Trading Your Map for a Compass
In his book, Living With Borrowed Dust, Jungian analyst James Hollis says the most important question we must answer is this: “What supports you when nothing supports you?” Where is your inner compass and how do you access it when sky and terrain blur into one impenetrable fog?
We are born with a working compass, though for many of us a myriad of awful religious teachings, like the Christian notion of original sin, have corrupted our trust in that inner compass. Much of the work of therapy is removing the obstacles stopping us from finding and following our inner compass. For most of us, it is hidden beneath the ego.
In his book, Tracking the Gods – The Place of Myth in Modern Life, Hollis says it would make a huge difference if every child could hear their parents say, time and again, “You are brought into life by nature having all you need. You have a great force, a great spirit, a great energy within. Trust it, stay in contact with it, and it will always lead you toward what is right for you.” In other words, a living, breathing, pulsating, well-calibrated inner compass.
Unfortunately, most of us receive the opposite message. My mother, a very bright and engaging woman, suffered from major depression and used to lie behind a closed door in her bedroom for days at a time. The doctor would come and I would hear muffled words and weeping from behind the door, but she did not emerge. During my early teen years my father, a kind and loving man, said to me, “Your mother’s been this way since you were born.” A statement like that has a tendency to stick with you. Dad did not make a connection with how I heard those words.
Even when the message is not so dramatically delivered, parents still find a myriad of ways to tell us that their problems are because of us, and that if it was not for the protection provided by our parents, we would be eaten by some kind of monster or another.
Those early maps stay folded in our hearts, and unfortunately they are unfolded with regularity. The asterisk at the top of the map sends you to words at the bottom: “There is something inherent within you that causes you to be unworthy of deep human connection. If you want to avoid complete abandonment, you must carefully follow this map.”
Nowhere does the map say to look inward for direction. It says to look at the one who is the greatest threat to you. The threatener might be a parent, or a punitive god, or a religious community whose primary interest is the retention of power.
As I said in my last post, though we become adults, we continue to follow the map of our childhood. The map served us well when we were powerless and our environment was filled with overwhelming external threats. But we are powerless no longer. The map is a map for the helpless, and we are no longer helpless, yet we still refer to the same old map.
That map must be discarded. We do not need a new map. Maps will always have to be discarded. What we need is the compass with which we came into the world.
Without the instruction that comes from that compass, we meander. We move, because we exist in time and time keeps changing, but our movement is like stepping on the gas without a steering wheel. We go wherever the wheels, the terrain, and the physics of it all take us.
A part of finding the inner compass involves another question Hollis suggests: “What is this path in service to inside of me?” There is an inner story to all of our paths. Many have no idea what inner story they are living out. For some, life has never been safe enough to allow that question. For others, the family or culture in which they were raised prohibited it, and they did not have the ego strength to stand up to the powers that be.
In the first half of life, when we are following the map of childhood, our path is in service to the unfulfilled dreams of our parents and the demands of the tribe in which we were raised. It is important work, but it does not sustain one’s soul. Somewhere in the middle of the road of your life you awake in a dark wood in which the true way is wholly lost. At least that’s how Dante defined it. Maybe you come into a certain ennui or dysthymia or cynicism in which you say with McBeth, “Life is but a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
This is when you become uncomfortable enough to begin a serious search for that long buried compass. You desire a path in service to the numinosity of the gods wanting to make themselves known through you. We avoid engaging in that search because we’re not sure we want the gods making themselves known through us. Doing so comes with a responsibility we are hesitant to accept. Ever heard of the Hero’s Journey?
The world is desperately in need of the gods making themselves known through us. It is how we are touched by the numinous, an experience we all crave. It is why we cram into concert halls and theaters, hoping to be transported onto a higher plain by a person or persons who are open to the gods making themselves known through us.
That we might become a source of that numinosity is terrifying. It should be. It comes with a lot of responsibility, a responsibility I will talk about in my next post.
