What do you not bring forth with destroy you

 

Wassily Kandinsky, Black Increasing, 1927.

James Hollis, Find Meaning in the Second Half of Life notes from this blog.

As Jesus is reported to have said in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” This is the essence of what Jung means by individuation.

Rather than ask, what does my tribe demand of me, what will win me collective approval, what will please my parents, we ask, what do the gods intend through me? It is a quite different question, and the answers will vary with the stage of life, and from one person to another. The necessary choices will never prove easy, but asking this question, and suffering it honestly, leads through the vicissitudes of life to larger places of meaning and purpose. One finds so much richness of experience, so much growth of consciousness, so much enlargement of one’s vision that the work proves well worth it. The false gods of our culture, power, materialism, hedonism, and narcissism, those upon which we have projected our longing for transcendence, only narrow and diminish. Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask: “Does this path enlarge or diminish me?” Usually, we know the answer to that question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut. Choosing the path that enlarges is always going to mean choosing the path of individuation. The gods want us to grow up, to step up to that high calling that each soul carries as its destiny

As Shakespeare observed in Twelfth Night, no prisons are more confining than those we know not we are in. 

we are now able to ask: “Who am I apart from the roles I have been playing—some of them good, productive, and consistent with my inner values, and some not?” Or we may wonder, “Since I have served the expectations of my culture, reproduced my species, become a socially productive citizen and taxpayer, what now?” 

Magical thinking results from an insufficient ability to differentiate self and world. The child concludes that “The world is an encoded message to me, a statement about me, about how I am valued, and how I am to comport myself.” Another way of putting this is: “I am what happens, or happened, to me.”

When the ego gets conscious enough and strong enough, or battered enough, it will begin to say: “What new thing do I have to learn about myself in the world?” “Since I can no longer manage all this perplexity by my former understanding, what does the soul ask me to do in the face of this overthrow?”

We all have a tendency to confuse fate and destiny, between what life presents us and what we are meant to become.

The chief disorders of our time are the fear of loneliness and the fear of growing up.

Growing up means taking psychological responsibility for ourselves, and not just economic and social responsibility—that is the easy part. Growing up means that we take spiritual responsibility for ourselves. No other can define our values, become our authority, or protect us from necessary choices. Until we accept this responsibility for ourselves, we are asking others to be a shelter for our homeless soul.