We all are born into a certain situation, given a name, and begin to develop a life. In our early years we take direction from the collective forces around us. There is a lack of freedom in this arrangement, as so many decisions are made for us, dictated by family, society, and tradition. Our relationship with parents is primordial; it sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, but of course the culture we enter also shapes who we become and what is relegated to the underworld of unlived life.
Qualities supported or suppressed are different for each person. A cute little girl enjoys special attention and opportunities at school, while other capacities in her remain dormant. A strong and physically coordinated boy who becomes an athlete may gain social privileges, while other talents go underground. The naturally plump girl in a skinny class will stand out and perhaps even become the brunt of jokes and comments that reinforce her shyness and resentment. The child born with a physical deformity, the sensitive gay boy, the adolescent scarred by acne, the racial minority in an intolerant neighborhood, the brainy kid who loves to read—all individuals face challenges that will bring certain aspects of their personality to the fore.
How we look, how we respond to others, the “goodness of fit” between our innate qualities and that of our parents and teachers, our gender, our social class—all these have enormous impact on what gets included in our lived life and what is relegated to unlived life.
Every culture instills one-sidedness in its members.
The ancient Greeks, whose culture is often referred to as a flowering of Western civilization, called those who did not speak their language barbarians because the sounds they made were unintelligible gibberish—bar bar—to their ears. One of the functions of culture is to designate what we pay attention to and what we ignore. We learn to take in some things and dismiss others.
Intelligence, as measured in modern society, is learning to pay attention to the “right” things. And so we make our way through life. A child takes the qualities that the culture likes or calls good and affixes them to the conscious personality, while the remainder falls into unlived life. Often these are quite arbitrary.
Take manners, for example. If I burp loudly at the dinner table, in Western culture this is considered bad manners. Burping, though natural, is socialized out and pushed to the left-hand side of the personality teeter-totter. In many places in Asia if you don’t burp at the end of a meal, it is an indication that you are not pleased with the food. Many, many customs are like this. In one place it is a sign of honor to cover your head; in another place it is a sign of honor to uncover your head. In one place it is forbidden to go into a temple or holy place without shoes. If you try to walk into St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome without shoes, you will be thrown out, whereas in any village in India you don’t dare enter a Hindu temple with your shoes on.
The thrust of Western society is to specialize, with particular emphasis on developing thinking abilities. We ask: What did you get your degree in? To specialize in something means to gather up energy and add it to that faculty of the personality. One robs energy from another faculty to specialize in some aspect that is chosen (or, more likely, one that was chosen for you). In Western culture we are trained in thinking, paid for thinking, honored for our ability to think. In the hierarchy of human skills, thinking currently is at the top of the heap, while feeling and emotional intelligence are considered less important. In other cultures, such as those found in traditional societies such as India, there is a greater emphasis on feeling qualities.
We would like to think there are innate things that are correct, but for the most part it is the result of what significant others have decided for us.
The Influence of the Ancestors
How Castor and Pollux came to be born is key to understanding their destinies. Legend has it that Zeus, king of the gods, was sojourning on the face of the earth looking for a fair maiden, as he liked to do. Being a god and all-powerful, he had his way with a beautiful woman named Leda. Leda is not a Greek name, but in Asia Minor it meant “woman.” So we could say that out of a union with her divine consort, woman conceived a pair of twins, one feminine and the other masculine. Later that same night Leda also joined in love-making with her earthly husband, Tyndareus, the king of Sparta. From this mortal union Leda simultaneously conceived another pair of twins, one feminine and the other masculine.
In due time, the creations emanating from Leda were brought into this world as quadruplets: One pair, a boy and a girl, had been fathered by a god and mothered by a mortal, while mere mortals parented the other two children. The pair sired by Zeus, the immortal ones, were given the names Pollux and Helen; the mortal twins were called Castor and Clytemnestra. In this manner Leda’s children were divided between heaven and earth. A parallel development, though with differences, could be explored through stories of the two women. Our story will focus on the masculine pair, Castor and Pollux.
We can see how the core issues facing Castor and Pollux were created even before their birth. One boy must abide by the practical cultural rules of earth, while the other must be held to the ideals and laws of the heavenly realm. This follows naturally because their mortal mother, Leda, was similarly split; her loyalty was torn between Zeus and Tyndareus. She carried the seeds of twinship and division.
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote that “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents,” by which he meant that where and how our caretakers were stuck in their development becomes an internal paradigm for us also to be stuck. Frequently we find ourselves dealing with a parent’s unresolved issues. At times we may replicate the patterns of our ancestors, or we may rebel and attempt to do the opposite. Interestingly, antagonism to the influences of parents binds just as tightly as compliance. Either way, antecedents confine and limit us. Perhaps this fact is behind the ancient biblical admonition that the sins of a man shall be visited “upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”
We all are familiar with the phenomenon of the ambitious stage mother who lives out dreams of becoming an actress by pushing her beautiful daughter into beauty pageants by age five, or the Little League dad who plays out his own athletic fantasies to the detriment of his child’s development. These are simple examples of unlived life that unconsciously is passed along to the next generation. As long as we unconsciously serve a parent’s ambitions, agendas, or limitations, we are prisoners of the past.
Most parents do the best they can, given the tools available to them, but the role of caretaker easily becomes a means and excuse for controlling the life of a child. There always are unconscious assumptions and motivations behind a parent’s actions. For example, they may want you to achieve something they missed out on. The unstated bargain is “I will love you if you do what I know is right, but you must not disappoint me.”
When a parent cannot stand some quality in his or her child, this is a good indicator of something that is unlived in the parent. I had one client who was not allowed to express anger, though he was regularly beaten for alleged misdeeds. His mother lived her life as a fundamentalist Christian. Anger and sexuality were the work of the devil, so these fell into unlived life. She had to beat these qualities out of her boy to save him. Of course, as an adult this poor man became terribly neurotic concerning these issues; he was promiscuous and carried around a seething cauldron of repressed inner rage, problems that destroyed his first two marriages. The heritage from his family was the suppression of instinctive qualities, and they burst forth at the most inopportune times.
Another example: Nancy came to my consulting room to discuss her marital problems. Her husband and teenage daughter were constantly ignoring and even denigrating her efforts to take care of them. For years she had prided herself on being a good wife and mother, always sacrificing her own needs. How ironic that “these two ingrates,” as Nancy called them, were now accusing her of suffocating them. Her demeanor was pinched, anxious, and overtly controlling. This middle-aged woman was constantly nagging her daughter about grades, her friends, practicing the piano. All of this was well intentioned. When we reviewed her own childhood, Nancy recalled how when she was fifteen she watched her mother enter into a midlife fling. Mom abandoned the household, filed for divorce, and then embarrassed everyone by dating a string of younger men. “I swore I would never be like her,” my client said, reduced to tearful resentment at the memory. What she came to realize was that she had tipped the teeter-totter of her personality in the opposite direction. Ironically, Nancy was so intent on being the perfect mom that she had given up having a life of her own, which her husband and daughter could plainly see and openly resented. A pattern of rebellion and antagonism to the parental model is just as confining as emulation. The old paradigm distorts and limits present experience in either case.
Suppose you are raised in a family with a fiery and brutal father contrasted by an oversensitive mother who represses all signs of her emotion. A child in such a setting cannot emulate both parents at the same time. When annoyed or stressed, she will be pulled by opposing reactions until a choice is made and one becomes more predominant in her personality. The other personality trait is suppressed, but it still exists as a potential, where it is added to the ever-growing inventory of unlived life. Under stress this person often flips to the opposite, and the suppressed quality comes out in a clumsy, unadapted way.
Inadequate adult modeling narrows our choices, as children naturally imitate what they see. Unfortunately, a child will internalize characteristics of an abusive, frightened, or depressed parent as well as a caring, confident, and happy one. The human brain’s capacity for organizing experience through patterned prototypes is both its strength and its downfall. Encountering an early series of consistent experiences can implant a limiting generalization in a child’s mind, and so we split off things that we will eventually need to find in ourselves. As children, it is difficult to evaluate whether the larger world runs in accordance with the scheme drawn from the emotional microcosm of the family. This is inevitable in the first half of life. Yet as long as the psyche unconsciously and indiscriminately serves the ambitions, agendas, and confines of others, we fall short of achieving our own potential. Eventually we will be called to sort through this inner maze to find the path that is truly ours. This sorting process, to emerge into an enlarged state of adulthood, is the worthy achievement of the second half of life.
Each individual’s temperament and vulnerabilities interact with the mix of ancestral patterns. Another client, Ron, told me his parents had emigrated from the former Soviet Union. “They were Russian, with anarchy inside them. My grandfather was German and his blood flows in me, too. I can feel his correctness in me, the need for order. Sometimes I hold a grudge, but then I say forget it and the Russian blood prevails, the blood of peasants who are used to working. We have to work.”
Sometimes unlived life mysteriously seems to skip a generation. I have had several clients who were children of World War II Holocaust survivors. Their parents refused to talk about their experiences in the labor camps, but the children came to me suffering from hopelessness, guilt, and deep depression that seemed unrelated to current life circumstances. “It is as if I must feel the grief that was too much for them to bear,” one man told me.
Some people particularly seem to carry compensatory qualities for the partial consciousness of those around them. In the extreme this can be a scapegoat quality: one child becomes the “black sheep” in the family. All families have someplace where unlived life collects.
Something interesting can turn up between siblings in the same family: one child may get an overdose of one quality while a sibling gets an overdose of the opposite. As a result, your brother or sister often carries something that you need in later life. Often we see families in which two siblings can’t stand each other, but in adulthood, if they bring enough consciousness to bear, they discover that their personalities need exactly the qualities that their sibling specialized in.
Sigmund Freud said that no one ever really forgives the person who civilizes them; this process leaves indelible influences, scars, and limitations. But if you don’t civilize young people and just dump them out naively into the world, this is a worse disaster. So a certain amount of alienation and resentment is inevitable—this is the price of consciousness.
If you are parenting children, making conscious your own unlived life is the best legacy you can pass along to your kids. If you wish to give your offspring the finest possible gift, deal with your own unlived life. One of the most harmful things we can do to others is burden them with our unconscious material, yet we all sin in this manner. The best we can do is to become more conscious of our inner stories, and thereby more understanding of ourselves and of others.
Off to the Wars
As we have seen, Castor and Pollux were inseparable friends throughout childhood, but as consciousness develops there always is division. When we are young and innocent, there is no problem of being divided. Castor and Pollux lived in a Garden of Eden tranquility that had only the beginnings of consciousness and therefore limited psychological difficulties. But as soon as maturity arrives with its complex consciousness, the wars begin.
The Greeks presumed that it was the fate of boys, especially a duo like Castor and Pollux, to go to the wars. They prepared for life’s battles by being tested as athletes in the Spartan Games, which was a most sacred event in ancient Sparta, with feats of physical and emotional prowess similar to the Olympic Games. Such games were considered good training for the challenges of maturity.
The wars began in earnest for Castor and Pollux when Theseus from the rival state of Athens carried off their sister Helen prior to her promised marriage to King Menelaus of Sparta. The brothers were called upon to fight, and they successfully brought their sister safely home to Sparta. (Helen would eventually become queen of Sparta, and years later a second abduction of her by Paris would lead to the Trojan War.)
What does this story have to do with modern life? I ask: Is there ever tranquility when there is the stirring of consciousness?
Psychological development automatically creates a conflict within us—these are the inner wars. They vary in character, but the hallmark is always conflict and decision between the righteous and the enemy, the good and the bad, the self and the other, the “this” and the “that” (the word de-cision implies a cutting out, just as an incision is a cutting in). These conflicts inevitably create division and anxiety. Our egos can only perceive reality in terms of oppositions, our very language and thought forms being dualistic.
Throughout life all of us are faced with innumerable decisions: some easy and inconsequential, others troublesome and far-reaching. It begins when you wake up in the morning: Should you put on this shirt or another one? Should you go exercise today or conserve energy and focus on your work? Should you eat dessert at lunch or stay on your diet?
It seems that we could not get through life without being divided, and it is this split into lived and unlived possibilities that solidifies our citizenship in the dual world. Everything that conscious human beings experience is brought to us in pairs of opposites.
Another familiar story, the Garden of Eden, speaks of this as the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The underlying conflict that grows out of consciousness is always the same, though with endless variations in the story. The world becomes a warring between this and that, with the ego always caught in the middle and required to choose.
We all go off to the wars each day: at work, juggling the household chores and the demands of the children, the unending oppositions that tie life up in knots. A neurosis consists of entertaining two opposing ideas at the same time, generally one of them conscious and the other unconscious.
The wars will eventually lead to a complete separation of Castor and Pollux, and it is this split that is the seat and dynamics of so many of our problems. Every opposition, every collision, every possibility in your life is basically the dilemma of Castor and Pollux.
What I am calling “the wars” is the duality of ordinary human consciousness. If you watch a child growing, you will see the gradual development of a personality centered by an ego. The ego divides the world into subject and object. “I see this.” That subjective “I” grows by watching and imitating others.
Hero Worship and Unlived Potentials
We may see our potentials in an older sibling, a friend, a teacher, a mentor, and that person becomes synonymous with meaning. A person carrying our potential is a hero to us; their smile can raise us to heavenly heights, while a frown hurls us to hellish depths, so great is the power of meaning.
The Castor and Pollux story is filled with hero worship, and it calls to mind our own youthful exploits of growing through imitation of others while taking on the world. The Golden Fleece was the pelt of a golden ram sent to earth by a goddess. It was said to have been placed in a sacred oak tree in the distant land of Colchis. When word went forth throughout the ancient world of Jason’s plan to find this priceless treasure, Castor and Pollux were the first to arrive for the adventure, riding all the way from Sparta on beautiful white horses.
A great ship was built to accomplish this sea voyage, and it was named the Argo. All the places visited by the Argonauts need not concern us here, but during one stop they were attacked while lighting their fires on the beach of a distant island. A king named Amycus threatened to kill all of the Argonauts unless one would consent to fight with him.
A renowned boxer even as a youth, Pollux had taught the younger Heracles how to fight, but that Greek champion was nowhere to be found during the attack by Amycus and his tribe, the Bebrycians. So the light-skinned Pollux stepped up to do battle with the dark and hugely shaped Amycus. The king of the foreigners, standing on the tips of his toes and rising high above him, tried to bring down his great fist upon the head of Pollux. The young hero swung aside and took the blow on his shoulder. Then he struck his blow. It was a strong one, and under it the king of the Bebrycians staggered and fell down. “You see,” said Pollux, “how we keep your law.”
The Argonauts shouted with excitement, but it was then that the Bebrycians raised their clubs to rush upon them. The Greeks retreated to get back to the Argo, but suddenly Heracles appeared, coming up from the forest and swinging a pine tree with the branches still attached. At this show of strength from Pollux’s pupil, the barbarians hurried off, carrying their fallen king with them.
The Argonauts gathered around Pollux and Heracles, saluting them as their champions and placing laurel crowns of victory upon their heads. Pollux had the good sense to thank the gods for the victory (modeling for Heracles the virtue of humility in conjunction with the release of energy that occurs when we exercise new capacities).
In childhood we all have heroes whom we worship because they carry some of our unlived capacities. These may be athletes or celebrities, but often they take the form of someone immediately in our lives. For a ten-year-old boy or girl, the twelve-year-old who lives down the street is often looked up to as a hero. The ten-year-old wants to imitate the older child. He walks like him, or she wears clothes just like her older model. We all know the power of fashion, and especially how fashion runs through a neighborhood of adolescent kids. The style of shoes, the type of haircut, all those things you’ve got to have. This is a form of hero worship. When we’re young we need projections to pull us into life.
Two years later, when the ten-year-old is twelve, he or she has become the characteristics that once were projected onto the twelve-year-old. These potentials have been assimilated and realized. Now he (or she) hero-worships a fourteen-year-old and has a new ladder to climb.
I remember vividly my own early hero-worshipping. It was so strong. Albert Schweitzer was a great hero of mine, chiefly as a musician and a humanitarian. I listened to his recordings. I read his ideas about re-forming recitals of J. S. Bach, suggesting that Bach’s works should be performed slowly and deliberately with great ornamentation and attention to detail. I fairly devoured everything about Albert Schweitzer. Then along came this powerful dream in which I actually ate him. In my dream I bit into Schweitzer’s flesh and then devoured him like a cannibal. This was such a shocking dream that I was embarrassed even to share it. When I told an early mentor about this dream, he patiently explained, “Don’t be disturbed. This means you are going to have to be an Albert Schweitzer, in some form. All heroes need externalizing. These are potentials in you that are becoming ripe for development.” My life went on to become a pale imitation of Albert Schweitzer’s, and that’s the power and strength I subsequently gained. At this time I was learning to assimilate my own potential greatness, represented by Dr. Schweitzer.
Eventually I was able to claim my own unrealized potentials rather than always projecting them upon a hero. Schweitzer was a wonderful musician who played Bach in a thrilling manner and published an influential book about building pipe organs. I learned to build clavichords and became an amateur musician, though I played mostly for friends and family. Schweitzer was a medical missionary in Africa, a great humanitarian. Inspired by his example, I have done my best to pursue my own inner work and share my findings with others. For nineteen years I spent my winters in India, attempting to synthesize the best of two very different cultures.
Of course, potentials that are projected and emulated are not all virtues from a societal perspective, and we must not idealize childhood. Children also pick up bullying, coarse language, cruelties, fear, greed, and a host of other “anti-heroic” and limiting qualities by following the lead of older kids, cultural models, and adults. Gang behavior results when youth attempt to initiate each other and assign herolike status to behaviors and values that are inconsiderate or even harmful. Not all of the projected contents of the unconscious are golden.
Romantic Love and Unlived Life
It is important to understand hero worship as the precursor for another archetypal experience by which we all can grow or falter: romantic love. (An archetype is Jung’s name for a universal pattern or blueprint by which energies take form. The Greek roots are arche, meaning “first” or “original,” and typos, meaning “model” or “type.”) By the teen and early adult years we begin to look for ways to complete ourselves through a romantic partner. Hero worship evolves into a search for our missing pieces by worshipping a soul mate. It is a painful fact that a good deal of what passes for romance is actually our own unlived life reflected back to us.
Take a few moments to look back on your personal relationships. What were the qualities that made your love interests attractive when you first met? What made them shine? The qualities that we most admire in a prospective partner are unlived potentials that are ripe for development within ourselves. When we awaken to a new possibility in our lives, we often see it first in another person. A part of us that has been hidden is about to emerge, but it doesn’t go in a straight line from the unconscious to consciousness. It travels by way of an intermediary. We project our developing potentials onto someone, and suddenly we’re consumed with him or her. The first inkling that something in us is attempting to change is when we see another person sparkle for us.
Again, this is how we grow, but if we do not become conscious of unlived life, our projections will undermine intimate relationships. As a relationship progresses, so often we demand that others fill in our missing pieces rather than utilize the relationship for mutual growth in consciousness. No one notices at the time, but in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved, for we are really looking at our own incipient potentials. And precisely because we have not reclaimed them as our own, we act out unfinished business and relive old wounds with the very people we profess to love. So often we unfairly require our partners to carry what is unlived in us. By observing what we attribute to the other person, we can see our own depth and meaning.
Love, as practiced from the egocentric perspective, is finding someone to use. “I love you because you are good for me, you complete me.” I once heard a client say that she had broken up with her husband because “he doesn’t fulfill my needs anymore.” Now she wanted to use someone new to get her requirements met. In contrast to this, love is the understanding of the identity of oneself and the beloved. That’s the only true union that a human being is capable of realizing; otherwise it is just casting about for mutually agreeable bargains. People think that hate is the opposite of love. Actually, power is the opposite of love. Love is identity with the other, while power is the desire to control the other for our own purposes.
In our culture, mutual projection is regarded as the prerequisite for marriage.
We take for granted that we will marry the person we are in love with, but that doesn’t work over time. To fall in love is to give our most profound unlived life to someone to incubate for a while, until we are ready to take it back. But for the relationship to succeed, somewhere along the way each of the partners must take back their projection and reclaim their own unlived life.
Unfortunately, that’s usually accompanied by disillusionment. “You’re not the prince I thought you were.” “You’re not a princess when you wake up in the morning.”
As one painfully honest young man recently told me, explaining why he was filing for divorce, “I’ve fallen out of love. She just doesn’t satisfy my soul anymore.” I couldn’t help myself from replying, “Well, what did you expect?”
If we could just understand that expecting someone else to carry our unlived life is acceptable only for a period of time—until we get stronger—and someday it must come to an end. We aren’t wise in this respect, and it’s one of the most painful issues in our culture. When, six months or one year or thirty years after the marriage began, the relationship “isn’t working,” we don’t recognize that it’s high time for us to withdraw our projections and actually relate to the person—our partner, our spouse.
True relationship can only be based on human love, which is different from romantic love, being in love, or in-loveness.
Romanticism is unique to the West, and only since the twelfth century. And romantic love is not in and of itself a basis for marriage. Our human life, our relationships, are fed by the capacity to love human to human. When we’re in love, we put our unlived life—our expectations—on the other person, and it obliterates him or her. There is no true relatedness.
Loving is a human faculty. We truly love someone for who that person is. We appreciate and feel a kinship and closeness. Romantic affection, on the other hand, is a kind of divine intoxication. We deify the other person. We ask that person, without knowing it, to be the incarnation of God for us. Our religious life can be fed by in-loveness. It is a deep spiritual experience, for many people the only religious experience they’ll have in life, the last recourse God has to catch them.
When you ask someone in a relationship to incubate your unlived life for you, try to be conscious of what you’re doing. If you ask someone to carry that numinous, glow-in-the-dark quality, understand that doing so will obscure him or her from you as a person. Naming the process helps. That’s the beginning. Why do I have this feeling when I look at such-and-such a person? Do I really see him or her? Do I truly love this person, or am I putting a bell jar over my beloved, which will obliterate the real person from my sight?
Most of the time we are not conscious of this; our unlived life is bouncing around out of sight and out of control. The extent to which we project in our relationships is a serious problem. We see our own unlived potentials reflected as in a mirror, not the true reality of the other person or the outside world. The exchange of projections takes place much more frequently than you might realize, so you must try to be conscious of it and do what you can to reclaim it as your own. The first half of life feeds on projections—this is how the unconscious becomes conscious. This is akin to the search for the Golden Fleece. If we did not project idealism and love, we might never leave home. However, in the second half of the journey our projected values, hopes, and dreams lose some of their magical power. Our illusions are disillusioned. It must be so if we are to collect our own missing pieces and become more whole.
Reclaiming Ourselves: An Exercise
In this chapter we have seen that how we were raised and who we fall in love with can provide insight into what is unlived in us. The exercises that follow are designed to help you discover clues to the development of your “other side,” your “missing twin,” as it were, and to assist you in the process of exploring the unlived life of your ancestors. Devote some undisturbed time to these exercises. Make sure it is a quiet world of its own, a sanctuary from outer disturbances.
Let’s start with your family of origin. Take a few moments to consider the following questions: What is known about your entry into the world? Was it planned and welcomed or an accident? What stresses might have existed that influenced how you were nourished in those first months and early years? What were the hopes and plans of your parents at this time? Did they have dreams that were deferred?
In dealing with the unlived life of parents, it does no good to resent them. Opposition to parents only strengthens ties to the old family patterns. Try to accept their failings with compassion, without reacting against them. They simply lacked the necessary consciousness to do better with the reality that they faced. Reflecting upon your early upbringing is not about assigning blame but rather a first step in becoming aware of the patterns that continue to shape present experience. Those psychic reflexes might well have been different—and they can still be changed.
Many times people are deeply hurt because they cannot get parental approval. We all have a deep hunger to be understood and accepted for who we are. But when your caregivers cannot provide this, you must accept that this will not be forthcoming. Candidly ask yourself: What difference does their approval or disapproval really make? We all would like it, but, in truth, we don’t really need it.
Take some time to answer the following questions, either on your computer or a piece of paper:
Now let’s look at whom you really admire or the people who were heroic to you in your childhood. Who has mentored you? What qualities did you admire in them? What has been the nature and realization of those qualities in you? Can you see a bit of yourself in the people you put on pedestals?
Finally, a review of your romantic life can yield tremendous information about unlived aspects of yourself. Think back to your first love. What were the things that first drew you to him or her? What about people you had crushes on?
Now turn to your recent or current relationship. What unlived parts of yourself do you unconsciously expect that person to carry for you? Try this: For one day, make a note of your disappointments and frustrations with your significant other. Then see if you can identify those same qualities in yourself. A revealing exercise, to be sure!
After you have finished these exercises, they will keep working silently for you, and you can add to your list. If you want the impact to be greater, return to the exercises over the course of the next several days. Stop to consider the unlived life of your parents right in the midst of everyday activities. Remember how much you idolized your first boss or a special professor in school. Let life be your ever-present test laboratory for discovering how assumptions about reality limit your experience.