Living an Examined Life

To say that any of us has a choice, really, is still a dubious statement. While we celebrate social license, revel in eccentricity, and accept changing social structures, reports from the behaviorists and the neurologists and the geneticists narrow the window of freedom more and more. In fact, the older I get, the narrower that window has become, despite having spent a life in education, in study, travel, and reflection. The powers of the unconscious cannot be underestimated. Our ego consciousness — namely, who we think we are, or what we believe real — is at best a thin wafer floating on an iridescent sea. In any moment, we view the world through a distorting lens and make choices based on what the lens allows us to see, not what lies outside its frame. The more conscious we become, the more we become aware of unconscious influences working upon our daily choices.

How haunting is Carl Jung’s observation that whatever is denied within us is likely to come to us in the outer world as fate? (That thought alone keeps me at this work.)

Our life begins twice: the day we are born and the day we accept the radical existential fact that our life, for all its delimiting factors, is essentially ours to choose. And the moment when we open to that invitation and step into that accountability, we take on the power of choice.

What stands in the way of the exercise of that power of choice is essentially two things. First, we learned early that trying out who we are in the world often produced negative reactions. So we learned to curb our desires, adapt, perhaps even hide out, and fit in. It is so much safer that way. Tiny in a world of giants, we reason that surely the world is governed by those who know, who understand, who are in control. How disconcerting it is then when we find our own psyches in revolt at these once protective adaptations, and how disillusioning it is to realize that there are very few, if any, adults on the scene who have a clue as to what is going on.

My understanding of Rilke’s poem is that once the observer has been in the presence of the large, the timeless, the imaginatively bold, he can no longer be at peace with his own small purchase on life. When we have had our lives reframed and see them as they often are — fear driven, petty, repetitive — we either anesthetize ourselves, distract ourselves, or realize that something has to change.

When we examine contemporary culture, we find these rites of passage missing. Instead of tools for personal strength and survival, we teach computer skills. We allow children to abide within the bosom of a protective culture, and accordingly, we have very few initiated, separated, independent persons of adult sensibility. Aging alone does not do it; playing major roles in life does not do it.

Life’s two biggest threats we carry within: fear and lethargy. Every morning we rise to find two gremlins at the foot of the bed. The one named Fear says, “The world is too big for you, too much. You are not up to it. Find a way to slip-slide away again today.” And the one named Lethargy says, “Hey, chill out. You’ve had a hard day. Turn on the telly, surf the Internet, have some chocolate. Tomorrow’s another day.”

More energy is spent in any given day on managing fear through unreflective compliance, or avoidance, than any other value. While it is natural to expend energy managing our fears, the magnitude of this effort on a daily basis cannot be overemphasized.

Drowning in distractions, palliated by simple solutions, and lulled by patronizing authorities, we can sleep our life away and never awaken to the summons of the soul that resounds within each of us.

From this gap between the expectations of our projections and transferences, we may from time to time come to realize that we are accountable for how things are playing out. When that realization occurs, a heroic summons follows: What am I asking of the other that I am not addressing myself? I suspect that all of us have a sneaking suspicion that we are deferring this question, this responsibility, and have done so for a long time.

Sooner or later, we are each called to face what we fear, respond to our summons to show up, and overcome the vast lethargic powers within us. This is what is asked of us, to show up as the person we really are, as best we can manage, under circumstances over which we may have no control. This showing up as best we can is growing up. That is all that life really asks of us: to show up as best we can.

Ask yourself these simple questions: Where do I need to grow up, step into my life? What fear will I need to confront in doing so? Is that fear realistic or from an earlier time in my development? And, given that heavy feeling I have carried for so long already, what is the price I have to pay for not growing up?

Only with this sort of respect for the dialogue with the psyche can we begin to leave the old behind. Much in our history is worthy of carrying forward, and much is not. Just as we periodically clean the house, go through old clothes and fashions and discard the no longer germane, so we have to go through our accumulated histories, our driving attitudes, reflexes, and responses, and discard what is no longer useful, productive, relevant, or serving growth.

Why should we be afraid of ourselves? We weren’t born that way. But soon we learn experientially, and increasingly consciously, that we are tiny, vulnerable, and dependent upon the huge powers around us, most notably the giants we later call parents. Whatever powers nature invested in us are easily overrun by the forces outside of us, and so we learn to deny, even fear, the powers within.

Jung asserted that all our difficulties derive from the fact that we become separated from our instincts, those internal energies, drives, and feeling states that move us toward greater wholeness.

The second half of life occurs when people, for whatever reason — death of partner, end of marriage, illness, retirement, whatever — are obliged to radically consider who they are apart from their history, their roles, and their commitments. Every young person “escapes” home and then goes out to repeat it, to be owned by it in overcompensation, or to attempt to “treat” it unconsciously through an addiction, a fugitive life, or some form of distraction. Given that the farther away one gets from those primal influences, the more these spectral influences still call the shots, most people sooner or later hit a wall. What they do then makes all the difference in their life.

It is not the other, but our relationship to history, to the disabling messages of our dependent past, that is imprisoning. Again, simply to realize this is only part of the battle. Then comes the courage to face what is internally programmed and still feels terrifying — the disapproval, the anger, the putative retaliation of the other. Ninety percent of the fears that bind us derive from our psychological history, when adaptation, surrender of personal truth, was obliged by an environmental situation.

The one thing parents can do for their children is live their lives as fully as they can, for this will open the children’s imagination, grant permission to them to have their own journey, and open the doors of possibility for them. Wherever we are stuck, they will have a tendency to be stuck also or will spend their life trying to overcompensate. Living our own journey as fully as possible is not only a gift to our soul, it also frees up the generation behind us to live theirs as well. The very freedom to live our lives that we wished from our parents, we thereby grant to our children to live theirs.

What feeds our needs most deeply? We project onto the raw material of food our emotional and social needs, far in addition to the nutritional needs of the organism. Food becomes love, continuity, ready presence. No matter how miserable the day, we can come home, open the fridge, and “lights on, and welcome home!”

And why is it we have so many eating disorders — anorexia, bulimia, obesity? These disorders are hypermanagement efforts in a world elsewhere beyond our control or a plaintive cry that there is never enough love, security, or reassurance. Why not? When the life of the spirit is compromised by the decline of the mediatorial institutions and connective imagery to the transcendent, one transfers the search for the numinous — that which speaks to the soul, engages the spirit — to some surrogate such as power, business, sex, satiety, or a palliative substance.

In the end, there are two existential threats to our survival and well-being: the fear of overwhelmment and the fear of abandonment. In the encounter with the former, we are reminded of our relative powerlessness in a large and potentially invasive world. This discrepancy, this unpredictability of the environment, is inculcated in childhood, reinforced and ratified by multiple experiences of the power of the world over our capacities.

Similarly, the opposite existential threat, abandonment, means the person is driven to achievement in order to attain the reassuring accolades of the other, or transfers the need for nurturance, constancy, or reassurance to some promising surrogate yet estranges the other through coercive behaviors. The person might also seek a position in life wherein approval and reassurance are structurally provided, or become addicted to a substance whose presence is easily managed yet whose payoff in satisfaction progressively declines.

None of us is free of addictive patterns — by this I mean reflexive anxiety management systems. Frankly, we have to have these systems, but they can come to manage us rather than the other way around. That is when the cost of the addiction accumulates.

I cannot count the times someone has said in the midst of analysis or a workshop, “I know I should . . . (fill in the blank).” How is it we can know and not carry through? This dilemma goes back to the chapter on stuckness for sure, and we need to remember that in those blockages, we are succumbing to an archaic anxiety of some sort: we fear we will be ridiculed, left alone, fall on our face, and so on. We all have those fears, yet deep within is that call again, that summons. How many talents have been neglected, opportunities aborted, risks rationalized away? Each one of those moments of postponement, rationalization, and deflection was when we turned our back on our own soul.

Jung pointed out, the smallest of things with meaning is infinitely greater than things without meaning. And meaning is defined by our souls, not our culture.

We forget our task, our responsibility to our talents, to our interests, and to our unique perspectives on the world because it is easier to do so. We forget, simply forget. Yet something in us remembers and protests. So we dismiss the protests, the troubling dream, the fear that awakens us at three in the morning. We run from ourselves to places of security, of comfort, to the fantasy of fitting in.

A very effective instrument when in the face of blockages and difficult choices is to ask the very pragmatic question: “Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me?”

What makes us timorous is the activation of the old paradigm with which we all grow up, that we are small and the world large. That message is corrosive to our sense of worth, our entitlement to possibilities, our right to dream. I am not endorsing grandiosity, inflation, hubris, or any other delusional denial of reality; however, most of us, quite simply, live lives too small for us.

Rather than be enslaved by our fears, in service to our limiting heritage or our debilitated, even devastated, history, we understand finally that we are called to something large. Our attitude toward others then changes. We grow less fearful, less suspicious, less needy, because we know that we have a calling to something else. It is natural to have fears of the world. Only a psychotic person would not. But it is a violation of our souls if we live our lives governed by our fears.

Each of us has a gift, the essential gift of being who we are, with all the flaws, shortcomings, mistakes, and fears of which we are all so aware. One of the most pernicious influences of most religions, and a lot of unconscious parents, is the shaming process, the inevitable admonition to be perfect, to measure up to some abstract codes. As none of us is able to live a model of perfection, we wind up swimming in shame, overcompensating or self-sabotaging.

In the end, we are not here to fit in, to be well adjusted, acceptable to all, or to make our parents proud of us. We are here to be ourselves. Often that is not pretty, but it is honest. And our gift to the great mosaic of the world is our uniqueness.

There is no going forward without a death of some kind: a death of who we thought we were and were supposed to be; a death of a map of the world we thought worthy of our trust and investment; a death of expectations that by choosing rightly we could avoid suffering, experience the love and approval of those around us, and achieve a sense of peace, satisfaction, arrival home. But life has other plans it seems; indeed, our own souls have other plans. And there is a terrible price to pay for ignoring or fleeing those intimations and summons to depth.

Recognizing the patterns, especially the self-destructive patterns, is the first step. Then comes taking them on, for the rest of one’s life. Taking them on requires risk, courage, perseverance, and showing up more days than not. Some days the possibility of a larger life wins; other days the ghosts win. One has to know that every day is a war between the constrictive colloquies of history and the invitation to the high seas of the soul. But such a venture is what our life is about, what real adulthood is about, and what the journey of the soul demands.

Considering the larger picture for each of us on a very personal level requires that we reflect on Jung’s concept of individuation. By individuation, he does not mean narcissism, ego aggrandizement, or being measured by any external achievements. Individuation means submission, not ego triumph or transcendence of the ordinary. It means surrendering the life we wanted or expected, for that which the gods or the soul (whatever metaphor you prefer) calls for.

The bigger picture for all of us is found in asking from time to time, “What is my life about, really?” We are all deeply invested in the details of daily life, and usefully so, but we are more than economic animals, more than social tokens on a large board, more than perpetually hungry animals. We are souls in the world of flesh, spirits in the world of perpetually decaying matter. What does it mean to be here? To what am I called? What values, traits, and capacities must I embody in my life? These are the kinds of questions that call us out of the trivial, that help us reframe our frustrations and disappointments and step into something larger than fitting in, being successful, being safe, and being accepted by everyone. These moments are far from comfortable, but they are energizing and lead us from one developmental stage to the next, and the one beyond that, stretching out into the emergent future. Then we are alive, not just going through the motions.

Permission is something that can be given if the parents not only affirm the child in his or her struggles, but also, even more importantly, live rich, full lives themselves. As Jung famously noted, no burden is greater for a child than the unlived life of the parent. What they have not faced in their lives remains a glass ceiling, a constriction that either the child serves or has to spend a lot of effort breaking through.

Many in the context of therapy discover that what has depressed them, what they sought to distract, or anesthetize, or flee, is actually the larger life that wishes expression through them. The moment we realize that our life is really in our own hands, that it is a spiritual summons to be honored, and that we deprive others by not bringing our more developed selves to share, then we realize permission is not something given — but something to be seized. And from that, a larger life, a life of service to a force greater than we are, begins. And from that turn, we get our life back, the life intended by the gods in the first place. As Jung observed once, life is a short pause between two great mysteries.