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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
Jean Benedict Raffa, The Soul’s Twins: Emancipate Your Feminine and Masculine Archetypes, Red Feather Mind, Body, Spirit, Atglen, PA, 2020, p. 181
You have two vocations that require your ego’s full cooperation before your instinct for creativity can help you accomplish your life’s purpose. The first is to create a conscious work of art out of the raw materials of your soul. The second is to make your creative contribution to collective consciousness. You were born to do these things. and nobody else can do them. If you haven’t already found your vocation in the outer world, you will know it when you find it because you will want to do it even if no one notices, even if you don’t get paid.
I saw opening out before me a clearly marked field of activity, with all its problems, its hard work, its materials, its instruments, and its inflexibility. I no longer asked myself: what shall I do? There was everything to be done, everything I had formerly longed to do ... but everything was possible.
Individuation is the development of the capacity to realize, and to experience one separateness, one’s wholeness, one’s uniqueness.
Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasies of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual.
From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside dreams: who looks inside awakes.
In every adult there lurks a child - an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.
But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most important of all offenders yea the very fiend himself – that these are within me, and that I myself stand in the need of the arms of my own kindness, that I myself in the enemy who must be loved – what then?
The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity.
It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.
Independence and self-respect emerge when the role of the good obedient girl is no longer extant.
The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.
[The] act of self-recollection or the gathering together of what is scattered indicates the integration and humanization of the self.
The capacity to mourn is consonant with the process of individuation, as becoming oneself is connected to the capacity of the mind to process separation and mourn what was lost.
We become ourselves through interactions with others, and in this experience, we find the face of others within ourselves.
Individuation involves the transformation of the analyst as well as the patient, stirring up in his or her personality the layers that correspond to the patient’s conflicts and insights… Archetypal dynamics will affect any analyst, particularly one whose life is not fully lived and needs to be.
Without an accurate inner mirroring, she assesses herself to be either inferior or superior to others … To recover herself is a process requiring a dive into the unconscious.
Move outside the tangle of fear thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.
There is a lack of passion, the kind that comes from sidestepping the depths rather than going to them. At some point, life events caused her to halt abruptly and take a step back into accessing her core self. This often means stripping away the very mechanisms through which she has seemed to survive.
Individual self-reflection, return of the individual to the ground of human nature, to his or her own deepest being with its individual and social destiny – here is the beginning of a cure for that blindness which reigns at the present hour.
I come to be by differentiating myself from the world into which I was born, but success of this project requires that I become a differentiated unity.
As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in height and awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.
To know our self is to know our complexes individually and distinctively and become aware of how they change and morph through life.
Why, what is to live? Not to eat, and drink and breathe, – but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully.
I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear – a care-woven garment to protect me from the questionings and thee from my negligence. The “I” in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain forever more, unperceived, unapproachable.
For an individual to come to be, she needs freedom from certain internal and external tyrannies.
There must be someone who understands. And it’s inside myself that I must create that someone who will understand.
Our passionate selves are our best selves: and a passionate life is only possible, by definition, if we can make our passions known: to ourselves … There can be no passion - without representation … Passion entails circulation and exchange.
Your Unique Self is your irreducibly unique perspective which fosters your unique insight which creates your unique gift which engenders your unique responsibility to address the unique needs in your circle of intimacy and influence. Are you willing [as a seeker of enlightenment] to play a larger game? Let me state the core premise clearly. We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. Why can we not access the outrageous love necessary to engage in the evolutionary healing and transformation of ourselves and our reality? Because we shut our hearts to the unbearable pain of the world. Not merely because, as the classic enlightenment teachers reprimand us, we are stuck in ego. Rather because the gap between our ability to feel and our ability to heal has become too great. It simply hurts too much. Through the virtues of the virtual media we are almost omniscient. We are aware today of a level of suffering that only God was aware of a hundred years ago. But unlike the classic vision of an omniscient but also omnipotent God, we are largely impotent to heal the suffering. Because the gap between our ability to feel and our ability to heal has become too great, we shut our hearts and turn inwards in varying mixtures of overt narcissism and more subtle spiritual materialism in the form of soothing meditations and various pseudo-realizations of oneness and enlightenment. This is in marked distinction to the realization of Unique Self that closes the gap between the ability to feel and the ability to heal.... We now come back to our core premise. We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. What does an outrageous lover do? She commits outrageous acts of love. Which outrageous acts of love? Those acts of love that are a function of her Unique Self. In this way the enlightened Unique Self who is the incarnation of all that is, living in her as her and through her, intimately addresses the unique needs in her circle of intimacy and influence. In doing so she reclaims her potent power — the power of the Shekhinah — the power to heal and transform. The gap between the ability to feel and the ability to heal is closed. The heart opens once again and a sacred activism sourced in outrageous love perfumes all of reality.
Each person is a unique word in an endless sentence spoken by God, whose illocutionary goal is total self-expression.
One person's mind is not similar to another person's mind.' For God apportioned goodness and life to each one in particular, and no one is similar to anyone else. It is therefore written, 'Lift up the head.' That is, every person should be in the place belonging to [them].
Each individual has massive reserves of untapped potential, often squandered and neglected during the struggle to make a living and conform to social roles that deny individual potency and uniqueness.
Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous, the gods wait to delight in you.
It might be that the healthiest cognitive position concerning forgiveness is an attitude that allows for the possibility of its currents on the other side of extensive grieving.
Healing progresses when we learn to distinguish depressed thinking [which we need to eliminate] from depressed feeling [which we sometimes need to feel].
The depth of our ability to be there for an intimate generally depends on the depth of our capacity to practice unwavering allegiance to ourselves.
I subscribe to authenticity as one of my highest values, but it does not include sharing my outer critic’s view of you or exposing my inner critic’s unfair judgments of me. Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Azure Coyote, USA, 2013, p. 195
I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
I subscribed to the normalcy of vacillating along a continuum of efficiency.
I am a human being not a human doing.
As long as I am not hurting anyone, I refuse to be shamed for normal emotional responses like anger, sadness, fear and depression.
Disapproval is OK with me … Their disapproval of me is actually an affirmation that I have indeed been involved in right action.
She has scorned herself as selfish countless times, until one night she had the epiphany that she was by far not selfish enough.
A healthy relationship with yourself is seen in your ability to move in a balanced way between doing and being, between persistence and letting go, between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation, and between intense focus and relaxed, daydreamy reverie.
He not busy being born is busy dying.
Deep-level recovery is also evidenced by you becoming gradually more relaxed and safe enough company. This intern leads to an increase in capacity to be more authentic and vulnerable in trustworthy relationships… Advanced recovery also correlates with letting go of the salvation fantasy that you will never have another flashback.
A further sign of recovering is a gradual increase in your ability to relax… This means you only fight back when under real attack, only flee when odds are insurmountable, only freeze when you need to go into acute observation mode, and only fawn when it is appropriate to be self-sacrificing.
Persistence – even more than intelligence or innate talent – is the key psychological characteristic necessary for finding fulfillment in life.
Fire is the sun unwinding itself out of the wood.
When inward tenderness Finds the secret hurt, Pain itself will crack the rock and, Ah! Let the soul emerge.
And the day came When the risk to remain Close tightly in a bud Became more painful Than the risk it took To blossom
Accept your myth and live it.
To see that one must begin with oneself is to realize an enormous truth; but most of us overlook it, we easily brush it aside, because we are concerned with the collective, with changing the social order, with trying to bring about peace and harmony in the world.
At some point in your spiritual journey, you may have a profound mystical experience. This does not mean you are finished. It means you are at the threshold of a new path…
Life will become a gift to be savored; not a contest to win, obstacle to overcome, or ordeal to endure.
You will not stifle your gifts, pretend, respond habitually, or conceal your true needs and honest feelings. You will respond to life with openness, honesty, and spontaneity. This is true freedom.
Rebelling against outmoded beliefs and traditions can be very scary, but you will never be happy or fulfilled until you find the sacred within you. Because that's where it lives - in you and everyone.
As a reward for your hard work and determination, Innovator gradually removes the obstacles to self-fulfillment in your worldly pursuits. This closes old doors and opens new ones. Opportunities show up. New ideas take shape. Your confidence grows. You produce observable results. You attract the attention of mentors and allies who help you fulfill your dreams. Your efforts to integrate both twins invite success and power to gravitate toward you.
Unless you begin with yourself, do what you will, you will never find the end of sorrow... You have to understand yourself, and you can play with it a little bit every day. A man who plays with the understanding of himself will perceive far more than he who preaches to others.
They can tolerate the tension of dancing between the two worlds without breaking because they know and trust this process. They are this process. They are the knower and the known, the seeker and the sought, the heights and the depths, the core and the circumference. They are you.
Uninterested in society's artificial boundaries, you will not be constrained in your need to satisfy your deep hunger for physical and emotional attunement with your inner world and the world outside.
To live oneself means: to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator.
Your goal in life is not perfection but completion.
For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong.
Living your own life with courage and integrity is how warriors, knights, heroines, and heroes define power and success.
I can see no sense in our blaming the war for things that have happened to us. Each of us carried within himself the elements that brought on the war.
You'll develop a more balanced personality - and better relationships - if you take criticism seriously and examine your dreams. Both provide mirrors to your shadow.
The transformation of a soul does not happen easily for anyone.
…if you start losing interest and feel increasing dissatisfaction with your work, relationships, or life in general, your less well-developed nature needs more immediate attention.
To maintain an ongoing awareness of your inner life is the secret to befriending and empowering your soul's twins. They are your personal guides, and they can lead you to unitive consciousness and wholeness if you let them.
Who cares what kind of energy you use or what you call it as long as you live authentically and spontaneously in joyful participation with the sorrows of the world?
You were made for self-knowledge, individuation, wholeness, and love, and your soul will not settle for less.
… evolving into your fullest Self is a matter of your ego's willingness to consciously integrate your inner psychological opposites. Your growth into greater self-awareness and self-acceptance progresses roughly through four epochs or stages: physical consciousness, ego consciousness, integrative consciousness, and unitive consciousness.
Jung concluded a woman's unconscious masculine side and a man's unconscious feminine side hold the key to individuation and spiritual enlightenment. He believed that only by integrating your inner opposites – the divine feminine and divine masculine – into an inner partnership, traditionally called the sacred marriage, can you grow into your complete, unified Self.
I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone.
I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people – aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice. Of course I did not always obey it. How can anyone live without inconsistency?
For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable. I’ve had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved divisive, it overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grasp of the daimon. I can never stop at anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.
Insight into the dangers and the painfulness of such a state might well decide one to stay at home, that is, never to leave the safe fold and the warm cocoon, since these alone promise protection from inner stress ... A good many persons, however, find themselves thrust out upon the road to individuation. In no time at all they will become acquainted with the positive and the negative aspects of human nature.
There is now an authentic secret in his life which cannot be discussed – if only because he is involved in an endless inner trial in which he is his own counsel and ruthless examiner, and no secular or spiritual judge can restore his easy sleep.
But anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.
At first everything is thrust upon him, everything happens to him, and it is only by great effort that he finally succeeds in conquering and holding for himself an area of relative freedom. Only when he has won his way to this achievement, and then only, is he in a position to recognize that he is confronting his instinctive foundations, given him from the beginning, which he cannot make disappear, however much he would like to. His beginnings are not by any means mere pasts; they live within him as the constant substratum of his existence and his consciousness is as much molded by them as by the physical world around him.
What happens within oneself when one integrates previously unconscious contents with the consciousness is something which can scarcely be described in words. It can only be experienced. It is a subjective affair quite beyond discussion; we have a particular feeling about ourselves, about the way we are, and that is a fact which it is neither possible nor meaningful to doubt. Similarly, we convey a particular feeling to others, and that too is a fact that cannot be doubted. So far as we know, there is no higher authority which could eliminate the probable discrepancies between all these impressions and opinions. Whether a change has taken place as the result of integration, and what the nature of that change is, remains a matter of subjective conviction. To be sure, it is not a fact which can be scientifically verified and therefore finds no place in an official view of the world. Yet it nevertheless remains a fact which is in practice uncommonly important and fraught with consequences.
To me there is no liberation à tout prix. I cannot be liberated from anything that I do not possess, have not done or experienced. Real liberation becomes possible for me only when I have done all that I was able to do, when I have completely devoted myself to a thing and participated in it to the utmost. If I withdraw from participation, I am vitally amputating the corresponding part of my psyche.
Where danger is, there is salvation also.
All haste is of the devil.
Once the past is breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion.
I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.
I have the feeling that I have done all that it was possible for me to do. Without a doubt that life work could have been larger, and could have been done better; but more was not within my power.
For I felt that something great was happening to me, and I put my trust in the thing which I felt to be more important sub specie aeternitatis. I knew that it would fill my life, and for the sake of that goal I was ready to take any kind of risk.
For youthful folly, it is the most hopeless thing to entangle itself in empty imaginings. The more obstinately it clings to such unreal fantasies the more certainly will humiliation overtake it.
If … a technically minded young man … is consciously to choose the way of psychic development, he must be prepared for a reversal of his old attitudes… Only then will it be possible for him to judge at what level he must deviate to reach the group, the other qualities of his psyche that he had left behind.
Hence, for the individual to enter seriously into the process of individuation in the way that has been outlined means a completely new and different orientation toward life.
… an unconditional devotion to one's own process of individuation also brings about the best possible social adaptation.
Symbolically, this points to the fact that often the urge toward individuation appears in a veiled form, hidden in the overwhelming passion one may feel for another person. (In fact, passion that goes beyond the natural measure of love ultimately aims at the mystery of becoming whole, and this is why one feels, when one has fallen passionately in love, that becoming one with the other person is the only worthwhile goal of one's life.)
This inner Great Man redeems the individual by leading him out of creation and its sufferings, back into his original eternal sphere. But he can do this only if man recognizes him and rises from his sleep in order to be led.
It is exactly the same in the initial crisis in the life of an individual. One is seeking something that is impossible to find or about which nothing is known. In such moments all well-meant, sensible advice is completely useless-advice that urges one to try to be responsible, to take a holiday, not to work so hard (or to work harder), to have more (or less human contact, or to take up a hobby. None of that helps, or at best only rarely. There is only one thing that seems to work; and that is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you.
The actual process of individuation — the conscious coming-to-terms with one's own inner center (psychic nucleus) or Self generally begins with a wounding of the personality and the suffering that accompanies it. This initial shock amounts to a sort of "call," although it is not often recognized as such. On the contrary, the ego feels hampered in its will or its desire and usually projects the obstruction onto something external. That is, the ego accuses God or the economic situation or the boss or the marriage partner of being responsible for whatever is obstructing it.
Although many human problems are similar, they are never identical… Because of these factors of sameness and difference, it is difficult to summarize the infinite variations of the process of individuating… The fact is that each person has to do something different, something that is uniquely his own.
… in order to bring the individuation process into reality, one must surrender consciously to the power of the unconscious, instead of thinking in terms of what one should do, or of what is generally thought right, or of what usually happens. One must simply listen, in order to learn what the inner totality — the Self — wants one to do here and now in a particular situation.
… simply to fulfill one's destiny is the greatest human achievement, and … our utilitarian notions have to give way in the face of the demands of our unconscious psyche.
The individuation process is more than a coming to terms between the inborn germ of wholeness and the outer acts of fate. Its subjective experience conveys the feeling that some supra-personal force is actively interfering in a creative way. One sometimes feels that the unconscious is leading the way in accordance with a secret design. It is as if something is looking at me, something that I do not see but that sees me — perhaps that Great Man in the heart, who tells me his opinions about me by means of dreams.
… man certainly is able to participate consciously in his development. He even feels that from time to time, by making free decisions, he can cooperate actively with it. This cooperation belongs to the process of individuation in the narrower sense of the word.
Strictly speaking … the process of individuation is real only if the individual is aware of it and consciously makes a living connection with it.
The inborn but hidden totality of the psyche is not the same thing as a wholeness that is fully realized and lived.
The awful daring of a moment's surrender, which an age of prudence can never retract.
A child … possesses a sense of completeness, but only before the initial emergence of his ego-consciousness. In the case of an adult, a sense of completeness is achieved through a union of the consciousness with the unconscious contents of the mind. Out of this union arises what Jung called "the transcendent function of the psyche," by which a man can achieve his highest goal: the full realization of the potential of his individual Self.
… if a young man does not strive for a higher goal than he can safely reach, he cannot surmount the obstacles between adolescence and maturity.
Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another.
… one can reach the center directly from any point of the compass.
All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not.
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