Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?
Sydney J. Harris
Concurring very strongly with Douglas Harding’s assertion that when we begin to practice we consult the great teachers/ traditions to see if we have got it right but then at a certain point we reconsult them to see if they have got it right!
I often find myself overwhelmed in awe and wonder at the infinite number of perspectives and points of view with which it’s possible to apprehend everything that arises.
Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of.
Carl Jung
Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Whatever arises, love that.
Kavi Jezzie Hockaday
The Truth requires belief. Your own truths are self evident and need no support or validation.
Beware claims of The Truth yet recognise, accept and be grateful for all the myriad truths of who and what you are.
No doubt we are right to open the eyes and ears of our young people to the wide world, but it is the maddest of delusions to think that this really equips them for the task of living.
It is the kind of training that enables a young person to adapt himself outwardly to the world and reality, but no one gives a thought to the necessity of adapting to the self, to the powers of the psyche, which are far mightier than all the Great Powers of the earth.
Carl Jung
Pulling back projections is the most painful, agonizing process in the world.
Because you have to recognize that what you thought was out there in another person is not out there, but inside yourself.
Marion Woodman
A healthy ego forgets itself.
You can’t edit life. You’re either all in or all out.
Anyone who wants to know the human mind will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world.
There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.
Carl Jung, New Paths in Psychology
The spiritual exhortation to end suffering and the West’s dream of pursuing happiness are the same misguided projects which only ensure suffering and the impossibility of happiness.
Every moment of existence has value. It all counts.
Understanding who one is has nothing to do with identity or images of selfhood. Knowing who you are means accepting your wholeness, embracing every aspect of your being, the dark and the light. We discover that we are who we and not who we think we are or who we would like to be. This recognition requires a radical honesty and letting go of fantasies of identity.
Life has a way of revealing to us who we are whether we ask for it or not.
You do not have to be good.
Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse!
In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something.
Carl Jung
I rarely write about my work and I have no idea why. It seems I am simply not moved to.
That said it appears, today, that I am moved to say something, in relation to a previous post which mentioned imposter syndrome.
To cut an exceedingly long and boring story short, I worked for many years in publishing and marketing as a graphic and web designer.
Although earning decent money and able to provide for my family I found myself empty inside and miserable most of the time. According to the late anthropologist David Graeber I had a ‘bullshit job’.
Imposter syndrome was in full effect. I was a chancer and a fraud and I entertained a persistent inner dialogue of cruel and merciless self criticism and judgement. So far so normal.
And then the pandemic struck. Redundancy followed. I was at a loss at what to do. My wife who knew me better than I knew myself at the time, said I should get a job as a Support Worker in social care. I literally had no idea what she was talking about.
Cut to four years later and I find myself working long anti-social hours, harder than I ever have, on minimum wage, and challenged daily mentally, physically and psychologically/ emotionally. I leave every single shift exhausted, stimulated, drained, rewarded, energised, satisfied, fulfilled and grateful. And I have never been happier.
If I had to hazard a guess as to why it probably has something to do with the fact that it is work that demands the integrated combination of head, hand and heart. I also think it’s significant that it is work that has nothing to do with competitiveness, business, making money or selling anything. At work I inhabit a world free from the commercial imperative. I never sit in front of a computer. Email, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, lunch breaks, offices, desks are now nothing more than vague memories and the stuff of nightmares.
The daily preoccupation with profit, reach, statistics, branding, sales, marketing, jargon, promotion, competition, clicks, reports, presentations and strategies etc. has been replaced with concerns about human dignity, privacy, safety, mental and physical health, care, empathy, independence, choice, opportunity, support and encouragement.
I am not saying this is better or more important work than any other. Far from it. Horses for courses. Simply that when one finds, belatedly in my case, work that is most closely aligned with who one is, then any sense of being an imposter doesn’t arise.
In short, I thought I was something I wasn’t and paid the price. Now that I do what most closely aligns with who and what I am, I couldn’t feel more whole, rewarded, alive and grateful.
Life lives us whether we recognise it or not. We are fully lived regardless of what we think we do or don’t do. We are helpless in the face of life’s ceaseless animation. The relentless inevitability of our aliveness in each and every moment…
Diagnosis with a specific terminal illness changes nothing except perhaps revealing our capacity to hide and diminish the actuality which enables our aliveness. We are all born with the terminal illness of life.
The map is just another aspect of the territory.
The endless cycle of recognition of, acceptance of and gratitude for impermanence and interdependence.