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LIFE IS A RICH but fragile mystery. As depicted in Tibetan paintings of the Wheel of Life, from the moment of conception we are held in the jaws of Yama, the Lord of Death. Perhaps the greatest miracle is that some of us actually survive and are able to engage in life. In the womb, the likelihood of a fetus living through the duration of pregnancy is not great. The instinctual cries of an infant after birth are a powerful reflex for survival. By the time we have been in this life for a decade, this challenge to survive has become a normality to which we are largely oblivious. By adulthood, we have developed sophisticated psychological strategies and patterns to deal with the uncertainties and unpredictability of life. These strategies shape the person we become and, unfortunately, can do so in increasingly limiting and rigid ways.
As our personality and ego-identity become stronger, they can also become less flexible, so that our capacity for adaptation and change also slows and freezes. What were once natural mechanisms for adaptation, growth, and survival can begin to be limitations that actually accentuate our suffering. Life then presents us with a further challenge. Are we ready and willing to wake up, to let go and open to our intrinsically fleeting, illusory nature and allow ourselves to change? If we do not do so willingly, then it is inevitable that life circumstances will eventually demand that we face ourselves and shed the skin of our limiting self-conceptions to discover our true nature. Some may take up this challenge, this call, while others choose to do otherwise.
It may be difficult to imagine the internal struggle taking place in a young man trapped in stultifying luxury, desperate to break free and search for truth. Siddhartha, the son of a rich Nepalese raja, had been cosseted in circumstances that were primarily intended to prevent him from seeing the world at large. His father dreaded the path that his son might follow, should the inclination arise. At the time of Siddhartha’s birth, a prediction had been made that he would either become a great king or else renounce the kingdom, follow the path of a mendicant, and become a fully enlightened Buddha. In an attempt to prevent the latter from happening, the King contrived circumstances that would enclose Siddhartha in a world that was effectively a prison. In time, these conditions became intolerable. Siddhartha began surreptitiously venturing out of his enclosure in an attempt to discover more of the world outside. This only exacerbated his frustration and disillusionment with the false world he inhabited.
One can only speculate upon the torment Siddhartha must have gone through to respond to the call that was growing within. To leave a father, wife, and child would, I imagine, be extremely difficult, but this is what he was driven to do. Knowing that he would never gain his father’s approval, Siddhartha Gautama, the future Shakyamuni Buddha, had to leave in the dark of night knowing that he would probably never return.
Seldom is someone destined to become the king of a rich kingdom, but it is not uncommon to discover ourselves at odds with the circumstances in which we find ourselves. As a psychotherapist, I often encounter people who are tormented and depressed by the sense that their lives lack direction and meaning. These are often very capable and successful people who have materially accomplished a great deal in their lives. They have, however, gradually come to feel stuck in a world they have created for themselves, working hard but going nowhere.
The growing urge to break out should not be seen as running away. It may be tempting to suggest, cynically, that Siddhartha, like a lot of young men, could not bear the responsibilities of parenthood and simply ran away. Indeed, I have seen many clients whose disposition was to try to escape in this way. The inner call to change, however, often arises in those who have worked hard. They may, it is true, have focused their attention narrowly—perhaps on sustaining a relationship, bringing up children, or developing a career. Conversely, there are those who suddenly wake up to the fact that they have drifted through their lives and gone nowhere.
The call to wake up and change comes in many guises, and it may come at virtually any age. Possibly the most noticeable ingredient of any call, however, is a profound sense of malaise—a growing recognition of what the Buddha would have called the truth of suffering. The Buddha’s understanding of suffering was not a simplistic notion of pain or discomfort. Suffering, or dukkha in Sanskrit, relates particularly to a recognition of the fundamental unsatisfactoriness or pointlessness of what we experience. We may put effort and time into things that at first seem to offer a sense of meaning, only to find, at some point, that they begin to feel hollow and unsatisfactory. We may suddenly stop and ask ourselves why we are bothering. Money, status, selfesteem, reputation, security, material success, self-image, self-validation, approval, duty—the list of possible reasons is endless. Life may be insisting that we begin to face ourselves and honestly admit to our selfimposed restrictions and limitations.
When I was around nineteen or twenty, I experienced an initial call that gradually changed my life. Having left school at sixteen, I had been engaged in an electronics apprenticeship for several years in a “new town” called Crawley in Sussex, UK. I found myself becoming deeply disaffected and disillusioned by the factory environment I was working in. I began to see the routine of hundreds of people clocking-in in the early morning to work on production lines as numbingly meaningless. Being a late teenager, I expressed my inner angst in the form of poetic monologues. Some of these, in retrospect, were embarrassingly naïve, while others were surprisingly insightful. It was, however, a dawning of the realization that the factory worker life was not for me. I found it increasingly depressing and repellent.
My training officer at the time was surprisingly astute and had a significant influence on the call that was awakening in me. He could see my inner struggle with the world I was in, and he gradually shifted my perspective towards potentials that I had never considered. The narrow view of life I had grown to accept, even at such a young age, was beginning to break apart and open up to new possibilities. I realized I had to get out and eventually finished my apprenticeship, after four years. I went to university, something unusual in my family, and there found a response to my inner searching in the form of Jungian psychology and Buddhism.
While my call occurred at a relatively early age, for many it happens later in life, after many years of following a particular path. Typical of this phenomenon was the experience of a client who worked as an accountant and who was, on the surface, a safely settled family man with a wife and two children. When he discovered his wife had been having an affair for several years, he was thrown into a devastating crash, partly precipitated by his wife saying she wanted to be with a “real man.” This caused him to begin to look deeply at the situation he had set up for himself, which consisted of a secure yet undemanding job in a career he had entered by default, having followed his parents’ wishes. His relationship was with a strongly career-minded woman who had become the primary earner while he looked after the children.
Following the discovery of his wife’s affair, he began to wake up to the life he had created for himself, which was cut off from his feelings, safe, and without any real sense of his own identity as a man. He became acutely aware of his lack of fulfillment and a lack of real engagement in what he was doing. He felt impotent and as though he had never really stepped into his life. This painful wake-up call opened him to his emotional life and also to the recognition that he needed to embark upon a period of self-exploration if his life and relationship were going to have any real sense of meaning. He began to recognize how much he had become stuck in an unconscious need for a safe maternal cocoon and thus had run away from actively and passionately living his life.
Another example is the story of a client who had remained in a stultifying and potentially destructive relationship because she was afraid to move on. The combination of a chronic lack of self-esteem, a deep sense of duty, and a fear of breaking free held her in paralysis. Gradually she become ill, which made her aware of how much she was imprisoning her potential to be true to herself. Eventually the conflict between how she knew she could be and what she had forced herself to be became so painful she began to make the changes she needed. She then had the courage to leave the relationship.
The call so often comes because we have unwittingly dug a hole for ourselves that has limited and constricted our innate potential in increasingly unhealthy ways. At some point, an inner impulse to change becomes inevitable. It is our deeper instinct for health and wholeness.
This inner call awakens us to the need for change. Sometimes it is initiated by outer circumstances, such as an illness or losing a job or a partner, but it may also arise from something less specific: life may simply have become stagnant and apparently meaningless. There may also be a profound sense of incongruity between our outer life circumstances and our inner needs.
When people speak of the need for change, one often feels that an irresistible impulse is at work. It is as if they are being moved by a force in their lives that is greater than themselves. Jung spoke of the power of the Self as the inner archetype of wholeness, one that can unfold our life for us. However, its effect may not always be comfortable. The inner impulse towards wholeness can create an almost intolerable pressure to break through to a new way of being. This often precipitates the experience of a breakdown.
What eventually called me to the path I was to follow was an intense period of suffering which was accompanied by a growing recognition that I had to go on a journey. I needed to leave my familiar surroundings and take the risk of stepping out into the world on my own. Following university I left on my travels, which took me gradually around the world until I eventually arrived in Nepal. There, several months later, I found myself sitting at the feet of a Tibetan Lama receiving instructions on Buddhist meditation practice. I had a profound sense that I had come home.
In Man and His Symbols Jung speaks of the journey as a central theme of the process of individuation.1 The journey that emerges as a result of the call does not require that we travel in a physical sense: the traveling must be done inwardly. However, what it does require is that we begin to question the underlying assumptions upon which we have based our lives. Leaving home to go to foreign lands is one way of shaking up our preconceptions. The cultural shifts we encounter can help to detach us from the social and cultural conditioning by which we have become trapped. In the absence of physical travel, this detachment can equally well be achieved through a process of selfexploration such as therapy. What seems crucial, however, is that we allow ourselves to become dislodged from what was familiar and step into a place of liminality, of uncertainty, where we do not have to retain the sense of ourselves we once had. We may do this voluntarily and consciously, or this may be thrust upon us by circumstances, such as an illness or bereavement.
If we are to change and grow, we must allow ourselves to become fluid, not static and ossified. Then we can change shape as necessary. We also need others to allow us to change. In teachings on the bodhisattva’s way of life, it is sometimes mentioned that we may need to change our place of dwelling if staying in one place causes others to become fixed in their view of us.2 When this happens, the demands, expectations, or opinions of others can make it very difficult to change. I often hear clients in therapy saying that they are beginning to change and their friends or family don’t like it.
The call to travel, either inwardly or outwardly, is in part the call to break free of the constraints of a psychological environment that locks us into all manner of preconceptions and expectations. The sense of imprisonment that can ensue calls forth something from deep within that demands that we break up, break down, or shatter our solid reality so that growth can occur. This force from within is a natural expression of our own potential for health. I am reminded of the city of Rangoon, which I visited on my travels in 1973. There were the remains of many-storied Victorian buildings, left by the British. But, extraordinarily, trees, vines, and creepers were now growing through the pavements, walls, and ceilings, pushing their way through the layers of brick and plaster. The irresistible force of nature was reclaiming the city for itself.
If we listen to the call that is coming from deep within, we can begin to trust in a process that will lead us towards health and wholeness, towards individuation. If we do not—and some will not do so—the consequence may be dire. There are times in our lives when the call comes. If we fail to follow it, resisting change, plastering up the cracks, and attempting to carry on with the status quo, the call may return later. When it does so it will often be more forceful, more dramatic, and more devastating. At such times the consequences may be less easily resolved. Nature may reassert its need for our attention through chronic physical illness. The heart attack in middle age is a typical manifestation.
The call need not come through suffering alone, but it often does. In folk tales, there is usually dis-ease in the home. The King is old and sick, the land is barren, and there is trouble in the kingdom. The youngest son, the one taken least seriously, is usually the one called to heal the malaise. The possibility of healing is usually summoned by the realization that only by finding the sacred pearl, the healing elixir, or the sacred firebird will the kingdom be restored. The symbolism of this is charted in Jungian writings time and again.
The King symbolizes the ego within its increasingly unhealthy world. It is the ego that must evolve, gradually emerging from its origins in primitive, instinctual needs, and grow to inhabit a more conscious and healthy relationship to life. This is a hazardous journey—a journey of awakening and the emergence of consciousness. The call makes us begin to face the wounding that has inevitably occurred in the process of incarnating again in this material existence. We may have brought our susceptibilities with us from previous lives, and the early moments of this life will have reconstellated some of them. To quote Barbara Somers, with whom I trained to become a psychotherapist, many of us are like plants that have grown in rough, stony, poor soils and become damaged, contorted, and unhealthy, yet still manage to flower. Like these plants, by the time we reach relative adulthood, we may have been damaged in ways that we ourselves can barely see. The journey begins as we start to acknowledge our wounding and slowly take steps to heal ourselves.
One of the most common responses to the call to heal our sense of self is the search for what we call spirituality. This seems to be a kind of instinct that we possess as an aspect of our human condition. For Jung, the Self was indeed a core of being that, even though unconscious, stirs us with a deeply felt yearning for wholeness. The Buddha’s truth of cessation3 can be seen as an archetypal, primordial knowledge of our Buddha nature, which we each have buried in us “like a precious jewel buried beneath the house.”4 This archaic memory may have been carried through countless lives and generations. When we are called, something in us begins to stir, and this memory and a yearning for its restoration awaken. We are instinctively drawn to those experiences that offer solutions to our life malaise. Many of us embark upon what we have come to call a “spiritual path.” It remains to be seen whether this will ultimately cure our malaise.