. It is meant to come along for the ride because we are here to become unique, to realize talents, to realize skills, to know what we're good at, to know, not what we're good at, right? We need all of that, but we need that to, to offer it in service.

We need it to offer ourselves to the collective, to humanity, and to those around us. That is how we know that, yes, I have an ego, but I'm here to be of service to the world and to those around me. Yeah. So that's really how we know we are spiritually aware that we are here to, um, go beyond ourselves and in that going beyond ourselves to share ourselves.

We still need our boundaries, right? Boundaries. We, we love talking about boundaries, whether it's psychology or spirituality, even. Boundaries are incredibly important and boundaries are actually created at the egoic level. Right. So when we want to set boundaries, whether psychological, emotional, mental, physical, space, right, boundaries, this is happening at the egoic level because we do need to have a sense of who we are.

We need to know who we are, and that is our ego. But that who is not meant to stay at the level of just the me it's supposed to become we and I did talk about this in one of the earlier episodes. The we is at the level of the heart, right? So the ego is at the solar plexus level, and then when we move into the heart, this is when we start to experience, you know, our humanity in the way that it's meant to be experienced. And that is through receiving, offering, giving,  inviting in, right? So, it is important to cultivate a healthy ego and by cultivating healthy ego is really spiritualizing the ego. And as I mentioned before, the ego is the one that suppresses the shadow, right? So it is through the ego that we start to integrate those feelings and emotions that we are suppressing.

It is through the ego that we receive knowledge that we did not have before as we allow ourselves to feel the things that we've not let ourselves feel, and as we let ourselves feel our shadow material at the egoic level, this is also how we liberate our soul. Because our soul is the unconscious. Our soul is actually holding our shadow.

The Wild Soul and Cosmic Connection

The unconscious is dark. That does not make it evil. It is the wild thread of creation. The cosmos, the void is incredibly wild. The world, physical life started with a big bang, a big explosion, right? Like. Doesn't get wilder than that, and through billions of years of evolution, life has ended and restarted all over again.

That is incredibly wild. Chaos, destruction, order, rebuilding, death, reemergence. That force, that energy is our soul and it is the unconscious and it is the animal self. It is the wild one, and we are to make the wild one conscious. Even though the soul is the soul, it is still very wild and we do want to temper it in a way.

We don't want to suppress it. Tempering does not mean suppression. Tempering means loving it through awareness, through patience, through nurturing, and as the soul, as the unconscious, as the animal receives that, witnessing that love and that attention, it will become more conscious. And as we become more conscious, we're able to take more control of our life in a way because it's not our reactions and our triggers that are deciding things for us.

When we become more conscious, we can witness our processes more easily, and in that sense, we can choose differently. We can decide differently. A reaction we may have had a few years back will not be the same reaction we have in our current state because we are more conscious, we are able to take control.

Quote unquote in a sense. And really that is how we take control in our life through surrender, through letting go through accepting that we have a wildness, that we have a soul, that we have pain, that we have, you know, a, um, something within us that needs to suffer, needs to go through a certain ordeal because it is through that suffering where we learn more compassion, where we learn more empathy, where we learn more patience, where we learn more nurturing, where we learn more love, where we gain more strength.

So if we look at the grand scheme of things, right, and we look at the billions of years of evolution and really how everything started from this great dark void that is infinite intelligence. That just tells us already that darkness and light are one in the same. And I'm talking about this from the symbolic perspective.

And even so, science is catching up saying that actually invisible light is present and that this invisible light may be this higher intelligence that all religions and all spiritual schools of thought call God.

We already know that invisible light exists.

Right? The gamma Rays, wifi, infrared waves, x-rays, right? This is light. Invisible light, invisible information. So we know that invisible light exists, but a lot of the quantum mechanics research at the moment that is happening is saying that there's an invisible intelligence that's basically orchestrating all of life, and they cannot measure it directly, but they're measuring other things that is indirectly telling them that this great infinite intelligence exists, which is God, which all religions basically call God and all this mystic esoteric schools of thought call God.

Like it's really science is catching up to mysticism. Mysticism, back in the day, back in ancient times was one in the same as science, right? There's, they're not mutually exclusive. Science wants to prove everything through the material experience. Fine. We could say that that's ego, really. The ego wants to prove something solely from the tangible experience.

Fine, fair enough. And then mysticism, God, the source, the infinite intelligence, the cosmic information, all these billions of threads of  the great void that have moved through life. Right. Um, we can call the unconscious. So it's like we're always seeing how duality is coming into play in really anything that we're talking about. But duality is not the culprit. We need the duality to realize oneness.

That's the game. That's like the spiritual game of life is. You're gonna go to Earth. Experience all sorts of duality, all sorts of separation, all sorts of tension, all sorts of time and space apart, right? And the pain that that bears. But within all of that, you're gonna remember, realize, and also experience and feel oneness.

And oneness is God. Oneness is is love. Oneness is consciousness. The unconscious becomes conscious. Consciousness was already unconscious before we arrived here,   and our soul, our wild self is what holds the key. Last week I said the wild child holds the key. Which is the wild soul in itself. But when we're talking about the wild child, we're also talking about its pain. We're talking about its painful experiences that were suppressed from the ego, right?

As we grow, we are developing an ego. We're not dealing with our shit. We don't wanna feel our shit. We don't wanna share our shit. So the ego is just suppressing everything, but it's the wild child, that wild self that holds the key. Because it is through the wild that we not only heal and transmute our shadow, but we get to make our unconscious conscious.

And it's not just physical, it's not just material. It's cosmic. It's godly, it's sacred, it's intangible, it's immaterial. It's non-physical because before physical life, was energy, and this energy is conscious. This energy is the great infinite intelligence that has created everything.

And we are all a part of that. We are all connected to that, and it is our wild self, our unconscious that holds that key, that is that thread of the void. So when we think of the void, right? When we imagine the great void of creation and the billions of years of existence, of evolution, of all of the species that have walked this earth, that are still here, that are no longer here, these were all threads of consciousness.

But when we're talking now from the human perspective, as egos developed,  became the unconscious because the ego says, I don't, I can't see my soul. I can't touch my soul. I can't smell my soul. I can't hear my soul. But obviously the soul is there and in order to experience the soul, we have to first feel it. We have to feel, no matter what the pain, no matter what the story, no matter what the emotion, we have to let ourselves feel, because that is what the soul came here to do. The soul incarnated into this physical body to feel, to feel. And we don't let ourselves feel because we think that that pain is forever or that emotion will never leave.

It is only by feeling that emotion that it. Leaves, quote unquote, but actually transforms into a higher energy, into a higher emotion. Emotion is energy in motion. Everything is energy. Soul is energy. Spirit is energy. Love is energy. Consciousness is energy. Matter is energy. This microphone, it's matter.

It's atoms vibrating. This table, everything's vibrating. Everything is energy. I'm energy. Your energy. And that is all conscious, but from our egoic perspective, when we're talking about our personal energies, there are a lot of energies that are unconscious according to the ego, but they're not unconscious because that is where consciousness resides, in the unconscious.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

So I'm gonna leave it here. I think that's enough of food for thought. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're on YouTube watching, please hit that like subscribe button. I so greatly appreciate that. Please share the content if you so feel called if you're on one of the podcast platforms.

Please also share the episode in any way you feel called. I will be back next week with a brand new episode, as always here every Thursday on Bridger of Worlds. Thank you for being on this journey with me. Thank you for being here with me. I so appreciate your presence. If you want to connect more with me, I am on social media.

I'm on Threads, TikTok, Facebook, uh, did I say them all? Threats, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. How did I forget Instagram? I wonder why I forgot Instagram. Um, yeah, so I'd love to see you over there as well.  And of course, in closing, as always, please remember that you are the medicine and I'm just the messenger.

Thank you very much.