Question for the day: have you said too many yeses or too many nos in your life? Have you bought-in too much to our commercial culture, or have you gone too far the other way? And it may depend on what issue, of course.
Carl Jung said it this way: Man can suffer only a certain amount of culture without injury.
By “too much culture” he doesn’t mean too much Beethoven or Picasso. Jung is getting at the idea of too many rules to follow, too much squelching of the original you, while you were adapting to the world and getting an education, a job and fitting into society.
A life task for us all is staying close to the ‘soul DNA’ that is ours only, and that we must enact to live an authentic life. And we have to honor this original part of ourselves while we fit into a world of careers and bills, malls, and TV/internet overload.
I occasionally work with people who are too original and need to better adapt. But more often I work with those damaged by too much culture. They have said “yes” to the world too often. They are trying to piece together their neglected soul fragments, the ones lying around as collateral damage from being “culturized.”
What is your path to wholeness…too much or too little culture? Which part of your originality are you re-engaging?
Image above Some rights reserved by by mdare55