if you can assimilate your shadow, you then appear to yourself not only subjective but as something objective as well

As a matter of fact, you cannot assimilate yourself, you cannot live with yourself, unless you understand yourself as a sort of givenness, a datum; you are an objective fact.

If you assume that you are only the conscious ego, then it is as if you had wanted to bring about certain events, or had done certain things intentionally; but you cannot deny that it also looks as if they had just happened to you, as if you had encountered them, or perhaps as if you had been overcome by something strange and objective.

So if you can assimilate your shadow, you then appear to yourself not only subjective but as something objective as well.

You see, in assimilating the unconscious, you increase the circumference of your being to an unknown extent; moreover, you are including something in the totality of yourself which is not under your control: you can only control what is in consciousness.

It is as if you were ruler of a land which is only partially known to yourself, king of a country with an unknown number of inhabitants.

You don’t know who they are or what their condition may be; time and again you make the discovery that you have subjects in your country of whose existence you had no idea.

Therefore, you cannot assume the responsibility; you can only say, “I find myself as the ruler of a country which has unknown borders and unknown inhabitants, possessing qualities of which I am not entirely aware.”

Then you are at once out of your subjectivity, and are confronted with a situation in which you are a sort of prisoner; you are confronted with unknown possibilities, because those many uncontrollable factors at any time may influence all your actions or decisions.

So you are a funny kind of king in that country, a king who is not really a king, who is dependent upon so many known quantities and conditions that he often cannot carry through his own intentions.

Therefore, it is better not to speak of being a king at all, and be only one of the inhabitants who has just a corner of that territory in which to rule.

And the greater your experience, the more you see that your corner is infinitely small in comparison with the vast extent of the unknown against you.

You get the entirely new idea that the Self is obviously something exceedingly influential and very strange and that you are just a part of it; you don’t know how infinitesimal a part-or perhaps you are a considerable part.

But at all events, you have to assume the attitude of somebody who has established his little kingdom in a continent of unknown extension,

and beyond the indistinct borderline of your conscious king dom is the absolutely unknown.

Now, if you assume that this whole continent in which your little kingdom is to be found is ruled by a central power, then that central power would be your own king also; you would be a subject of that unknown grand power.

And that would be the self, about as we think of it in psychology. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 390-391