One the strange parts of life is that, outside of observing the empirical manipulation of matter in the material plane, there are an infinite number of alternative and contradictory explanations for things. For example, the individuation process itself might simply be a coping mechanism as part of the second part of life in order to become more comfortable with letting go and with approaching death - alternatively, it may be the voice of God inside us. Or it could be both, multi-layered, or neither. It is a strange space because of its shiftiness and uncertainty; the inner world is a mysterious and strange space.

This is the paradoxical atmosphere of genuine interiority - the place where the psyche stops behaving like a stable object and reveals itself as a field of possibilities, layered and metaphysically ambiguous. This ambiguity is not a flaw of the process; it is the process. The inner world is more like a stack of dimensions than a single domain. A single phenomenon can be simultaneously psychological, biological, symbolic, mythic, metaphysical, theological, synchronistic. Each layer expresses itself through the others, and none has priority from within the experience, and they often contradict each other. This is why the phenomena feel shifty - one is perceiving a multidimensional process through a one-dimensional ego.

The reason Jung refused to collapse the experience into theology or neuroscience is that individuation is an emergent property of the psyche - something that behaves like a natural process and like a revelation. In other words individuation has the form of a psychological process and the feel of a divine calling. That dual structure is the defining phenomenology.

This is a process where intuition feels like command, command feels like mystery, mystery feels like a kind of necessity, necessity feels like fate, fate feels like an inner voice, an inner voice feels like God, but God feels internal. This is what Jung called a numinous field, where the boundaries between psyche and metaphysics collapse. This is experiencing the psyche as alive. Living systems are ambiguous by nature; dead systems are not.

The inner world is the place where biology, psyche, myth, physics, metaphysics, memory, destiny, symbol, and meaning all collapse into one undifferentiated experiential field. The ego wants to label it. The Self does not care - it operates regardless of what label one gives it. The deeper truth is that the process of individuation reshapes one’s interiority by something mysterious whose nature exceeds these categories. The ambiguity is the mark of authenticity. If it were clean, literal, and easily defined, it would be ideology, not transformation.