The self, in its efforts at self-realization, reaches out beyond the ego-personality on all sides; because of its all-encompassing nature it is brighter and darker than the ego, and accordingly confronts it with problems which it would like to avoid. Either one's moral courage fails, or one's insight, or both, until in the end fate decides . . . you have become the victim of a decision made over your head or in defiance of the heart. From this we can see the numinous power of the self, which can hardly be experienced in any other way. For this reason the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.
— Edward F. Edinger
Jung is not offering comfort here — he is describing a structural condition. The self does not arrive as illumination or reward; it arrives as something that undoes you. Brighter and darker than the ego, it moves on a scale the ego cannot match, and the ego's first response is always to look away: to manage, to postpone, to find an arrangement that leaves the center of the personality intact. What Edinger draws from Jung is the recognition that this avoidance is not weakness but reflex — moral courage fails, or insight fails, or both, because the ego is constitutionally unprepared for what the self requires.
The defeat is the event. Not a station on the road to eventual mastery, not a difficult passage that consolidates into growth — the experience of the self is, in Jung's precise phrasing, always a defeat. What survives that defeat is not the ego repaired but something that was never organized around the ego's terms in the first place. This is why the encounter carries numinosity: not because it elevates, but because it removes the illusion that the personality's center belongs to the personality. The decision has already been made over your head. The only question is whether you recognize it before fate makes the recognition unavoidable.
Edward F. Edinger·Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche·1972