Try listening to every sound while you’re cooking dinner or taking a shower. Don’t add any meaning, labels, or thoughts to the sounds. Just hear them as they are, letting them pass through you. If you do this perfectly, you’ll have a direct experience of reality. Simple yet profoundly difficult. And you might find a great deal of joy in it.
“People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don’t accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them. When they resolve to spare themselves the pain and suffering, they owe to their nature. In so doing, they refuse to pay life’s dues and for this very reason, life then often leads them astray. If we don’t accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse! In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something. One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. After much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result—because avoidance is much worse.”
Carl Jung, from Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung by Aniela Jaffé.
I think many people misunderstand this advice from Jung. They take it to mean “I should work hard and achieve my goals and kiss the beautiful girl and do what I am driven to do, or I’ll get a neurosis.” But what he’s actually talking about is far less comfortable, far more grounded.
The problem with viewing Jung’s advice as “live in such a way that you won’t have regrets” or “just be yourself” is that no human on Earth knows how to do that. In fact, following Jung’s advice in that way is a great way to end up with regrets because regrets rarely come from doing something wrong in our past. They come from assuming we actually could have done things better in the past without the knowledge we have gained in the present by doing them badly.
Instead, Jung was speaking against this very thing. By trying to avoid an inevitable future in which you have regrets (inevitable because you don’t have perfect knowledge of outcomes, or how to achieve them, or what you actually want to achieve), you develop a neurosis that you have to deal with because you didn’t simply sit with the uncomfortable reality that you are a human being who can’t live a perfect life.
Sitting with the uncomfortable reality; that is really the key here. A bit of wisdom from Simone Weil can help us understand what reality is and why accepting it is so hard.
In her reflections on gravity (she is referring to a mental/spiritual gravity, not Newton’s gravity) and relationships, Weil suggests that our natural drives try to even scores. If my friend is late, I am bound by the law of gravity to seek retribution — maybe I make him apologize, maybe I keep score to use against him later, maybe I treat him with coldness. Weil calls this necessity. It is necessary for me to seek retribution. Necessity is beautiful, according to Weil. It’s the only reason we should do anything. It’s perfect obedience to the laws God wove into the universe.
But when it comes to relationships, necessity must be disrupted because humans are free, conscious beings; children of God.
The disruption of necessity is exactly what Christ was talking about when he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.” (Matthew 5:38-39) The law of gravity drives us to seek an eye for an eye. Grace — the beautiful gift of divinity breathed into every human heart — is the ether that enables us to turn the other cheek.
Grace gives us freedom from our drives. It also makes us unique among all creatures on Earth. We are dust — Earthly things, natural drives, gravity. But we aren’t mere dust. We are dust given form and the breath of God — Heavenly things, freedom from our natural drives, grace.
My friend was late. That is reality, the unadorned truth. When Jung says, “if I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality,” that’s what he’s talking about.
The law of gravity, according to Weil, drives me to seek retribution for the injustice of this reality. I am driven to even the score with my friend. For any number of reasons — maybe shame, maybe social stigma — I might find this drive unacceptable, so I ignore reality. I pretend my friend wasn’t late. I adorn the reality with deceptions. And the seed of a neurosis is planted.
But it goes deeper than that. Our culture seems to think our drives are who we are, and Jung’s writing is too often interpreted in that light.
When Jung says “one cannot do more than live what one really is,” he doesn’t mean you should follow your drives. He means you should experience your drives. To do that is to be human. But humans aren’t just animals that must obey the law of gravity. We are conscious. We are more than just our drives. We have the unique ability to act against them. We can, with grace, and only with grace, turn the other cheek.
When my friend is late, I don’t have to ignore that he was late, and I don’t have to seek retribution or lower my opinion of him to even the score. And I don’t have to think of a million reasons why it hurt me, why he doesn’t care about me, why he’s evil, why I shouldn’t be friends with him anymore. That cascade of accusations is called splitting — seeing another person as entirely good or entirely evil. It is a known and well-documented psychological neurosis that comes, as Jung points out, from a refusal to accept reality.
Instead of splitting, I can accept my friend’s tardiness, not out of weakness or conflict-avoidance, but out of a deep consent to reality. My friend was late. I consent to that reality. I don’t need to explain to myself why what he did was disrespectful or hurtful or immature.
I desperately want to pile all of this other thought on top of the simple reality. Why? To avoid the pain of the reality. Carl Jung is saying that that is the refusal to pay life’s dues, that is how a neurosis develops. And it is better to suffer by consenting to reality than to suffer by piling a bunch of rumination on top of it.
If you can spare yourself a neurosis, it is very likely that you’ll also spare yourself regret because regret comes from the same thing: avoiding reality. We don’t spare ourselves from regret by doing everything or making the perfect decisions. We spare ourselves from regret by accepting the uncomfortable reality that we are limited creatures who cannot do everything, who cannot make perfect decisions.
How do we accept that reality? It’s not always easy. In fact, it may be impossible for us. But perhaps something beyond us can help. As Simone Weil wrote, in Gravity & Grace, “In order to have the strength to contemplate affliction when we are afflicted we need supernatural bread.”
By grace, allow the pain. It will do its work and then leave you. And you might even find that it has left you with some hard-earned wisdom.
