What Is the Bigger Picture for You?
Our pictures of self and world are framed early, and as we have demonstrated, we seldom see a world larger than our frame allows. And yet, this is precisely why we have to come to recognize, respect, and dialogue with the other autonomous centers of intelligence within each of us that are wise in their ways and also invested in our well-being. This means the almighty ego has to realize that it is not really the master of the house, that there are many agencies that go bump in the night, many organs of special interest that play out their agendas, and equally that there are many healing mechanisms at work in the daily recalibrations of the organism as it seeks to survive and prevail in this world. Such mechanisms include dreams and symptoms — both autonomous, qualitative expressions of the psyche with which a genuine, respectful, and humble dialogue can lead to a much greater amplitude of vision, as well as a deeper, richer experience of the unfolding mystery of our own being.
When we consider “What is the bigger picture for me?” what comes up on the screen most often is: “Can I get the mortgage paid, the kids through school, find some partner to make my life whole, achieve a sense of satisfaction and well-being?” Where do we stand in relationship to the larger in our life, given that our complexes, our protective mechanisms, are driven by small concerns — important surely, but still small in the larger schemata of life.
When we reflect on the larger picture for our parents, what comes up? Do we find, for example, that our worries, concerns, preoccupations, and obsessive behaviors are the same and replicate their anxieties? If so, did we not just acquire them by internalizing their examples? Do we find our parental models were naturally caught in the questions and values of their time, leaving aside for the moment whether we are equally caught in the questions and values of our time? For example, for most of our parents, the power and role of the collective was much more influential than in our time. For them, exclusion from collective expectations was a form of hell. So whatever our parents thought, longed for, and suffered, most of them carried on in daily silence. When there were aberrations, such as people of different faiths marrying, people of different races mingling, or people of alien values expressing themselves, there was a generalized reaction and always, always intimidating judgments.
More recently, a nationally known woman told our mutual friend that she would not attend a class or lecture at the Jung Center because one of her children had seen a Jungian analyst in couples therapy and . . . got a divorce! In other words, no consideration of what might be best for the soul of her adult child, let alone the child’s right to their own decision even entering her purview. According to this woman, the role of the therapist was to keep the couple together, perhaps at all costs. I grieve, more than judge, the world of our parents, because for them their world was so circumscribed by socialized roles, categories, scripts, and expectations — and the sanctions for those who did not conform quite severe.
Similarly, their “big” religious picture was rather small as well, in my view. And even today, the mainstream religions have lost an enormous number of adherents — some split off by the enticements of the modern secular world, while others learned that there is a larger world out there, larger than the old tribal values — so that we are no longer constrained by the historic lens of our antecedents.
And yet, in the Western world at least, the only organized religions that grow and thrive are based on two diminishing perspectives. On the one hand are the fundamentalists, who respond to the changes of the modern and postmodern worlds by seeking to reconstitute the old values, the old normative ethics, and the old hierarchies of authority. Theirs is a community driven not by genuine experience, not by authentic conviction, but by anxiety and a “treatment plan” that reestablishes a known, albeit limited, world and its containing choices.
The other branch of institutional religion that grows is the one that has shaken hands with secularism, the gospel of prosperity, the motivating agenda of well-coifed, slick purveyors with polished programs, telling us that getting right with the Big Guy upstairs will lead to happiness, prosperity, and peace. Very seductive, those offerings, but they have the staying power of cotton candy, offering richness but leaving a gritty substance on the palate.
Which of these “bigger pictures” is worse: the one that infantilizes people by evoking omnipotent parent complexes in them, making them feel guilty, inadequate, and unworthy, or the one that offers an untroubled path but betrays them in the inevitable dark hours that come to all of us? Which is worse, that which infantilizes or that which trivializes? It is hard to decide between these two perversions.
For sure, we have good-faith efforts to address the role of anxiety in our journeys, with treatment plans ranging from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, to sundry forms of Eastern meditation, to a panoply of narcotics and a vast pharmaceutical industry devoted to numbing our angst. Additionally, we have generated a popular culture whose twenty-four-hour buzz offers a life of distraction, divertissement, and various anodynes in seductive packaging. So what then is a big picture for any of us?
On the front we have traditionally called religion, I agree that we are religious creatures at heart, no matter what our preoccupations, addictions, distractions, or confessions. In his Systematic Theology, theologian Paul Tillich asserted that religion is where one expresses one’s “ultimate concern.” If one’s ultimate concern is to gain material abundance, many millions so worship. We are surrounded by people who possess more than people have ever possessed before in history. And how are their lives faring? How are their souls? Recent studies indicate that the basic annual income in the United States necessary to achieve a state of relative well-being, even “happiness,” is around $50,000.1 At various stages above that figure, no appreciable increase in the sense of well-being is evident. In other words, a natural concern for providing food on the table, a roof over one’s head, and clothing for one’s person is quite understandable, but beyond that, more is not really more, or at least more is not enough to be more. What does that tell us?
There is something in all of us that longs for a bigger picture. Something in us wishes for connection, wishes to reframe the trivial in our daily lives, the pettiness with which most of our systems operate. If we look thoughtfully at the enterprise we call the great religions, with their rich anthologies of wisdom, their timeless stories, and their insights into the permutations of the human soul, we can still draw much that is useful in this wired world in which we swim. But we all have to uncover some other criteria by which we evaluate the instructions to which we are all in service most of the time. As we know, the complexes we serve, the autonomous clusters of history within us, have a historically generated, time-bound message for us. As long as they are operating, we are serving the small world they embody. Again, were there no psychopathology, no restlessness of the soul, why would we ever question these received, limited, fractal frames? And so, similarly, whatever our received religious values, I suggest some other criteria for evaluation.
First, does our encounter with the rich mystery of life repeatedly call upon us to reframe our understanding of self and world? If it does not, I submit that we are less linked to certainty than stuck in constriction, locked into an emotionally contained, imaginatively stunted partial view. Yes, we know that having to reframe our concepts, practices, understandings, and even values generates anxiety, but a mature spiritual position will oblige us to tolerate more anxiety than we wish. An authentic journey will ask us to embrace contradictions, suffer ambiguity, and not fall into either-or thinking, which is so characteristic of the immature or the frightened mind.
A mature spirituality will be one in which we encounter more mystery than is comfortable. After all, the things we can understand, tolerate, fixate in concepts are surely not the mystery. The mystery will always transcend our desires for clarity and certainty. But how much of that can we tolerate? F. Scott Fitzgerald has a character in one of his short stories who defines the first-rate mind as one that can hold opposites in tension without having to fall on one side of the ledger or the other. And Jung added that ordinary ideas are easily contradicted by other ideas, but for profoundly truthful ideas, their opposites are also true. Therefore, only paradox can begin to approach the magnitude of the universe in which we float.
A mature spirituality does not offer certainty; it offers mystery. It offers depth, it obliges reframing our understandings, and it requires growing up psychospiritually.
Considering the larger picture for each of us on a very personal level requires that we reflect on Jung’s concept of individuation. By individuation, he does not mean narcissism, ego aggrandizement, or being measured by any external achievements. Individuation means submission, not ego triumph or transcendence of the ordinary. It means surrendering the life we wanted or expected, for that which the gods or the soul (whatever metaphor you prefer) calls for. Most of the people we admire in the history of this planet are people who did not have easy, comfortable lives; in fact, most of them suffered horribly. But we admire them because they won their way through to incarnate their unique gifts in this world. Their gift sometimes took the form of prophetic utterances, scientific discoveries, social visions, creative expressions, or acts of self-abnegating compassion. But most of all, they were the willing vehicles for Being that seeks expression though our individual beings.
The bigger picture for all of us is found in asking from time to time, “What is my life about, really?” We are all deeply invested in the details of daily life, and usefully so, but we are more than economic animals, more than social tokens on a large board, more than perpetually hungry animals. We are souls in the world of flesh, spirits in the world of perpetually decaying matter. What does it mean to be here? To what am I called? What values, traits, and capacities must I embody in my life? These are the kinds of questions that call us out of the trivial, that help us reframe our frustrations and disappointments and step into something larger than fitting in, being successful, being safe, and being accepted by everyone. These moments are far from comfortable, but they are energizing and lead us from one developmental stage to the next, and the one beyond that, stretching out into the emergent future. Then we are alive, not just going through the motions. We are alive because we are serving life more than security, serving growth more than comforting stasis, serving the soul more than the anxious, distracted, and fugitive crowd.