14:The Full but Incomplete Life

14 

The Full but Incomplete Life 

“In every living creature the urge for its own totality

is perhaps the strongest and most fundamental of all urges.” 

Striving Towards Wholeness

Barbara Hannah 

A great sadness came over me and I began to cry, but I couldn’t understand why; and as we drove down the Trans-Canada Highway from our short visit to Penny’s cousin on the shores of Lake Superior just north of Sault St. Marie, I pondered my inexplicable sadness.

Penny’s cousin was in his early eighties and his wife in her late seventies, and they were getting ready to go down to Brownsville Texas for the winter, which they had been doing for the last twenty-some years; that’s why we dropped in to see them.

It was just after eight in the morning when I rang the front door bell, but no-one answered, and I was afraid they had already left for their winter residence; but then we went around to the back and I saw Barbara sitting at the dining room table and knocked on her patio door. Surprised to see us, she waved and let us in; her husband was still in bed.

She poured us coffee and went to tell her husband we had dropped in for a visit, and twenty minutes later he joined us at the table and we talked for an hour before we said we had to be on our way. It was eleven years since I had seen them last, and I knew we would probably never see each other again; this was evident in Tom’s eyes as we stepped out the front door. He was standing in the hallway leaning on his cane when we said goodbye, and as we drove down the highway I couldn’t get that look in his eyes out of my mind; that’s when a wave of sadness overcame me and I welled up with tears.

“I can’t get over the look in Tom’s eyes,” I said to Penny, opening up a dialogue on our short visit with her ageing cousin. “He knew this was the last time they would see us, but it was more than that; it was a look that bared his soul.”

“What did you see?” Penny asked, curious to know what I was feeling.

“I don’t know if I can explain it. Your cousin’s had a good life, which he worked very hard to realize; but I saw a longing in his soul that brought tears to my eyes, and I can’t get over the sadness that I feel for him. You know, sweetheart; Tom had a full life, but there’s something missing. That’s what I saw in his eyes as we said goodbye.”

Tom asked us to drop in on our way home from up north, inviting us to stay the night in the guest suite that he had added onto his garage to spare us the expense of a motel room in Sault St. Marie, but we all knew this was probably the last time we would see each other and our parting was filled with unspoken sorrow; but that wasn’t all that I saw in his eyes.

Something about the way he looked at me, a curiosity that troubled him, as though he couldn’t figure out what we had that he didn’t, and this puzzled him deeply; and I pondered that sad look in his eyes until they opened up onto his soul.

“If I were to put it into words,” I mused out loud, “I’d say that your cousin has lived a full life, but his eyes told me that something was missing in his life; something we had that he couldn’t understand. That’s the look I saw in his eyes, and the sadness.”

“He may have lived a full life, but it’s not complete,” Penny answered, quickly grasping the point that was just beyond my reach—

“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “That’s what I saw in his eyes!”

“I see a musing coming up,” Penny said, and broke into laughter.

“The full but incomplete life,” I replied, and laughed with her; but it was long after our second trip up north the following month that I began to ponder writing my spiritual musing on the full but incomplete life. I tried once or twice to write it, but it didn’t feel right; like I had to wait to find the right entry, and so I gave it to my unconscious to work out.

Why, I didn’t know; but I got an urge to re-read some of my Jung books, and I started with two or three essays from his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul; and this inspired me to re-read Barbara Hannah’s book Striving Towards Wholeness, which gave me the entry point that I needed for my spiritual musing on the full but incomplete life.

One of C. G. Jung’s most insightful students, Barbara Hannah wrote one of my favorite books on his life: Jung: His Life and Work, A Biographical Memoir; but her book Striving Towards Wholeness explained that sad look of longing that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes, and I knew it was my point of entry into my spiritual musing. She writes: 

“Jung has always compared the process of individuation to the formation of a crystal; the framework or lattice is in the solution from the beginning but only hardens and becomes visible much later as the crystal itself. In every human being there seems to be a similar framework or lattice of the process of individuation present from the beginning. It is as if this pattern—although its structure follows its own laws—depends for realization in some way on the individual becoming conscious of it…” (Striving Towards Wholeness, p. 214). 

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung tells us that the central concept of his psychology is the process of individuation, but this presupposes so much that I don’t know where to begin to explain what I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes; because that sad longing in his eyes was the same look that I once saw in an old German Shepherd’s eyes when I was working on the new house that my neighbor built for his retirement (ironically, his wife left him shortly after their new house was finished, and their dog died) was the longing for wholeness that every soul that comes into this world strives for but never realizes until they are ready to finish what nature cannot complete. As Jung wrote in his memoir, quoting an ancient alchemist saying, “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,”

This “art” is what Jung finally came to call the process of individuation; but how can I possibly explain soul’s inherent longing for wholeness?

That’s the musing that I’ve been called upon to write; and even though I’ve explored this mysterious “art” in all of my books (the most succinct being Do We Have an Immortal Soul?), I feel compelled to spell it out in today’s spiritual musing; but to do that I have to call upon the infinite resources of my faithful Muse… 

“The truth is that no matter where I went I was always looking for myself,” said Shirley MacLaine, the well-known actress/seeker/writer, which can be said of every person whether they know it or not; and not until we find our true self will we feel complete.

          On the cusp of eighty, Shirley MacLaine wrote another book called What If…, and on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday show she was asked what would she like people most to know after all her years of seeking; and Shirley replied: “The notion that all you really need in life is some fresh water, a good hat, and a really good pair of shoes.”

She was obviously making reference to her pilgrimage on the road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain which she made when she was sixty years old and wrote about in her controversial book The Camino; but her reference speaks to the outer and inner life.

Shirley MacLaine was a very successful movie actress known throughout the world for her belief in reincarnation and UFOs, and despite all the ridicule that she received for her “eccentric” beliefs she continued to seek an answer to what she called the “Big Truth.”

“Everywhere I’ve travelled in the world I’ve found that people are looking for something to fill the loneliness inside them,” wrote MacLaine in her memoir I’m Over All That; “they are after what I think of as the ‘Big Truth.’ It doesn’t matter how wealthy or well suited they are, after surface talking, joking, eating, Hollywood gossip, and cultural politeness, the conversation always turns to why are we here, what is the point of life, is God real,  are we alone in the universe?”

Like Shirley MacLaine, I was also a seeker looking for the “Big Truth,” and after years of seeking and living what Gurdjieff called “work on oneself” and Jung called “the secret way” I came to the realization that our greatest need in life is to be who we are meant to be; which made our true self the “Big Truth” that everyone is looking for.

“There is nothing but the self and God,” said Jesus in Glenda Green’s book The Keys of Jeshua; but the self that Jesus is referring to is our inner self, or divine nature. But as I and every seeker learns in our quest for the “Big Truth,” to find our true self we have to bring our outer life into agreement with our inner life; and that, sadly, is the most difficult thing in the world to do—as Christ’s parable of the rich young man tells us; because not everyone wants to sacrifice their outer life to their inner life. “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus (John 12:25).

That’s precisely what Shirley MacLaine intuited with her sage little notion that all we really need in life is some fresh water, a good hat, and a really good pair of shoes; because unless we let go of what we think we are (our outer life), we will never make the pilgrimage to our inner self and satisfy our inherent longing to be whole.

That’s the sadness that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes, because I felt that desperate longing in his soul to be whole. Despite having lived a full life, her aging cousin had not made that connection with his inner self that would satisfy his inner longing, and for some strange reason his longing to be whole cried out to me and touched my soul.

“Are you happy,” Oprah asked Shirley in the same interview; and Shirley MacLaine replied, “O yeah.” But Oprah, ever the curious seeker, probed a little deeper: “In that Derek Walcott poem where he talks about sit, and feasting on your life; were you able to do that?”

Very thoughtfully, Shirley replied: “Not so much my life. I sit and feast on the now. I really do that; I really do that. And so that’s why I’m so intertwined with nature; you know, my animals; my thoughts of other people. When I’m with them, I’m really feasting on the now of who they’re trying to be. What an entertainment.”

“Who they’re trying to be.” That’s the teleological pull to our inner self, the natural process of individuation which will one day bring us to our true self that Derek Walcott so presciently captured in his poem “Love after Love” that Oprah referenced— 

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

          After a lifetime of questing for her true self, the courageous actress/seeker/writer finally met her true self and began to peel her image from the mirror of her life; that’s why she could feast on the now. Her quest was over, and all that remained was for her to be herself.

Shirley MacLaine lived a full life, but not until she made the pilgrimage to her inner self did she feel whole enough to feast on the now of her life; that’s why I was brought to tears by the sadness that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes. His life was nearly over, but he still had a long way to go to satisfy the longing in his soul.

“Maybe in his next life,” I said to Penny, somewhere near The Canadian Carver where we stopped to gas up and catch the Carver’s end-of-summer sale.

 

♥

 

 

 

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