a mass distorting space-time © NASA
My brother has a concept of ‘personal gravity’ that he uses to describe a quality that a person demonstrates towards others. Specifically, he has used it as a stick to beat me with: complaining that I have such strong ‘personal gravity’ that I never “leave my own planet to go and visit other people’s” (ie. his)…
I think that this concept can be generalized to some advantage. Gravity – in the sense that Einstein defined it – as the distortion of space-time caused by a mass, allows parallels with a person’s ego. All masses draw other masses to them: as egos do. The greater a mass, the more likely it is to trap other masses in orbit around them: as egos can do. If the mass is great enough it will draw everything to it, including light – there is, perhaps a parallel here with an ego so massive it destroys those that come anywhere near it. Further, if we expand the analogy to the whole universe – a procedure that I imagine Jung would have considered plausible – then we have the conjecture that, if the universe were to contain enough mass, it would fold so much that its space-time would become ‘closed’… A person too ego-centred (and I do not mean this in any pejorative sense) could become folded in on herself/himself – so that she/he would become closed to all other egos…