Barbara Hannah – Striving Towards Wholeness
in earlier days it was self-evident that every living creature was striving to complete the pattern of its existence as fully as possible.
In our rational times, however, with their everincreasing demand for specialization, this fact seems to be almost forgotten, although in the unconscious the urge towards wholeness appears to have become all the stronger for being repressed and forgotten.
It has become very difficult to express what one means by “wholeness” in terms that are likely to convey something intelligible to the present-day
reader, yet most people still feel an immense satisfaction when they see a tree or a plant, for instance, that has fulfilled the pattern of its being to the greatest possible extent.
While the human body necessarily follows the life pattern of every other animal, increasing in strength till the middle of life and then slowly decreasing towards inevitable death, our spirit seems to be far more aptly symbolized by the image of the tree that goes on developing, becoming stronger and more whole, until the forester decides it is ripe for a
change, fells it and it is later converted into another form.
So our spiritual, psychic life can go on developing until the blow of the forester—when the body dies—converts it into another (unknown) form.
One of the principal reasons the urge towards wholeness has been forgotten today is that the Christian religion has been urging man, during the last two thousand years, to strive for perfection.
But perfection is necessarily one-sided, it attempts to develop the light side of man exclusively, to dismiss the dark side as sin which must be resisted at all costs, whereas everything that exists consists of both light and dark.
The Swiss psychologist, C. G. Jung, had already recognized in boyhood that life is no longer satisfied with Western man’s one-sided traditional attempt to strive after perfection in all the Christian virtues, but is now demanding
the recognition of certain thoughts which definitely come from the other, the dark side of man.1 Further experience and his analytical practice strengthened this early conviction.
The impossibility of fulfilling the Christian ideal led and leads increasingly to dangerous feelings of inferiority and to neurosis.
Indeed, St. Paul himself complained of this weakness in the Christian program: “For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 6:19). How much more problematic this has become in our complicated, over-populated, modern world where the dark
side of man seems to be flourishing as never before!
Jung became more and more convinced that a satisfactory solution
to the contradictions inherent in this one-sidedness could only be found by giving up the hopeless search for perfection and replacing it with a quest for wholeness.
As he studied the human psyche in its endless variety, Jung found that the empirical data revealed that the psyche’s central core has a fourfold structure.
It is difficult perhaps for the general reader to realize the vital importance of the number four in the realm of the psyche, but from the beginning
mankind has unconsciously produced this number in every area of the world. Pythagoras (c. 582-507 b.c.) was probably the first to realize consciously that four is the number of totality and to draw attention to this vital fact.
The earliest Eastern mandates (to use a Sanskrit word for the sacred image of fourfoldness) were all built upon the square or circle which is generally divided into four or a multiple of four. We find the same image in the Mayan culture and in fact everywhere in man’s earliest attempts to produce an
abstract image for the deity or for the innermost center of the soul.
Although historians have a passion for searching for outer connections between images and ideas, these basic structural images are far too universal to be pinned down in this way.
One might as well try to show that patterns of behavior in animals and insects are passed on outwardly from one generation to the next or from one place to another.
But it is a proved fact, for instance, that the Yucca moth is dead long
before its eggs are hatched, yet the little caterpillars know exactly what to do and this is only one of countless examples.
No naturalist and hardly any layman now doubt that most of the “wonders of nature” in the animal world are produced by innate patterns of behavior, faithfully and instinctively carried out by the young living creatures.
Yet when it comes to man, the idea that we also may have innate patterns of behavior is very seldom taken into consideration, in fact often passionately denied.
Therefore the historian—with a praiseworthy diligence—will go to great trouble to attempt to prove outer connections in every instance, because
he is convinced that these must exist.
(Naturally, in many places historical connections do exist and are very interesting.
But apart from this, there are independent basic human patterns of behavior such as the production of the square and the circle built up on the number four.)
It is true that, as consciousness developed, the possibility of deviating from these innate patterns developed also.
The development of the intellect and reason and an arbitrary use of the will have become the goals of the human being, and it is difficult to reconcile such goals with obedience to our instinctive patterns.
To take a banal analogy: Balance in bicycling is an instinctive matter; once we have learned to ride a bicycle we do so quite unconsciously.
If, however, we begin to think about where we should place our weight, the chances are that we will lose our instinctive balance at once. It could be done, no doubt, by a careful and long synchronization of balance and thought, but very few people would be willing to make the effort.
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