“Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.”
~ C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter II
We live in two worlds.
One through the body
through time, work, gravity.
And one through the soul
through symbol, silence, longing.
To lose ourselves only in the outer, even in noble pursuits, is still to be lost.
Even the most refined ideas can become escape if they sever us from our inner depths.
As Jung writes, the inner world is no poorer than the outer one.
Its valleys are vast, its rivers hidden, its need no less pressing.
When we ignore it, when we fail to tend it, the soul thirst.
We develop symptoms.
Recognition, admiration, success
these become desperate substitutes in the outer world.
The soul doesn’t want our perfection.
It doesn’t need our mastery.
It wants our foolishness, our humility, our presence.
It asks for a life lived with awareness of both worlds.
So let us not be the fool who lives here or there.
But the one who walks between
rooted in the visible and the invisible,
obedient not to a rule,
but to reality as it unfolds.
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