“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” -Carl Jung 1
I have thought about Carl Jung's statement above for years. Though clearly removed from the context it was originally written in, the quote talks about vision, though it could equally be about a calling. It’s almost a call to arms, to “look inside”: Stop dreaming, get to work! The more I reread this statement, neither option—looking outside versus looking inside—is qualitatively any better or worse than the other, and it could be argued that they are both reasonable goals; but in the context, awakening seems key. I have mostly taken this statement to mean that, in terms of a calling, one should always look within and not feel dictated to by anyone or anything extraneous. And again, one should count themselves lucky to even get there.
As a mantra to live by for a writer, I've returned to Jung’s statement because it ties into my sense of finding resource, and resilience, in myself.
I thought about this statement recently when my daughter's class had to study identity. This required her to come up with five or six objects and explain how they defined her. The exercise was difficult for her, and the results were somewhat rudimentary. Her homework, however, got me thinking how much of what we do defines us; and, if one is lucky, how this choice is consciously made. I sometimes believe it has taken me four decades to even begin to feel I have established my own identity.
Much of the trouble I come up against in writing is the notion that I am somehow too focused on an inward look (which is not always at my heart; my brain, maybe. Or my gut, yes). Of course, shouldn’t this be the key to awakening? Maybe this is a misreading of Jung. Maybe it is wrong to conflate the two notions as they describe two different problems. In fact, I could argue that I consider each look (outside, inside) with a similar weight. Though there is a premium on the notion of being awake, Jung was so profoundly invested in the dream life that it is hard to see that he would advise against it, either. And maybe Jung is not admonishing in the statement as much as I would like to believe.
Jung’s words offer wisdom to me. Reading and studying his life and writings has often been enlightening and revelatory.2 This has been intensified by the active aspect of the reading, how I have found resonance with this notion of the inward gaze into my own life, also while on the verge of some necessary change. Maybe the times I have turned to Jung have been when I am looking for an answer or a solution to a problem.
In recent years, I have come to believe it is possible to reinvent oneself; not only that it is possible, but that it is necessary. I can look back at my life and recognize that a good number of beliefs, self-restrictions in a sense, set in place from my upbringing—which established an early unease with being in the world—have had to be consciously overthrown. The paradox of course is that I would not have become the person I am without those experiences, so shaking them off is essentially a willful rejection of them. But also, what fades is the sense that things could have been more perfect, more perfected, and that I might have found a calling sooner, or forgone certain other paths that have in turn defined me.
There is a natural impulse to protect your own child from the insecurities you had experienced growing up. But is this going to deprive her of a chance to grow through her own adversity? There is the counter-notion of imposing adversity onto a child so that she will know what that struggle is. But if I consider my own experience, my parents had their own adversity (growing up as children in the shadow of the depression, and then a World War), and I know they tried to give me their idea of a normal childhood. Still, I went through my own adverse traumas that I am convinced shaped me. Perhaps there is no way to account for what helps evolve us into our identities. I feel lucky to have found myself through creativity and hope that my daughter may find something equivalent for herself. Perhaps this is what Jung was talking about, looking inside, awakening the heart.
I have put years into writing, and this has felt like a calling to me. I often think I kept at it for so long because I was determined to be a writer; the longer I practice, definition becomes undeniable. It is where I have found myself at my best. At times it feels like a great gift, and though the thought can seem self-indulgent, the benefits and joys of writing are rewards I revel in within the province of myself, like a secret I can't always keep.
Our identity is what we define when we begin to recognize what we want (probably from within). In finding those things that we love to do, we begin to identify with them. The problem with limited experience is that we don't know enough what is good, or what we like, even love. Maybe we attach a false sense of identity upon those talismans of youth that we might one day, with better understanding, think to shun for good. I suspect that the exercise of my daughter attempting to define her identity at an early age is likely enacted by her school to foster cultural awareness at this fraught time when it can seem the hyperawareness of identity, or its lack, has come to define our unstable present.
There is an idea that one’s identity is defined from their genes. But the notion that one is fully born from the womb with an unassailable identity intact is confounding. In the nature versus nurture argument, it may not so much be that nature gets the upper hand, as it is that a lack of nurturing at all creates an insurmountable impediment. Nature has some sway, but from my own life, I can see when I have had to use my better sense (in effect, nurturing myself) to prevent some egregious choices in my life.
I have found, through writing, that it gets me closer to that awakening. It is as if the act of writing itself, the tactility of holding the pen and scribing words across the page touches some internal key to my being. And it leaves the residue, an artifact, the writing. It puts me as close to an ideal state as is possible. And perhaps it creates my identity, an activity which I am constantly defining.
This is purported to be a statement by Jung, though I cannot find the attribution in a text for this quote. Certainly sounds like Jung…
I’d start with Memories, Dreams, Reflections , a fascinating collection of transcribed conversations about his life that he had with his colleague and friend Aniela Jaffe. Also, The Portable Jung edited by Joseph Campbell.