Much might have been different

In the July, 2012, issue of “The Sun”, on “The Dog-Eared Page”, is this quote from C.G. Jung.  It is excerpted from Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Jung as edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated by Richard & Clara Wnston and published again and again and again by Random House.

            I am satisfied with the course my life has taken.  It has been bountiful and has given me a great deal.  How could I have ever expected so much?  Nothing but unexpected things kept happening to me.  Much might have been different if I myself had been different.  But it was as it had to be; for all came about because I am as I am.   Many things worked out as I planned them to, but that did not always prove of benefit to me.  But almost everything developed naturally and by destiny.  I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal.  And so I am disappointed and not disappointed.  I am disappointed with people and disappointed with myself.  I have learned amazing things from people, and have accomplished more than I expected of myself.  I cannot form any final judgment because of the phenomenon of life and the phenomenon of man are too vast.  The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or known about myself.

            I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself.  I am distressed, depressed, rapturous.  I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum.  I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness.  I have no judgment about myself and my life.  There is nothing I am quite sure about.  I have no definite convictions – not about anything, really.  I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along.  I exist on the foundations of something I do not know.  In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidarity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. 

            The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty.  Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament.  If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step of our development.  But that is – or seems to me – not the case.  Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true:  life is – or has – meaning and meaninglessness.  I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

            When Lao-tzu says, “All are clear, I alone am clouded,” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.  Lao-tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning.  The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true.  At every level of intelligence this type appears, and its lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or a great philosopher like Lao-tzu.  This is old age, and a limitation.  Yet there is so much that fills me: plants animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man.  The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.  In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me form the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.