The inward journey is the classic one of mysticism. I am not a mystic, and yet I have had to learn some of the ways of inwardness as part of the Journey in Four Directions.
Many people today believe that the journey inward is important because we have, within ourselves, everything we need to help us on our journey.
I do not believe this. In fact, I believe almost the opposite: that we have within us almost everything that will hinder us on our journey. For this reason, it is vitally important to journey inward and discover, name, and be aware of these hindrances. Then, if we are very wise and very brave, they may even become helps - not all the helps we need, but helps. C.S. Lewis has a wonderful image in his allegory of heaven and hell, The Great Divorce, in which a man struggles with an ugly lizard representing lust which has always been a burden to him. When he finally agrees to give it up, to allow it to be killed, it falls to the ground and becomes a powerful horse, on which he rides rapidly in the direction of Heaven.
In the words of Carl Jung, one of the 20th century's most prominent advocates of the inward journey:
What we call civilised consciousness has steadily separated itself from the basic instincts. But these instincts have not disappeared. They have merely lost their contact with our consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect fashion....
A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.... Modern man protects himself against seeing his own split state by a system of compartments. Certain areas of outer life and of his own behaviour are kept, as it were, in separate drawers and are never confronted with one another.
- "Approaching the Unconscious" in Man and His Symbols, ed. C.J. Jung, London: Aldus Books, 1964.
(Emphasis mine, non-gender-neutral language Jung's. I have doubts about Jung but agree with him here.)
"To be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into [your] arrangements and decisions" - that is the inward journey. The phrase I express this in is as follows: "Greet every part of yourself as a companion on the journey."
I say "greet", because "welcome" is too positive and "recognise" too neutral. We do not have to approve of every part of ourselves - in fact, it would be foolish. But we should do more than recognise it. We should accept it as what it is, a part of ourselves. We should greet it as a companion - one that will travel with us, that we will be aware of as we travel. This is especially true of our shadow (another Jungian concept).
There are a number of ways of becoming self-aware, and I will divide them into some categories to make it easier to write and read about them (though naturally everything is connected and we are concerned with understanding ourselves as whole people).
Beliefs influence what we wish to become and are able to become. Awareness of our own beliefs, and a critical position concerning them, reduces their power to influence our actions as unseen, unacknowledged puppetmasters.
The mechanics of how our minds and emotions work, and work together, are basic to a full understanding of ourselves. Recent science has given us outstanding insights in this area which have helped my process of becoming.
I speak here mainly of the insights of psychology (literally the "study of the soul") in all its many aspects. How the soul is shaped (and reshaped), the ideas of personality and character, how to find your own soul's shape, and what to do after you have done so are among the issues I discuss and erect guideposts for.
To deal with the whole person we cannot neglect the body. Evidence is mounting that the state of the body and the state of the soul are closely linked; what happens to one affects the other.
The ultimate aim of self-awareness is not self-awareness, but, paradoxically, self-forgetfulness - an essential of the outward journey.
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29 November 1997.
This material is copyright 1997 to Mike McMillan. Use for profit is reserved to the author unless otherwise arranged.
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