By Answering Your Soul’s Call To Maturity: Time For A Change Of Pace
Now that you are no longer imprisoned in the fearful, defensive and repressive dogma of religion, you are free to concentrate on yourself, on your psyche or soul in ways never before possible or permissible. This may still feel selfish or wrong to you because of the mind-controlling constriction placed upon your soul’s meaning, but the fact is, a life that constricts meaning wounds the soul.
Carl Jung wrote in his memoirs, “Meaninglessness and constricted meaning inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Self discovered meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”
The Underworlds Invitation: Finding Your Better Self
What has brought you to this moment in your life?
Undoubtedly it has been an external violation of your soul, an intrusion, whether from the acts of others, from the fates or by your own choices. Inexplicably, it is the soul itself that brings us to those difficult places in order to enlarge us, to ask more of us than we originally intended on giving. Unfortunately, many of us are just trying to make it through life without having to think. On the other hand, some of us think too much. Like most things in life, a balance is needed.
Socrates (470 – 399 BC) stated it perfectly: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Only by attending the wounding of the soul and its call to us, only by learning to align our choices, our strategies with our psyches’ remedies, can we actively participate with life’s persistent summons to heal and flourish. Whatever we do to avoid the summons of the soul will prolong our wounding reliance on the debris of our old life and the revolving meaninglessness of its suffering. Only through making the meaning of our suffering a conscious agenda and summons for spiritual enlargement can we ever emerge from the underworld. In our lives, periods of wounding present rich possibilities for enlarged being—if we courageously fearfully accept the invitation.
You are faced with an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility to live more consciously. You are now able to ask, “Who am I apart from the roles I have been playing?” Some of these roles were good, productive and consistent with your inner values, but many were not. As an ex-fundamentalist, you already know you are a survivor. That counts for a great deal in life, but there is much more than simply finding more traumatic events to prove what talented survivors we are. How—and, more importantly, whether—we finally use our accumulated strengths to redeem our lives from our suffering will count for immeasurably more.
Why have you been challenged and called to journey through your underworld?
Perhaps Jung’s most compelling contribution to the understanding of human existence is the idea of individuation, the lifelong project of becoming more fully “whole” individuals (balanced and healthy emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically). This is the person we were meant to be—not what our delusional fundamentalism intended, or our parents, or our culture. While admiring the attributes and mystery of others, our individuation summons each of us to stand in the presence of our own mystery, and become more fully responsible for who we are in the adventure we call our life.
So often in religion, individuation has been condemned as over self-indulgence or self-serving individuality, but what individuation asks of us is to surrender our self-protecting agendas, pacifying absolutes and self-deceiving denials — in other words, our security — in favor of humble service to the soul’s intent. Simply put, we need to release and become vulnerable to our own souls’ summons.
You might think of it this way: the person who knows anything realizes they know nothing at all, and therefore they humbly listen to their soul and educate themselves about themselves, the world and life in general. “Knowing nothing” doesn’t mean being stupid or humble to the point of self-deprecation; it means being open to all of the mystery and diversity of life, with a sense of wonder and amazement. It also means not having to be perfect and pretending we have everything put together and all figured out, which—by the way—is a form of deep denial used to hide just how utterly lost and afraid we really are.
Remember, it’s not necessary or required that we have all of the answers. We only have to answer the summons to be true to ourselves and strive to be better with each passing year, which means we never become our best.
We never stop learning, loving, growing and experiencing life, for the alternative means something vital within us will die, even though our bodies keep on moving for decades.
Obviously, then, individuation is completely the opposite of self-indulgence; it is the lifelong service of our soul to the higher order revealed and expressed through the self, our enlargement of being. It is an invitation to sincerely grow up.
For those who follow the teachings of Jesus, it is the fulfillment of Hebrews 5:13-14:
“For everyone that partakes of milk is unacquainted with the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to mature people, to those who through use have their perceptive powers trained to distinguish both right and wrong.”
It is in essence a spiritual growing up, a putting away of the infantilized teachings of religious leaders who make infants of their congregations rather than challenge them to become what they are meant to become. Their messages offer relief from life’s struggle through simple steps and “us versus them” mindsets and platitudes, drawing people to them by giving them what they want: an easy way out, the avoidance of life’s summons to depth.
