Life is Too Rational
Life is too rational, there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.
~ Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life
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…It is a clumsy irony, a bloody joke, to assert that a man, after eight or more hours of a manual labor, still has strength in him to have fun, to enjoy in an elevated, spiritual way.
— Severino of John
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For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else.
– Jeanette Winterson
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We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
— Herman Melville
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Our credulity, our gullibility, our easy acceptance of the conventions of whatever society we happen to be born into, can kill our spirit. The pressures are immense, it’s true, but we are too easily persuaded they’re the only game worth playing. We dismiss our own longing for something more. We’re trapped by what we’re trained to believe, convinced we have no power, no right to inspiration and beauty. Those luxuries are out of reach.
You could almost suspect that they are hidden on purpose so that you don’t get a taste for them. What if you developed discrimination, what if you became capable of speaking in your own well educated and well informed voice? You might be dangerous to the status quo, which would alarm serious people.
We try to make our lives within a rational construct, testing our dreams and our longing for meaning with rational tools. We discourage ourselves this way. That persistent longing for a grand life gets whittled down to basic survival, which takes everything we have to accomplish. We measure ourselves along the metrics of how successful we are in that given task, discounting the role of luck if it’s good but blaming it if it’s bad.
Outside the territory of survival lies the realm of survival of the soul, which requires intangible things like love and purpose and beauty. The gates of this territory won’t appear until you take a stand for a life of overarching meaning. You have to ask yourself if you agree with what you’re taught. You have to consider the possibility that you’ve been told lies, that your elders don’t know what they’re doing, that you have to fashion your own meaningful life with whatever help comes your way.
We’re all lost to some extent, especially those who are certain they know what’s what. People who know the absolute truth are probably the most dangerous to the world. They should not be allowed around small children, but somehow they end up running schools and churches. Getting disentangled from categorical belief systems is prerequisite to claiming your own life. It’s work, and it takes a courageous, independent spirit to do it.
If we are capable of stepping back enough to take in even a corner of the drama we’re privileged to play a part in, we discover connections that, in our distraction and blindness, were invisible. Only when we assume our proper role in the matrix of interrelationships do we come upon our purpose. By unloading the cultural assumptions and conditioning we’ve been charged with we find our proper roots in the eternal. Life doesn’t mean much before we become consciously rooted in what Jung is calling the “divine drama.”
We live at a time when cliches have replaced the divine drama as a reality of life. We, as individuals, have to find a new way to that world.
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My first book is a compilation of selected Medium articles. You can get it at Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9RY2XSX?dplnkId=36fc7dd4-54df-4b5a-9b6b-567e03c345e5&nodl=
