Live
Deep
“There
is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we
each give to our life, an individual meaning, and individual plot,
like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
Anais Nin
(The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol.1: 1936-1934)
At the Friends of
Jung-South board meeting last night, we talked about several programs
we will bring to Birmingham in the next year--one next month about
giving up perfect, and being open to good, and one in 2018 on
personality types and how they interact in relationships. We have a
good response to our seminars simply because they are different—not
the usual continuing education material for psychologists and
counselors. They dive down a little—more heart than head, more understanding than imparting information.
We also talked about the
response to the Solar Eclipse. People who traveled to the path of
totality were more likely to describe the experience in superlatives:
“cosmic,” “transcendent,” “life-changing.” Perhaps the
experience was so potent because the “Black Sun” or “Dark Sun”
is an archetypal symbol from ancient alchemy—the process of turning
base elements into gold. The dark sun is the symbol used to indicate
the first step in the alchemical process—the blackening. Even when
we don't know the meaning or symbolism of an archetype, we respond to
them emotionally. We say we are having a spiritual experience. On
Monday, during the eclipse, we stood in streets, on rooftops, in
fields, and on beaches across this country, shared our eclipse
glasses with total strangers, and collectively observed a perfectly
normal process—one governed by the natural laws of the universe.
Our experience of it, however, was well beyond that. It was
archetypal. It had unusual significance because we gave it unusual
significance.
Our tendency to look for
meaning in life-events is a singularly human trait. It is the rare
person who does not look back and assign meaning to things that
happened in the past—especially those that changed the trajectory
of our lives. It may be difficult in the moment, or in the months
surrounding any major life event, to sort out its meaning, but in
retrospect we do that. We assign meaning because doing so enriches life. Every person's story is a compilation of significant
happenings. The more open we are to finding meaning in everyday events, the more purposeful our lives will seem, and the
clearer our story will be.
People are hungry for
meaning. We want to feel that our life is mysterious and deep—and
it is. Looking for the underlying significance in everyday events is
the vehicle for diving deep and “sucking out the marrow”
(Thoreau). When we come to the end of our days, we will know that we
have lived—and that's a very good thing.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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