Life is always calling us. It tells us plainly, this is what we are to do and this is where we are to go. It’s an invisible pipeline between us and the energy of our soul that we’re born with. It communicates through our nervous system. It dictates the course of our lives more than anything else, including environment, early or otherwise, using intuitive whispers, chance, and unreasonable aspirations.
Addiction and culture-sick personality block our destiny; they sever the tie between us and the energy of our soul. The lights go out, and a suffocating stagnation with its attendant hopelessness becomes our day-to-day. Something comically shallow becomes the substitute we mistake for a viable source. But the more we draw on that distraction, status, or approval, the weaker we become. All external sources come with limits. Nothing can compete with God.
The difficult circumstances of our lives are necessary parts of our story, not random or punitive misfortune. They exist to build in us what our calling requires. They’re not unfair, evidence of wrongdoing, or cause for quitting; they’re weights we need to lift over our heads. Age, size, education, and training may interrupt or alter the personality’s plan, but destiny intends and makes use of them.
Destiny never bows to psychology. The limits we impose on ourselves with labels and explanations are more about how we remember, defend against, and argue with past events. We’re blind to the plot; our story is bigger than disadvantages and bullies. They are the concrete, and we are the grass cracking through, destined to grow despite anything. We don’t earn it or undergo a decades-long process; it’s here now. We need only direct the same relentless loyalty we give to our excuses and victimhood to it.
If we are to fulfill our destiny, we have to handcuff ourselves to our inner call until it becomes our reality. It’s not one of a thousand theories to question; it’s a fact to abide by. If we refuse to acknowledge it or invalidate it with psychological theory, we’ll be angry and resentful. We’ll languish in longing. The call never dies down.
Destiny doesn’t require capacity. Genius is a bank from which we all can draw; it’s not a trait bestowed on a chosen few. Like a personal librarian, we can ask it to retrieve what we need in the moment. If what we consume in the name of improvement, of earning our way there, gives us the doomed feeling of a cell door locking with its certainty, if it’s lifeless and stale, then it’s not working. It’s never going to work. Psychology is not law. It’s stimulating, but it doesn’t deserve reverence. Law is law. All we have to do is obey it.
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It is very probable that only what we call consciousness is contained in space and time, and that the rest of the psyche, the unconscious, exists in a state of relative spacelessness and timelessness. For the psyche this means a relative eternality and a relative non-separation from other psyches, or a oneness with them.
Carl Jung's Letters, Volume I
Song Accompaniment
More Essays
So Many Sources, So Little Relief
Life is always calling us. It tells us plainly, this is what we are to do and this is where we are to go. It’s an invisible pipeline between us and the energy of our soul that we’re born with.
The Mind Turns on the Passive
We only work on problems we believe have a solution. Everything else — precedent, other people’s opinions, the weight of “it can’t be done” — is a story the mind tells itself to stop looking. This is what happens when it starts looking again, and what happens when it doesn’t.
The Gap Between Us and Everything
There’s a gap most of us maintain without noticing, between ourselves and the universal energy running under everything. We call it being realistic. We call it caution. Passion is the one thing that actually closes it, and resignation is not the same as peace.
Ok. So now what?
Let the mistake be just that — a mistake. Not an omen, not an albatross. What comes next is a question of fact, not feeling.
Silly, Self-Centered. That’s Us.
We got the stuff and the people, and it didn’t satisfy, didn’t soothe. Aggravated, in fact. What makes us childishly happy isn’t too hard to come by.
How We Fail the Same Way. Twice. Again.
It’s not the magnitude of the situation that stops us. It’s whether we allow ignorance to strip us of the will to stand back up — and how we keep choosing not to look.
