← Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
What Jung and Neuroscience Reveal About the Ego (and Why It Matters at Midlife)
00:41:30
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to Jung on purpose with CreativeMind, hosted by Deborah and Dr. Rob Maldonado, creators of the NeuroMindra coaching method based on Jungian psychology, non dual spirituality and social neuroscience. Join us each week as we explore personal growth for purpose seekers and the incredible inner journey of becoming your true self. Let's get started.
- [00:34]
B
Hello.
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A
Welcome to yet another episode of Young on Purpose. I am Deborah Maldonado.
- [00:40]
B
And I'm Dr. Rob.
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A
And we are so excited to bring you today this topic about the ego and how it's not the enemy. And Rob has some interesting research in neuroscience that came just recent about the development of the individual. And that's going to shed some light on this and yourself and midlife and shifting. But before we begin, I do want to ask you to subscribe to our channel if you're watching us on YouTube or if you're listening to us on one of the podcast services, do not forget to subscribe. That helps us a lot. Gets more people to listen to our show. Thank you so much. The ego is not the enemy. You know, there's a big book that says the ego is the enemy. So let's see. It's often demonized the ego, even in Eastern spirituality, sometimes let go the ego. You want to let go of the ego? You want to get rid of the ego.
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B
Yeah. Ego and the shadow are the big.
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A
They're terrible. They ruin our lives. Clear them out.
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B
And really, when you consider them and what they give us, they're like the best things that ever happened to us. But of course, it requires they requ. Let's say they. They put us through our paces, both the ego and the shadow. But it's a good. Let's say it's a. It's a good challenge that they present for us. Right. Whatever doesn't kill us makes. It makes us stronger. And therefore it really makes us strong when we're able to come to terms with our egos and our shadows. Let's. Let's focus on the ego.
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A
Okay.
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B
Because.
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A
Jung thought that we need a coherent, grounded ego so that we can relate to the unconscious.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
And so the unconscious is so vast, and if we don't have a point of focus, the I. How are we going to relate to something so vast without getting lost in it? And so he said that early part of life is so important to. To build the ego so that we have that individual, like, kind of conscious self that can relate to the unconscious. And a weaker, fragmented ego really can't hold the energy. It won't be able to hold the power of the unconscious, the collective unconscious, to really take advantage of the potential that we have, because we need that ego almost like as a weight in the. In the world to counter the ultimate potential and the creativity. So it's about integration, not about erasing or clearing or pushing things away. It's about how do we live, how do we live with our ego without getting rid of it. And so you have some information which I found fascinating about the development of the brain.
- [03:40]
B
Yeah, this is some recent research that came out, and we'll post the link for those of you that want to geek out with us on the stats and how people are doing research on the brain, brain development. And this is called lifespan work, meaning they're looking at people throughout their lifespan, from birth to death all the way through. What is interesting about this research is that it confirms a lot of the work that we've been already doing kind of developmentally and looking at these sensitive periods of. Of life where transformation occurs. So it turns out that there is indeed a. A brain restructuring happening at these different stages of our life. So we knew about sensitive periods, but often the, you know, there's not, let's say, definitive research that shows, yes, indeed, the brain is undergoing some kind of transformation. So the first one, they say the first important period is from birth to nine years of age. You think about it, that's your childhood essentially after that. And of course, there's a margin of error of a few years.
- [04:59]
A
It's kind of like where you're still part associated in socializing with your family. And then at around that age, at 9 or 10, maybe even 8, you start to kind of hang out with your friends more. And you have your own little social group because you're in school. So you could see how that changes. And some, your parents aren't the center of the universe anymore. And now you have this social group which is a very important part of development.
- [05:24]
B
Yeah. And some ancient cultures or traditional cultures, there was no in between, between childhood and adulthood. At around 9 or so, give or take a few years, you became an adult. And this was done almost instantly. In other words, you. Yesterday you were a kid, now you're an adult. Whereas in, in Western cultures, we have this period of adolescence. Right. That we give people some time to adjust and, you know, prepare and all that stuff. But in. Just to kind of know the scale of it, in some cultures, it was one day to the next. You're. You're an adult now. But anyway, what's going on in this early period is an overproduction of neuronal connections. So the brain is really super wired to absorb as much information, to extract as much information from the, this human experience of childhood as possible. So it's very sensitive. Everything the child sees and you know, who has ever been around kids, you know, they're, they're like sponges. They're.
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A
And everything's such a big deal, like I forgot my stuffed animal and they have a meltdown. Right?
- [06:49]
B
Two. Yeah. Because that over overproduction of, of neuronal connections allows them to process tons of information at once. So they're taking in sight, sound, touch, taste, everything at once and their brain is able to handle it after that. So from 9 to 32, which is surprising because a lot of us think adulthood kind of starts at 21, but from 9 to 32 there begins a pruning. So in other words, of, instead of having all these overproduction of neuronal connections and neurons are simply the, the brain cells that communicate with each other, this is how they, they communicate through these connections. So there's a pruning of that, almost like a, a gardener pruning the tree that has too many branches. A pruning begins after nine or from nine, especially those early te to those early teenage years where you start to develop that sense of okay, what is it that I want to do with my life? Right. So you start to get interested in your topics. I was interested in biology early on. I was interested in art and drawing. So I imagine my, my brain was essentially saying, well, if you're not going to focus on math or engineering, let's cut some of those branches off. You don't need them. They're taking up space. You, you should focus some more on the topics that you're interested in. And so it strengthens the topics that we gravitate towards. So what's going on internally or in our mind is we're getting a sense of identity of who we are. What am I going to do with my life? Right. What do we ask the kids? What are you going to do when you grow up?
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A
So the ego's developing this sense of identity in relation to its external stimulation. And then using the emotion to navigate from that early life to kind of map out their life in a way.
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B
I would say both externally and internally, because we know we're born with those genetic predispositions. And then internally also there's epigenetics, which is kind of our ancestors experiences are playing into turning genes on and off. And you know, the, our I IQ that we're kind of born with. Right. It's a predisposition is evolving and, and being shaped by the environment. So it's always a two way street with development. So anyway, this period from 9 to 32 is when we really start to develop our ego, our sense of I, of who I am. As Jung would say, this is the Persona, the personality that we. It starts to harden in a sense it's almost like cement early on as, as children. It's still wet, still malleable. We can still manipulate it. Neuroplasticity. At this juncture from 9 to 32, which is fairly long Spanish. There's, there's time to evolve this sense of I to where it starts to gain some structure to some sense of I. I know who I am or I at least I have this identity that I can count on that's stable.
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A
So you go to high school and you either fit into the jocks or the burnouts or you become the cheerleader or the drama per student or the brain. And then you go into adulthood and you're, you know, trying to find your first job or getting married and all those things that you're. Who am I in the world? And developing that sense of I related to those like life experiences or life milestones. Yes, but you said that it doesn't, they don't really reach adulthood. So what is between 9 and 32? What is that considered still childhood?
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B
That's a good question. I would say it's considered like a long adolescence.
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A
Oh, so we're still in adolescence till we're 32. That makes a lot of sense. That tracks with me. My life.
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B
Exactly. But especially now we think we're so grown up.
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A
But think about our 20s. We were really grown up.
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B
No, we still. At that time I still loved video games and fooling around and all that stuff.
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A
And do they have an idea like. Cause they always say women mature faster than men. Men do they enter that adulthood later than women. Like do they check that on that study, was it between men and women or was it average for both? They didn't distinguish.
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B
I'm sure they tracked it. Whether they included it in the, in the paper, I don't really remember. But okay, yeah. If you have that kind of data, you're definitely going to look at. Is there a difference between.
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Yeah, yeah.
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B
Men and women? Absolutely. So at 32 though, this is interesting, right? Because we know at 32 to 33 and again, a couple of years of error, it could. Like I remember at 28, I was starting to feel different. Like I I really started to think about, I want to get serious with my life. Right. I, I, I want to achieve the things that I want to, that I envision for myself. And those things started come online. Seriously. Like, I started to plan, what am I going to do? What's the plan here? So, but by 32, on average, people start to really solidify their careers, get serious about what they want to do.
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They might have kids, already built a family. Some people, although it's later and later, now people are having kids.
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B
That's a good point. There's some, there's some adolescents having children. Well, that's a hallmark of the brain, that it's flexible.
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Yeah.
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Plasticity.
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And it's, on average, it's like, it's not 32. Every single person has that shift.
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B
Like you wake up on your birthday at 33.
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I'm an adult.
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B
Yeah, no, it's, it's a, it's an average, it's a general principle. You know, the, the neurobiology works pretty much as a clock. I mean, you see it and especially in kids, right? You see them from first grade to third grade, they're completely different. And they just went through two or three years of evolution there, but they completely changed their, their way of thinking. So from 32 on, then what happened?
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A
So this is it, would you say the point where the ego matures? Like, the ego's kind of like at its height of building, you know, it's like kind of matures in a way. Like you say the cement starts to get more set.
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B
Yes, because what's happening is that pruning again, instead of thinking of yourself in all these possibilities, the branches that aren't really bearing fruit, they, they start to get pruned. In other words, it's reducing the path, the neural pathways, and saying, this is how I think about myself by doing this. And so you, you start to get better at the things that you're good at because you're focusing on those things and practicing and the things that, you know, you wanted to do. But, you know, I wanted to be a pilot. I took a few pilot, a few flying lessons and stuff like that, but I, I never really persisted with it. Therefore, those, those neural connections get pruned, so you start to focus. From 32 to 66 is a big, another big chunk of our growth process. Now this is interesting for us because this is precisely what Jung called middle age. Most people at 33 don't consider themselves going into middle age. Right. But, but in essence, what he meant was the middle of life Right where.
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A
It'S a big chunk of our life.
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B
Right where we're adults, we're still young enough to do what we want, but old enough to take responsibility and make those big decisions for ourselves. And that period, of course, we can see that it lasts for a long time. In other words, it's not set in stone. Nobody decides, you know, that they're going to be one thing and that's it. We're still open to learning, to experiencing, to trying different things.
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A
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B
We can also see it in terms of rebirth because there are these cultural ideas, right. The rituals, institutions that human beings build in different cultures to mark these changes. So what happens at the first phase, from zero to nine? It's baptism. In other words, it's an initiation into life and too often into the tribe. Kind of, you're. You're initiated into this. This group of people that you call your family and your culture and you identify with them. Right. It's. It's a powerful experience. I know in Catholicism, you know, much more than. Than I do. Because you experience Catholic girl. Yeah. What. What were the. The.
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Well, we had our communion at 8, 7 or 8. Right. Then we had our confirmation at 12, and we. Where we married God.
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B
And so that's the initiation from childhood into adulthood.
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Yeah.
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B
The quinceanera, also the sweet 16. Yes. These. All these initiations mark the end of childhood and entering adulthood. And so this sense of rebirth, what happens at 32, often, because people do kind of enter into this new stage, they're often initiated into larger responsibilities. You were saying family, sometimes military, sometimes academic or running a business.
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They become like leaders in their company. They start moving up the ranks.
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B
Yes.
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They're not the intern anymore. They're making copies. They're out there really leading others.
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B
But because we're looking at these things from the Jungian perspective, the unconscious is also now bringing up and giving the individual very powerful dreams that often, Jung would say they initiate a kind of spiritual crisis. Not so much that it's about religion. Right. But it's about identity. The individual begins to feel like, is this all there is?
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A
And it doesn't always happen at 32 on the dot. On the nose.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Somewhere in between, we start to some people, it's 35. Some people it's. Some people is 45 where we have that spiritual crisis. Don't feel if you're 33 and say, I haven't had my spiritual crisis yet. Hurry up and have it like it'll, it'll come when it's like when you're ready. Now I want to talk about before we go on. So a strong ego. The reason we want a strong ego and we want to build the ego is so we can step out of that role. We have a role that we can step out of. If there's no role and we're ambiguous, there's no nowhere for us to like step out of it. And it's almost like you need, you can't push yourself off of air. You know, you need a wall to push yourself off so that that wall, that ego, becomes our launching point or our catalyst and it creates that inner conflict. And we need the conflict. It's that fire, that sacred fire to light us up. So we need, it's almost like that friction. If we don't have a strong ego or a weak ego, meaning we don't know who we are, we're always following everyone else and we've never really created anything for ourself. There's nothing for us to like have friction with. There's no friction. There's no set strength that we can, you know, fight against because it's so, it's like almost like flimsy, right? And, and watery and, and it feels so when we think about the weak ego, it's like Clyta clinging through other people a lot more and not really self reliant or even being like, hey, this isn't enough. It's more like I don't know who I am and I belong to, you know, this group or I belong to this church or I belong to this community or this political party or this sports team. And we don't have that like sense or someone doesn't have that sense of their individuality. They're really like moved into the group. Some people, it's the family they just are identified with as a family, as a group. And so when that happens, like why does that happen? Rob, From a psychological standpoint, why would someone have a weak ego? What would be the reason for it?
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B
I don't like the word weak ego, but, but we can call it more flimsy.
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A
It's not weak. It's flimsy. It's not set or it's not established.
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B
Maybe yeah, we can say concrete underdeveloped.
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A
Underdeveloped.
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B
Okay, yeah, it's underdeveloped. In other words, it's underdevelopment. Right? Like a men at work.
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A
It's on its way to be developed. So it's not like broken. Yeah.
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B
Reconstruction, let's say. And there's nothing wrong with it. Sometimes it, you know, things in life happen. We know, for example, drug use, alcohol use kind of put the ego development on hold. And so if you go through periods where you're using a lot of alcohol, a lot of substances to ease the pain, or, you know, recreational drugs, like they say, those periods kind of leave gaps in your ego development.
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A
Is that because you're escaping the world and you're just kind of.
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B
You're not facing the challenges? It's almost like not showing up for that initiation that is going to take.
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A
It's avoiding the. Avoiding conflict, avoiding difficult situation. Right. Like escaping life in a way.
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B
Yes.
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A
Not facing life. And so when we're. When we're have a healthy ego or a strong ego, we're facing challenges. We're constantly like, you know, battling life in a way. And we have that sense of. Almost like I always think when we have go get through something difficult, it just brings. Makes us stronger. And then if we are afraid of difficulty where we don't take action and we're just so frozen by it, and it's like it's. You got to build up the ego. And you can do that very easily by just taking small steps and really getting to know who you are and trying new things. You know, like, that could be a way to build up the ego.
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B
Yeah. It's natural for us to build ego. We do have to, let's say, as human beings. Right. We're so complex that we do require support. Like they say. What's the saying? It takes a village to raise a child. Yeah. It requires more than just, you know, looking at your parents and kind of, you know, guiding yourself from them. Older siblings, cousins, friends, sometimes teachers, all serve as that support system for your ego that you're picking up things from others besides your family on. How do I do this thing called my life? You know, how do I gain confidence? How do I gain. Do the things that I want to do?
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A
Remember, the firmer your ego is, the easier for you to let it go, which feels counterintuitive. You think, well, if my ego's weak, then I could just flick it like a little bug. But it's strong and. But we need that friction. We need that fight.
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B
Yeah. I think of like a. Like a maturing of a fruit. You know, it takes time to. To reach that.
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A
That avocado that gets off too quick.
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B
Yeah, that. That's ripe. Yeah, the ripening. Then it just falls off the branch. Naturally. Whereas when it's still green unformed, it's difficult to pull it off the tree. So our ego is very similar organically. We're meant to build it up to a certain point and then let go of it. And this is. This confuses many people because they've never been taught what is the ego and what is its function.
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A
Well, can I just say, you're not really letting go of it. You're just letting go of its. You're not letting it drive anymore because you can't really let go of your ego. It's can help you. Yeah, that's a way.
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B
That's really the way of talking.
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A
I know semantics, but.
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B
Yeah, it's semantics, but. But it is an important point. Let's say who's letting go of what? Right. Who's letting go of itself? Yeah, it's more. If we think about identification, we're not over identifying with it.
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A
Yes.
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B
Anymore. So we're not pushing it away. We're not getting rid of it. But we. It's not what we identify as. Whereas in those early periods, let's say if we look at this developmental period from 9 to 32, in the middle of that, we're really identifying with our Persona and our ego. Right. It's like guiding us and it's keeping us safe. It's telling us when to do things, when not to do things, what's good and bad. So it, It's. It's really useful for us. But to. After that. Right. As we get into adulthood, if we're still depending on what we learn from our parents and our teachers to tell us what's right or wrong, that's not a very mature ego. Right. Because we're still looking back at those early periods in life. What we need to do then in this middle stage is decide for ourselves.
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A
So wouldn't it also be people like. I know for me, I spent so much time looking at my childhood, and it's like the time to let go of that thing that happened 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago and finally make a decision on, like, you're not. Like you've done enough processing with it and you're ready to kind of move on and decide for yourself now. So it's not only the patterns you learn, but it's almost letting go of the whole. That. That part of you is. Is holding you back anymore.
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B
Yeah. Yeah. And so it's a very different experience of your life because you're taking the reins of your life and that taking.
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A
Responsibility and your Personal responsibility.
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B
That's what Jung meant by individuation or coming into a mature ego that you, you're taking responsibility for your life and you're making your own decisions. Not trying to compensate, like we were saying with the personalities, right, or the Persona. Not trying to compensate for things that you lacked in those early phases of your life, which some people get stuck in, right? They, they just think, well, if this compensates for my lack of validation by my father, then it's working for me and therefore why should I change? And so they stay stuck in these patterns that aren't really useful to them anymore.
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A
And so a strong ego is self aware, grounded, reality oriented kind of being in the world, emotionally mature and ability to self reflect. That's a big one.
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B
That self reflection is a big piece.
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A
And open to the unknown. So checkbox everyone. And what's the difference between ego strength and ego inflation?
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B
Yeah, so I would say ego strength is like all things in psychology. It's a good balance of you're affirming your needs, your desires, your boundaries, but not, not so much that you're pushing other people's boundaries, right? You're, you're, in other words, you're being reasonable, you're giving other people their space, ability to shine and do what they need to do. But you're also feel, you feel secure in yourself and your self identity and you don't have to borrow from others their power.
- [30:58]
A
And so an inflated ego would be defensive, rigid, reactive and grandiose or self importance. And we do have ego inflation sometimes, right? We do have this times where we get defensive, times where we feel rigid, times where we get reactive or feel grandiose. But it's not our default, that's not how we always operate. So we want to say that these things, there's some times where we feel more grounded and sometimes than we don't, or more emotionally mature than you don't. We want to have a little bit of the maturity and the self reliance and the ability to self reflect. It's a balance. And we're not saying you have to be perfect. The ego's not perfect. But I think those are good ways to think about it. When you're feeling really defensive about something. You could say what my ego is trying to get. And you start to be the observer of the ego versus identifying as I am defensive. You could start saying this part of me is defensive right now, I wonder what's going on. And you start to watch and listen to your thoughts, pay attention to how you feel and just Notice where those things show up in your life and this, is this a pattern? Where does this always happen? And why? What am I defending? What am I really? Where does my ego feel threatened? Those are great questions to ask yourself when you're in those stages and to build a healthy ego. If you're able to self reflect, it deflates it, it deflates that ego because now you're not pumping all your energy into the ego, you're. You're pulling sitting in the power that you truly are. Which is that what we call the pure awareness that witness mind, which is where all the energy is anyway.
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B
Yeah. So this is interesting. In Jung's model, when the ego persists beyond the, this, this stage or it's kind of its natural stage of building the individual, building up the ego and the Persona. When it persists beyond its natural lifespan, it begins to act like a tyrant. Because internally we start to feel like all that pressure to perform, all that pressure to be someone, all that pressure to, to act and do things and.
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A
Fit in and not speak up and play small when you want to be big.
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B
Yeah. It begins to, to feel like a burden for us. And so there, there's a lot of mythology around this old king that's outlived his, his function and is tyrannical. Now that sounds familiar, right?
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A
I know, I feel like this, what is supposed to be a political conversation.
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B
But yeah, this is internally.
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A
Yeah, we're all witnessing the external in our internal plane.
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B
Yeah. If you think about the collective psychology, it's simply an expression of all our internal psychology in kind of bulk form. Right. In the mob mental form. Yeah. Anyway, so there is this sense of the ego outlives its function. And middle age, like Jung says, we want to overthrow it. We want to establish a new way of seeing ourselves that is not connected to our personal history. Because what is the ego? It has that personal narrative of I grew up in this family, I went to this school, on and on. There's nothing wrong with it. It's simply that that's not who we are in totality, in our totality. The human being is. Yes, we're a biological social creature, but. But we're also connected to the cosmos, to the divine, to the transcendent. And that is the important aspect of letting go of that. Over identification with the ego. That like you say, if we're over attached to it, if we don't let go of it, we can't move on to something beyond it.
- [35:12]
A
It's like a ball and chain in our life. And again, I Think I. I think, you know, a lot of personal development is about building up the ego. And I think for me, it helped me a lot. Like, when I was in my 30s, I did a lot of personal growth. I did workshops and worked on my inner child and all that stuff. And I think that was great. Maybe I needed that, like, because I didn't get that, you know, in my child, in my adolescence, or I was still in my adolescence. And so it really helped me to build up that ego. And then when I was ready for individuation, it was like I was ready for it, you know, I was. I was able to shift and do shadow work and do the other, deeper work. So there's nothing wrong with building the ego and ego work. But let me tell you, those of you who do personal development work, you will get to a point where you're working on your. In, you know, the childhood past and all that stuff. And at first you're going to get lots of insights and you feel breakthroughs and you're working on emotions and everything's so great and is making you feel better. But there will be a point, and this happened to me, where it stops working the way it used to. It's because the all you go can only take you so far. And so if you feel that you are in this kind of, like, cycle of personal growth but not really getting anywhere anymore, like, the beginning, like, was so wonderful and you got all the insights, but now you just feel like you keep working on yourself. And it feels like the more you work, the more stuff you find and the more you have to fix, that's a sign that you're ready to now move on to individuation. And so for some people, happens very quickly. But I think all of us, people that do our programs, they always say, like, oh, you know, I did all that work on myself and I felt like something was missing. And they got to that point where it didn't work anymore. Just like the ego, you get to a point where it's no longer. You can't build it up anymore, right? And you have to let it go. I know you. It happened to you at 28. Late bloomer. We always talk about who matures faster, women or men. I think you matured faster than me, Rob.
- [37:17]
B
Well, I think I would say it was the beginning of a long journey, which I'm still on.
- [37:24]
A
Did you pass adolescence yet?
- [37:26]
B
Yeah, that's another important point, that we keep all the stages of our development with us. We bring them along, right? So that the child is still with us. The adolescent is still with us. That young adult is still with us.
- [37:40]
A
Yeah.
- [37:41]
B
And we can revert to that. We can regress to that sometimes, but it's also great to have that.
- [37:47]
A
Yeah. So this was really fascinating. I love the idea of tying it to the brain and development and then also just, you know, I think a lot of people can relate to the whole, like, personal development, spinning wheel of a gerbil wheel of trying to fix yourself. And you get to the point where you're just like, it's not having that traction it had before. And I need something deeper. Most people think deep is like working on their childhood and reclaiming, you know, looking at the history and looking at memories and deep, you know, cathartic emotions. But that's like the little wafer on the top of the ocean of who we are. We're the ocean. So when you're ready, fixing that wafer and that wafer is strong enough, now you're able to go into individuation, which is bringing us to a deeper aspect of who we are. More potential, more. There's where the land of the archetypes are and the potential power that we were born with. And that's really where the. Where the lightness and the freedom comes, where we really become who we're meant to be in this world.
- [38:49]
B
Absolutely.
- [38:51]
A
Anything else to add before we go, Rob?
- [38:53]
B
Yeah, just one last thought. Jung saw and studied these patterns in different cultures through different times. Right. And in different spiritual traditions. And what he was aiming to do was leave us with a psychology that held that power, that transformational kind of ritualized power that human beings have always used throughout time to take care of themselves and their children and their. Each other. Right. To. To put each other through these phases in a creative, potential way. And he saw that psychology was often moving towards this pathologizing of the mind instead of empowering us. Often, psychological models teach us about brokenness and lack and dysfunction. And we, of course, we need those things. We need to understand those things. But for most of us, what we need is an empowerment model, a way to. To actualize ourselves, to find the power, the strength to face the challenges of life in a creative, powerful way. And that's what he left us with. And that's why we focus so much on Jung's work.
- [40:17]
A
Yes. And he even said the first part of life, the psychology and application of psychotherapy, is very different than after you're at midlife. It requires a completely different way of doing personal growth work. This second part of life, psychology is really important for us to be fully fulfilled and having meaning in our life and feeling light and free. So that's what we went through. All of you, thank you for joining us and we'll see you next week for another show.
- [40:48]
B
See you soon.
- [40:49]
A
Take care. Thank you for joining us for Jung on Purpose with Deborah Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of Creative Mind. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast before you leave and join us each week. We'll see you soon.
- [41:21]
B
Sa.