Once Upon a Time and the Crisis of "Nothing But"

Myth Matters

"Everything is banal, everything is 'nothing but;' and that is the reason that people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want war..." --C. G. Jung from "The Symbolic Life," CW 18.

According to Jung, most Western individuals suffer from a pervasive soul sickness, a sickness created by the one-sided nature of Western consciousness. The single-minded pursuit of "reason" has driven the deep need for wonder, meaning, and mystery into the unconscious and given rise to a dangerous literalizing, and a world in which the lines between fact and fiction, truth and lie, are collapsing.

The one-sidedness begins with the mistaken notion that one makes a choice between two opposing options. Both impulses will direct your life as this is beyond your control, and the choice is not "between" reason and imagination, the rational and irrational, fact and fantasy.
The choice is to become more conscious of all of it, to learn to live with nuance and ambiguity, and live the mystery in you, that is you.

This choice is available to any person of intelligence and heart, who hears the invitation in "once upon a time" and begin a conscious quest for the symbolic life.

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