I'm instinctively wary of the pic'n'mix approach to belief and spirituality, mostly because I'm quite a pic'n'mixer myself. It's the worry of never engaging the deeper riches of any single practice or way of life, which requires decades to do. And Jung suggests to me that might be right, via his concept of individuation.

By that account, the story of our lives is, first, the establishment of the ego, in the ways of the world; and second, the displacement of the ego by the Self - that wider participation in life, variously referred to as embracing the flow of life, fuller consciousness, the way, God. One needs the other: the Self needs an established ego fully to be in the world; the ego needs the Self to find not just instrumental purpose but ontological meaning.

Today, this rise and then eclipse of the ego is disrupted because the ego may never find the security it needs to first establish itself, what with the multiple choices on offer in the contemporary world: in a plural culture of many ways, and lots of pic'n'mix, it's hard to be committed to one way for long enough. The situation is exacerbated because consumerism celebrates the freedom of the ego - the freedom to experiment with this and then that. In a way, it's fascinating. Though the price is never sinking roots.

However, the Self seeks to make itself known no less. And the result is individuals in a perpetual state of meaning-seeking - we're all visionaries and mystics now - though we all also share a particular characteristic: unlike our forebears who sought meaning too, through their inherited tradition, contemporary seeking is marked by the constant fear that what we seek lies elsewhere. The risk is that instead of a steady process of individuation, we live lives of constant skirmishing between ego and Self. Or to put it another way, the commitment of the New Age is not to 'the way', for who can believe there is a 'the way' anymore; but instead to 'my way'.