James Hollis

Ask yourself, 'When do I feel most real?' What comes up on the screen? All of us have had moments in our lives when we felt whole or wholly present, or experienced a sense of well-being, an intuition of a higher order of reality. Such moments are transitory, alas, and cannot be summoned up by will or mind or right conduct, just as the person who seeks humility finds more and more that pride and one-sidedness push the goal further and further away. - excerpt from Creating A Life

Finding Your Individual Path

Creating a Life

Laura Mei

This life, is one big contradiction. The more you are like others, the more secure you will feel, yet the more your heart will ache, the more dreams will be troubled and the more your soul will slip off into silences. Finally, one day, you will have forgotten that you have a soul — you will rise, drive through traffic, arrive at work, and not remember how you got there. Once you reach that condition, there is no further need to think about much or face painful choices. You will have developed enough conditioned reflexes to make it through your life on automatic pilot. Maybe that was the freedom you sought, the release from torturous thought, colliding emotions, and the burden of growing up. Humans have long speculated upon these paradoxes, these mysteries: how to be, what to be, to what end, whether we are really free to choose or whether dark gods control all, and even whether there is any meaning possible in a world which seems so chaotic, so absurd, and ends in personal annihilation. How can one choose clearly, prudently, when the lens through which one sees the world is itself provisional and distorting? How could one not choose wrongly when one cannot see anything but through such a lens? The sum of one's choices become a body of fate even though one is ostensibly free to choose otherwise. Such a 𝘬𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘢 is heavy freight for the spirit, and an inherited burden for the next generation. Most children are carriers of that greatest of burdens, the unlived life of the parent and the parent's parent. Whatsoever is unaddressed by one generation is rolled over into the next by way of example, admonition or omission.

What would it feel like if one were to operate out of the natural core of one's being? We do so act, occasionally at least, when we are most spontaneous or wholly in that moment. When the Zen master strikes the nodding novice, he does so not as chastisement, but as a summons to return to this moment, this moment which is all there is. The past is past, and the future is never here. There is only this now, now. Yet, as we know, and T.S. Eliot strongly reminded us, it is not the pastness of the past which is significant, but the ubiquitous presence of the past. The compensatory activity of the psyche, through moods, dreams, symptoms testifies to the relentless insistence of the psyche that it be honoured. When Jung defined neurosis as a wounded god he meant to suggest that the symptomatology which we would so quickly suppress is a dynamic representation of the wounding of some deep part of one's soul.

In the face of an insufficiently nurturant environment, the child will internalize this provisional message as a statement about its own worthiness to be met half-way. Identifying with this fantasy of diminishment, he or she will live out repeating patterns of self-devaluation, self-sabotage. Or the child will launch a frantic search for reassurance from the other, often choosing precisely those who will repeat the primordial experience of insufficiency. Such a desperate search for reassuring connection is the birth of addictions — through the connection with the other, there is a momentary lowering of the existential angst with which the child has always lived.

According to Jung [as quoted by James Hollis]:

The self 𝘪𝘴 relatedness; the self doesn't exist without relationship. Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist — then it has roots. You can never come to yourself by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation; you are all alone with yourself and 𝘵𝘩𝘦 self doesn't exist . . . Not that you 𝘢𝘳𝘦, but that you 𝘥𝘰 is the self. The self appears in your deeds, and deeds always mean relationship.

Each of us lives out a story, a dynamic narrative whose only consistency is that we somehow show up in each of the scenes. While the plot line may be unknown to us, there is one. It is composed, of course, of genetic, familial, and cultural antecedents which are present at the moment of birth. The stories we live out are capable of alteration by fate, by the influence of others, and occasionally by conscious choice. The narrower the frame of consciousness, the greater the personal chronicle plays out as fate. As Jung has observed, what is denied inwardly, will come to us as Fate. As we can only be partially conscious at best, much of the fate we would deny or decry, we have unconsciously elected. This is why patterns occur so often in one's life, even though one is rationally obliged to admit that no one else made him or her choose that person, that path or that behaviour. We are reminded again of the wisdom of the classical imagination which intuited this paradox. The gods set things in motion, but the choices are ours. The sum of those choices, and their consequences which may ripple through generations to come, is the story of our life.

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦, 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯, 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘸 𝘶𝘱? This is a question we frequently ask of children. We often forget to ask it of ourselves at midlife when we know something is played out, that something does not work for us. In the midst of this disorientation, we are nonetheless gifted by the experience that some things do work for us, and that there are intimations, hopes, dreams, and longings which have played about the fringes of consciousness for a long time. So, what does one choose then, if one chooses to grow up? Habit is a great deadener. So is fear, and so is lethargy, the twin gremlins which sit at the foot of our bed each morning, each wishing to nibble away at resolution and desire. Yet, as Schopenhauer argued in the last century, will is the life force seeking its own expression. Will is more than conscious intent, though consciousness can hinder or help. Will is expressed through the body, through desire, through dreams, and through the evanescent visions we may have throughout our life, the vision of the larger life. Most often, the anxiety aroused by the summons to a larger life is more than we can bear. The larger life is the soul's agenda, not that of our parents or our culture, or even of our conscious will. The agenda of the soul will not be denied though it may be repressed. It will show up in depression, listlessness, ennui and fantasies.

One of the most profound of Jung's contributions to the field of psychology is the paradoxical concept of individuation. Even today the term is misunderstood as egotism or self-absorption. Rather, individuation has to do with becoming, as nearly as one can manage, the being that was set in motion by the gods. Such a path is seldom if ever the path of ego gratification, creature comforts, vacillation and flight. It is the cruciform path of the Self which will seek its own fullest being whether the ego cooperates or not. Whatever one's fate may have in store, the task, if we are up to it, is to serve the individuation imperative, to become as nearly like ourselves as we can manage. 𝘈𝘮𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘪 is, after all, even amid defeat and confusion, a form of love. To love one's fate is to embrace the loathsome frog, kiss the suppurating wound, accept the ignominy of defeat, and yet find somehow one has been blessed.

The fundamental reality which we all serve, whether we like it or not, is the principle Jung identified as compensation. Whatever is true to consciousness is compensated by its opposite in the unconscious. The more pious I am outwardly, the more violence lurks in my psyche, for I am the carrier of nature. Nature naturing is always seeking a dynamic tension of the opposites. Consciousness, as we have seen, tends to privilege one value and exclude its contrary. That contrary does not go away; it is projected onto others, or it goes into the unconscious, only to emerge at some other time and place. The more I identify with a value, the more one-sided becomes my orientation to reality. As that one-sided orientation excludes the range of possibilities, those rejected values are pathologized. In the life of the individual the excluded values will somaticize, express themselves in vigorous dream images, or be seen in projection.

As individuals, we are not meant to be well-balanced, sober servants of collective values. We are not meant to be sane, safe or similar. We are, each of us, meant to be different. What Jung says on this subject bears repeating: 

"What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? It is what is commonly called 𝘷𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯: an irrational factor that destinies a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation. But vocation acts as a law from God from which there is no escape. [Man] 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥."

The shape and character of our vocation may change at different developmental stages. We have not just one life, but many lives to live, and in the course of however long we are privileged to live, many tasks, many vocations. Personality, or personhood as Jung might define it, is not found in adjustment to external expectations, but in serving one's calling in the context of our environment. Something in us, no matter how much we flee it, summons us. We may avoid it all our lives, but deep down, something knows. It knows us whether we wish to know it or not.

Where is the unlived life which haunts, or summons, or intimidates you? We have all been called to spiritual greatness. Not the greatness of worldly standard, but the largeness of individuation, the vocation to be who we are, in the peculiar fashion the psyche demands, at whatever cost may be exacted by the collective. Somewhere, deep inside each of us, is the knowing which knows us, that mystery which seeks us, desires realization through us. What a defilement of our calling it is to live a lesser life. We may be frightened by the scope of such a calling, but it is even more frightening to have stayed stuck in a life of no consequence, of no contribution. Fear of the call is a good fear, for it reduces the other fears to their lesser claim on us.

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