1. "You were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played."
In the opening of Tao Ruspoli’s documentary on Heidegger’s philosophy, Being in the World, Ryan Cross, a bass player, tries to explain the experience of playing his instrument. He says: “For me, connecting to my instrument, being connected to myself, I have to be connected here [pointing to his bass]. I have to be in touch with myself, myself meaning the instrument becomes you.” When he started playing the bass, it felt to him as if the instrument “had a character of its own”, the sound “directed” him and told him where to go.
This intimacy, in which we’re indistinguishable from an activity, an object, or a person, gives us peace. It makes doubts, questions, and troubles dissolve. Intimacy speaks to our intuition. When we hold our instrument or our lover, care commands our hands so that our next touch is the right one.
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after your dead. But we missed the point the whole way along, it was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played
- Alan Watts
The choice between a journey and music is one between hope and harmony. In journeys, we endeavour towards an outcome that will justify the struggle. With music, we try to match a rhythm and get caught up in something that transcends us. But music cannot always save us. And sometimes, journeys descend into races. Sometimes, we can’t sing and dance but must scream and trudge. Harmony is gifted by grace and hard work. Hope is the best that most of us can hope for and allows us to carry on.
The idea of being directed goes against our core belief about what it means to be human. It looks like giving up our freedom and losing control. Harmony acknowledges that we live alongside our world and must listen to it. Fully independent action, which is often what is meant by autonomy, is meaningless action. Meaningful action cannot be unrelated or unresponsive because it’s always action in a world that is given to us. Our fate is tied to others and the world. It is tied to others through love. And it is tied to the world’s rhythm because our own rhythm cannot contradict it.
2. Jung on How to Live
Our culture has chosen planning over playfulness. That is, an imposing and controlling, rather than a flexible and reciprocal, relationship with the world. Planning helps us to deny that things are fragile and unpredictable. But when life falls apart, we feel helpless and to blame. In those moments, we realise just how much is beyond us and we are forced to accept that most of life decides itself.
In his letter to Herr N., Jung is advising on a situation in which the recipient has found himself in a mess. Jung advises Herr N. to do the “next thing”. This “next thing” that we’re being guided toward is and opening to the avenue towards ourselves and out of difficulty. As if we’re being asked to stop interfering:
...there is not pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place.
When on is in a mess like you are, one has no right any more to worry about the idiocy of one's own psychology, but must do the next thing with diligence and devotion and earn the goodwill of others. In every littlest thing you do in this way you will find yourself. It was not different with X. He too had to do it the hard way, and always with the next, the littlest, and the hardest thing.
- Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Letters: Vol. 1 1906-1950
In another letter to Frau V, Jung supplements the “next thing” with the “necessary” thing. Our own way comes into being by itself through living, not planning. Destiny is ours not because we create it, but because it was written for us. We shouldn’t want to give this up. Outcomes that were “meant to be” have a magic and a serenity that preserve the mystery and the miracle that life is:
Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one...But if you want to of your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious but if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.
- Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Letters: Vol. 1 1906-1950
The next and most necessary thing presents itself to us as the next note in a composition does to a musician. The next and most necessary thing is always obvious and urgent. The thing we cannot hold in or prevent, like a confession or a full bladder. Giving in to these things and doing what we must is not subjugation.
3. How to Know What We Must Do
Our obsession with control looks silly since we discovered the unconscious. In his essay, Thinking About Oneself, D H Lawrence writes that: “We all seem to be haunted by some spectre of ourselves, that we daren’t face.” Darkness houses our fears but also our intuition and the reasons why things matter to us. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelley provide an answer to the question “how is anyone to discover what is worth caring about?” which is ultimately a question about who we are and what we must do:
The fact is, whether you know it or not, you already care about a whole range of goods. Just as the world is pregnant with meanings waiting to be revealed, human beings are filled with modes of caring that they have hidden from themselves. This may seem surprising. The idea that our cares exceed our understanding of them seems an affront to fundamental principles of self knowledge. Surely, if I care about something then I am in a position to know that I do. The Enlightenment tradition of autonomy suggests such a principle, and contemporary philosophy takes it virtually as an article of faith. but to be an embodied being as we are, open to moods that can direct us and reveal the world as meaningful, just is to be a being who extends beyond what we can know about ourselves. The project, then, is not to decide what to care about, but to discover what is about which one already cares.
H. Dreyfus and S.D. Kelly, All Things Shining
4. Being as becoming
I haven't finished the job of integrating and reorganising myself, but that's only confusing, not discouraging, now that I realise this is a continuing process...It's exciting, sometimes upsetting, but deeply encouraging to feel yourself in action, apparently knowing where you are going even though you don't always consciously know where that is.
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
In his book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers tries to isolate the common effects of therapy. The confession above from one of Carl Roger’s clients reveals one of these. Individuals both realise and begin to willingly accept that they are not “a fixed entity but a process of becoming”:
When he enters the therapeutic relationship, the client is likely to wish to achieve some fixed state: he wants to reach the point where his problems are solved, or where he is effective in his work, or where his marriage is satisfactory. He tends, in the freedom of the therapeutic relationship to drop such fixed goals, and to accept a more satisfying realisation that he is not a fixed entity, but a process of becoming
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
People who go into therapy seem to be asking a double question, “Who am I?” and “How may I become myself?” These questions are importantly and subtely different. The first is looking for an answer without any idea about where to find it. The second implies that there is already a self that we need to grow into. On Roger’s understanding, the self is to be uncovered:
I have stated that in a favourable psychological climate a process of becoming takes place; that here the individual drops one after another of the defensive masks with which he has face life; that he experiences fully the hidden aspects of himself...I have tried to give my picture of the characteristic attributes of the person who emerges; a person who is more open to all of the elements of his organic experience; a person who is developing a trust in his own organism...a person who is learning to live in his life as a participant in a fluid, ongoing process, in which he is continually discovering new aspects of himself in the flow of his experience.
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
This is something of a Nietzschean understanding who instructs us to “become who we are,” and one that speaks to Dreyfus and Kelley, that we are always already within ourselves and need only be courageous enough to become that thing that lies deep within us. For Nietzsche, this self speaks up for itself clearly and forthrightly in moments it cannot tolerate or must grasp. And these moments are revelations and “footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problems that we are”:
...at our foundation, "at the very bottom," there is clearly something that will not learn...predetermined decision and answers to selected, predetermined questions. In any cardinal problem, an immutable "that is me" speaks up.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
John O'Donohue put it this way:
“There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor no created thing can touch.” And I really thought that was amazing. And if you cash it out, what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.
5. What Trees Teach Us
I revere them when they stand alone. They are like a lonely person. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.
Hermann Hesse, Wandering
Herman Hesse admired Nietzsche. His admiration for trees was predicated on his respect for Nietzsche. Hesse believed that “trees are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them.” He thought that humans should listen to trees in order to learn how to become themselves:
Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
Hermann Hesse, Wandering
When explaining his admiration for trees he imagines them to say: “My strength is trust…I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labour is holy. Out of this trust I live.” Trees, like humans, contain their purpose within them:
In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.
Hermann Hesse, Wandering
Beyond poetry, this idea has ancient routes. Oak trees were sacred to the Druids. The word Druid means ““oak-knower” or “bearer of oak wisdom.” This was a “way of knowing that, like the ancient oaks, which reached deep into the ground with their roots and high into the air with their mighty branches, connected heaven and earth.”
Rilke, too, explained why this idea grips us beyond its poetic resonance. In his letters to the young poet, he explains that the beauty of plants growing is found in their bowing to necessity rather than in their will or their pursuit of something else. He writes that in:
all beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of love and longing…patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing, not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding.5
In my essay on How Wandering Leads Us Back Home, I wrote in response to Hesse’s entry on trees that:
Like branches, we grow towards the light. Wandering is the method by which we fulfil ourselves. Wandering isn’t aimless. It is guided by our unconscious and our spirit, who want us to grow as we’re supposed to, into the self we haven’t been able to articulate.
If being is becoming it’s because we had misunderstood being as a final resting place, when it was always a place we could never rest. It’s because we believed that a single resolution was possible and sufficient, and only a matter of time. But, left alone, everything resolves itself or, at the very least, begins to.