Choose the Path of Enlargement
A very effective instrument when in the face of blockages and difficult choices is to ask the very pragmatic question: “Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” I submit that usually we know the answer to that question immediately. If we don’t know the answer, then it is important to continue the question, for its resolution will always appear: as a dream image, a sudden recognition in the middle of the night, an insight that occurs in the middle of traffic when the ego is not maintaining its usual vigilance against disturbing thoughts. And then we know the answer to that question. We should choose the path of enlargement, not service to wealth, power, fame, or the accolades of others, because it is what is asked of us by the soul. When we choose the small, we don’t have to step into the large, which is quite comforting until we realize we are living small, diminished lives.
To be sure there are many forces in this world that contribute to diminishment. They are well known: poverty, lack of education, prejudice, dealing with a tilted playing field. But the biggest diminishment of all is the deep lesson derived from having been small, dependent, unknowing, and those matrices, repeated through our most formative years, feed diminishment, psychospiritual impoverishment, shame, and unworthiness.
Recall the common message of childhood: The world is big, and you are not. The world is powerful, and you are not. This message, overlearned, abides with us throughout all our journeys. What makes us timorous is the activation of the old paradigm with which we all grow up, that we are small and the world large. That message is corrosive to our sense of worth, our entitlement to possibilities, our right to dream. I am not endorsing grandiosity, inflation, hubris, or any other delusional denial of reality; however, most of us, quite simply, live lives too small for us.
In his various essays on personhood, Jung writes that the summons to personhood is a calling, a true vocatus, in the original sense of a calling from the sacred. To obey this calling is tantamount to religious obedience to that which is larger than we. And therein lies both the path and the conundrum.
We all know people who have excess entitlement, whose narcissistic inflation seems limitless, who do not respect the democracy of the grave. We also know people whose core insecurities have resulted in compensatory inflation. They are the power brokers of the world. They lie to the world because they have to lie to themselves. As the great American philosopher Pearl Bailey reportedly said, “Them’s what’s thinks they is, ain’t.” Their compensatory inflation is not what I am talking about. The attainment of personhood is not self-aggrandizement; it is answering a summons to step into oneself, to honor one’s interests, talents, and callings, whether recognized by others or not.
In walking through the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, I am always moved by a work of sculpture there. Titled The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, it is the life work of a gentleman who was a janitor for the federal government. By day, James Hampton swept the floors and cleaned the toilets. By night, he walked with gods and the vision they had vouchsafed him. Slowly, with tinfoil from a thousand pieces of chewing gum and the fragments discarded by a bored public passing through the buildings in his custodial care, he assembled his grand vision. I know no other artist with a vision this grand — including Michelangelo, who at least had patrons with deep pockets. Slowly, privately, he worshipped at the shrine of his particular genius.1 This is a man I admire greatly. He did his work, honored his vision at home, in his garage, unseen by any until his death. He dialogued not with public support, or fame, or companionship, but with the really large.
We all have a calling. For some it will be found in our capacity for caring for the needs of the suffering world around us. For others it will be the work of hands. For some it will be the work of the mind that opens doors and shatters shackles. For still others it will be the exploration of the natural world. For some it will be pushing back the boundaries of our limited sense of the possible. But for all of us, there is a large summons.
From childhood on, we all felt that others had it together and we did not, that others knew what they were doing, while we clearly did not. But we have never been admitted into their doubts, their failings, their moments of moral cowardice, their shames. Only when we risk our own journey can we begin to pull back the projections we have on others. Everyone we meet is beset with their own problems. Most of the time they don’t want you to know that, and they are also trying to figure out ways not to know that for themselves.
Because we learn early that the safe response often lies in our denial of the reality of our own feelings, we soon align against our personal authority, becoming strangers to ourselves. Because we grow facile in this self-denial, we forget over time that what we really feel matters. As a counterpoise, we must recall that we do not choose feelings. Feelings are autonomous responses of the organism to how things are going from its perspective. We can choose to ignore feelings, project them onto others, anesthetize them, and so on, but we do not choose them. It took me quite a while, as a thinking type, to realize this elemental truth. Having lived in an atmosphere where my feelings could so easily be discounted and realizing also that the expression of my feelings might further destabilize a tense environment, I soon became insulated against them. One turning point occurred in my early days as a college professor, when a student, no doubt meaning well, said, “I want to be just like you.” “How so?” I asked. “To have no feelings,” he said. I think he meant “cool” or something like that, and while I could not believe that his assessment was accurate, still his perception of me had to be based on something. It was, of course, one of many cracks in a policy of self-containment that had proved protective, but whose buffers had constituted a pathologizing gulf between persona and inner reality.
The memory of intimidation by the large constrains us all. To ask the question at critical junctures in our lives, of relationships, of careers, of lifestyles, may prove of decisive significance: Does this make me large, or does it make me smaller? We all remember moments in our lives when the choice was for the smaller, often safer, route, and the fact that we remember, that something in us aches, is itself a clue that the summons continues. No history of deflected choice, no life of shame, no patterns of self-defeating choices can be used as an excuse to remain small, psychologically speaking. Once we know, once we remember, we cannot not know.
To reiterate, the choice of the large is not in service to grandiosity or to inflation; it is quite the contrary. It is in service to our growing recognition that something else besides security, fitting in, and protection asks our recognition. Rather than be enslaved by our fears, in service to our limiting heritage or our debilitated, even devastated, history, we understand finally that we are called to something large. Our attitude toward others then changes. We grow less fearful, less suspicious, less needy, because we know that we have a calling to something else. It is natural to have fears of the world. Only a psychotic person would not. But it is a violation of our souls if we live our lives governed by our fears.
Ultimately, to step into the larger, we have to go through our fears. I have to emphasize go through. There is no magic, no set of five steps to dissolve the obstacles, no pill, no narcotic to make it all possible. There is only the going through and then realizing that we are on the other side of that issue. While the child is dominated, even devastated, by the loss of the approval of others, the person who goes through finds something within that supports, approves, and carries.
Friedrich Nietzsche had a peculiar aphorism that he expressed through his character Zarathustra. We are, he observed, a going under and a going through. We are an abyss, and we are the tightrope across the abyss. What are we to make of those conundrums? It is my belief that we go under by dying unto our old fears and old beliefs, and we go through by living our lives as best we can manage. I also suspect that by “abyss,” Nietzsche underlined the magnitude of being. Nearly a century later, Martin Heidegger observed that the abyss was an “openness of being,” rather than that which swallows us. When we remain prisoners to our complexes, and their history-bound, unimaginative purview, what else can we do but repeat our fugitive history? When we summon the timorous ego to the magnitude of our soul’s intent, we step across something deep within ourselves that abides in the midst of the abyss — the most difficult going through. All those whom we admire in history had to go through something, and when they did, they learned on the other side that they were still there, though the world was different. Then they began to step into their possibilities and felt more completely the support of energies within.
In all of these years, I have met only one person who had this sense of the large within her even as a child, and the courage to live it. She called this inner voice, this guiding genie, TWIHAT: an acronym for That Which I Have Always Thought. For reasons I do not know, this stalwart sojourner sustained a trust in that voice we all have within us. She trusted it, lived it, went through hard times with it, and came out the other side, as we all will if we risk trusting our own individuation process, our own guiding spirit, and our invitation to choose the large over the small. Then we serve not our egos, but our world, and bring a greater contribution to it.