Reflections on Jung's Wisdom for Successful Living
“Your life is what you try to live. Nobody can live it for you or instead of you. If I should try to put you through something, it would be my life and not yours. When you die, nobody else will die for you or instead of you. It will be entirely and exclusively your own affair.” ~ Carl Jung
I have been reading a book (The Wisdom of Carl Jung, Edward Hoffman) that contains these spectacular nuggets of wisdom of Carl Jung, and I cannot help but reflect and contemplate on many things shared in here. Continuously steering us towards the individuation and encouraging us to choose our own path, own it and live it - as there is no other way to truly live - the work of Carl Jung certainly is becoming my focus of interest and attention. Just a simple notion that I am still alive and breathing, despite of numerous challenges and difficult mental states throughout my life, helps me daily in being more and more steeped in this wonder of attaining the greatest possible level of self-awareness and spiritual development. It is by no means something that I anticipate or hope to be completing and accomplishing in this lifetime, but rather a journey that uncovers new layers of my personality and identity. Discovering all these different parts of me while following Jung’s ideology - that, if summed up in two words, would say everything belongs - feels so refreshing and yet strangely ancient, as well as intensely accepting and compassionate. I don’t remember resonating with a teaching that speaks so deeply and directly to me, for quite some time.
“There are, besides the gifts of the head, also those of the heart, which are no whit less important, although they may easily be overlooked because in such cases the head is often the weaker organ. And yet people of this kind sometimes contribute more to the well-being of society, and are more valuable, than those with other talents.”
I feel like this is an important topic for many of us - certainly always has been for me personally. Growing up, I remember people around me highlighting the importance of intellect, rational and analytical thinking, education and cognitive superiority. These attributes were even more accentuated for me in the States. However, I don’t remember anyone ever mentioned or taught on the importance of the heart - for example, to be a warmhearted person, to open up your heart to love, that kindheartedness is an important trait, to be a hearty host, that the heart is a tender but hardy organ, that many things and people can melt your heart, that doing things half-heartedly doesn’t bring us joy, and that heartbreaks are inevitable and even essential. I have met some extraordinary people lately who are proudly wearing their heart on their sleeve, and it made me think of how much I envy them for that. It’s been so long ago that I was able to do that, that I am unable to bring that time back clearly. All I know is that somewhere in the process of becoming who I am today, through many heartbreaks that I often would not grieve through enough, and get a proper closure for, I have closed my heart and somehow became more guarded and super vigilant. It is taking some time for me to remember that all of this is what comes after getting sober, after embarking on a recovery journey - where, all of a sudden I feel so exposed and so vulnerable, and feeling so much at the same time, that I simply don’t know what to do with all of it, and my first default response is to close up or run away; or both. It’ll take time…
“If you do not get along with the unconscious properly, that is, if it finds no expression through consciousness and conscious action, it piles up libido in the body and this leads to physical [weaknesses].”
Jung understood libido as “psychic energy: desire, will, interest, and passion. Libido includes instincts for fulfilling bodily appetites and engaging in developmental tasks. Although energy infuses all human activity, it is not a function of ego alone; for many, a worthy goal has lacked the libido to achieve it.” (Murray Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul)
Our feelings and actions can easily turn into symptoms, such as an addiction, for example. Low libido often represents a form of depression, and too high libido can be seen as mania. Most often, a problem with libido is experienced as “stuckness” - stagnation created from the friction between our natural, instinctual selves and family and societal expectations. When we can face our fears and engage our desire through recognizing the truth of where attraction resides, we can create pathways and allow libido to flow in service to a process of individuation.
So, libido, as Jung defines it, is a moving creative energy, a vital or life energy, and not only our desire for sex, as many often tend to think. Knowing our inner most desires, dreams and passions brings the unconscious into the light more and more, and living up to our own standards makes them possible to become reality. But, we are often confined into small boxes of our society, our families and friends, feeling as if we have no choice to break free and live our lives the way we want to. We often want to know how we should live, all the while forgetting that one lives as one can. There is no prescription for living, there is even no way of seeing it in advance, but rather looking back at it afterwards, and our search for that one thing that would make our life perfect is an absolute myth.
“All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.”
This is pure gold. I cannot count how many times in life I was trying to resolve a problem that just couldn’t be as simply resolved like others, how many times I felt an urge to push and influence the direction of an event in my life that could not have been influenced by my doing, how many times I was impatient and needed something to end and change and shift, so that I can continue with my life, only to realize that that exact thing was significant part my life… We humans are obsessed with resolving issues, solving problems, improving ourselves, controlling our environment, and searching for a simple solution for all our problems so that our lives can go smoothly, with certainty and a continuous joy. We wish to have simple lives, always certain and smooth, and without any doubts, and have results with no experiments and mistakes. But, we can only have results through experiments. And we can only live with doubts and uncertainties and not without them. Living in a perfect balance would make a very unfortunate scenario. It seems utterly inhuman. Plus, imagine your life being wonderful and amazing day after day, a year in and out…
“Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything that one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects: truly a task that taxes us to the utmost.”
I have been feeling this directly and expressing it for a while now as well. I feel like I have dedicated my life to self-exploration and self-development, and every day I feel more and more grateful for it. It helps that I also work in the healing and recovery space, so I get to share these wonders with others and witness their own journeys develop and unfold. Something very essential and significant that came to me from Jungian depth psychology directly, is that this is an approach to human experience as something which is all welcoming and belonging, and in no way abnormal and unnatural. What some other approaches may see as pathology in humans, depth psychology sees as part of unconscious and instead of treating one’s pathology and “helping them go back to being normal again”, it actually invites one to bring their unconscious into the light more, and more, and that way see through all these different aspects of self, that all belong. Not an easy task at all - as Jung says - but its value is immeasurable.
“Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand, it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore. A philosophical or religious view of the world enables him to do this, and such views prove to be, at the very least, psychic methods of healing if not of salvation.”
The idea and desire for me to explore and contemplate on suffering came originally from Buddhism. And Buddhism came into my life during the times of my deepest suffering - the very peak of my addiction. At the time I couldn’t have recognized that my addition is causing me additional suffering, mostly because I have used it as an escape and means to self-medicate for decades. Once I recognized the deep suffering that was hiding behind my addiction, as well as how my spiritual thirst would have never been satisfied if it wasn’t for my suffering - it somehow all clicked for me. If we have a deep inner understanding - no matter how crazy it may sound to others, but it makes sense for us - about pain and difficulties that are being presented in our lives, it is so much more possible for us to find freedom and even grow from that pain.
Or, as the famous saying by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche goes: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” There is a purpose and the higher meaning of life and suffering. Knowing the why is what helps us endure most things and find our way through how.
“[Profound] experiences cannot be made. They happen - yet fortunately their independence of man’s activity is not absolute but relative. We can draw closer to them - that much lies within our human reach. There are ways which bring us nearer to living experience, yet we should beware of calling these ways “methods.” The very word has a deadening effect. The way to experience, moreover, is anything but a clever trick: rather a venture which requires us to commit ourselves with our whole being.”
There is no such thing as chasing spiritual awakening, consciously creating serendipitous moments in life, or crafting a life experience that will with certainty turn out to be profound. Almost always these happen when we least expect. They happen on their own accord. They may happen when we are ready for them or when the stars align, on the days of the new moon, when your power of manifestation reaches its peak or when you open yourself up fully for life - whatever your point of view or your religious or spiritual belief is. But, the bottomline is - there is no confirmed and guaranteed method to make this happen. Just like there is no formula for happiness or joy. The only certain way to experience anything in life really is by “committing ourselves with our whole being”. What this means to me is living my life present and fully engaged with all the elements and events in it - from those that open my heart, and put a smile on my face and butterflies in my belly, to those that bring me the deepest sadness and make me spin for days at a time. Profound experiences cannot be made. They are to be lived by committing ourselves with our whole being.
“Life is crazy and meaningful at once. And when we do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest scale. Then there is little sense and little nonsense, either.” ~ Carl Jung
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Stay safe. Marina
Your selection of Jung quotes along with the images really complimented the theme of your post. I really enjoyed that!!!