Christmas Freud III: “The Oceanic,” Sun Tunnels+

Man’s observation of the great astronomical regularities not only furnished him with a model for introducing order into his life, but gave him the first points of departure for doing so.

In this way, then, the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive — indeed, an all-embracing — feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it [. . . ] a bond with the universe — the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the “oceanic” feeling.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930)