There's this idea in Jungian psychology called the circumambulation.
And Jung had this idea that
you had a potential future self, which would be in potential everything
that you could be, and that it manifests itself
moment to moment, in your present life by making you interested in things.
And the things that you're interested in are the things that would guide you
along the path that would lead you to maximal development.
Now, it sounds like a metaphysical idea
or a mystical idea even, but it's not.
It's a really profoundly biological idea.
The idea is something like, well,
you're set up so that you're automatically interested in those things that would
fully expand you as a well adapted creature.
Well, like, there's nothing radical about that idea.
What else could possibly be the case unless there's something fundamentally
flawed about you, that is what the situation would be.
It's kind of interesting to think about
how that would be manifest moment to moment.
But the idea is something like, well, your interest is captured by those
things that lead you down the path of development.
Well, that better be the case.
Okay, so that's fine.
And so there's some utility in pursuing those things that you're interested in.
That's the call to adventure, let's say,
and the call to adventure takes you all sorts of places.
Now, the problem with the call
to adventure is like, what the hell do you know?
You might be interested in things that are kind of warped and bent.
And often it's the case that when new parts of people manifest themselves
and grip their interests say they do it very badly and shoddily.
And so you stumble around like an idiot when you try to do something new.
That's why the fool is the precursor
to the Savior from the symbolic perspectives,
because you have to be a fool before you can be a master.
And if you're not willing to be a fool, then you can't be a master.
So it's an error ridden process.
And that's also laid out in the Old Testament stories,
because the first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when
God kicks them out of their father's house when they're, like, 84,
is that they run into all sorts of trouble and some of it's social and some of it's
natural and some of it's a consequence of their own moral inadequacy.
So they're fools.
But the thing that's so interesting is that despite the fact that they're
fools, they're still supposed to go on the adventure
and that they're capable of learning enough as a consequence of moving forward
on the adventure so that they straighten themselves out across time.
And so it's something like this.
The circumambulation that Jung talked about was
this continual... (we'll return to this) this continual
circling in some sense of who you could be.
You might notice, for example, that there are themes in your life.
When you go back across your experiences,
you see you kind of have your typical experience that sort of repeats itself.
And there might be variation on it like a musical theme.
But it's like you're circling yourself and getting
closer to yourself as you move across time.
That's the circumambulation.
Now remember that for a second, we'll go back to it.
Okay, so imagine that something glimmers before you.
It's an interest that's dawning
and you decide, well, first of all, you're paralyzed.
You think, well, how do I know if I should pursue that?
It's probably a stupid idea.
And the proper response to that is you're right.
It probably is a stupid idea because almost all ideas are stupid.
And so the probability that as you move forward on your adventure,
that you're going to get it right the first time is zero.
It's just not going to happen.
And so then you might think, Well,
maybe I'll just wait around until I get the right idea and which people do, right.
So they're like 40 year old = 13 year old, which is not a good idea.
So they wait around until, it's waiting for Godot, until they finally got it right.
But the problem is, you're too stupid to know when you've got it right.
So waiting around isn't going to help, because even if the perfect opportunity
manifested itself to you in your incomplete form,
the probability that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero.
You might even think it's the worst
possible idea that you've ever heard of anywhere.
Highly likely.
Nietzsche called that a will to stupidity,
which I really liked because he thought of stupidity as being...
You have to take it into account, fundamentally, and work with it.
You can take these tentative steps on your
pathway to destiny, and you can assume that you're going to do
it badly, and that's really useful because you don't have to beat yourself up.
It's pretty easy to do it badly.
But the thing is, it's way better to do it badly than not to do it at all.
And that's the continual message
that echoes through these historical stories in Genesis.
It's like these are flawed people.
They should have got the hell out of their house way before they did.
And they go out and they stumble around
in tyranny and famine and self betrayal and violence.
But it's a hell of a lot better than just rotting away at home.
And...That's great.
So, that's good. Why is that?
Well, okay.
So you start your path and you think that you're heading towards your star,
and so you go in that direction, and then because
you're here, the world looks a particular way.
But then when you move here,
the world looks different, and you're
different as a consequence of having made that voyage.
And so what that means is that now
that thing that glimmers in front of you is going to have shifted its location
because you weren't very good at specifying it to begin with,
and now that you're a little sharper and more focused than you were,
it's going to reveal itself with more accuracy to you.
And so then you have to take
it's almost like a 180 degree reversal.
But it isn't because
you've gone this far, and that's a long way to get that far.
But that's a lot farther than
you would be if you just stayed where you were waiting.
And so it doesn't matter that you overshoot continually,
because as you overshoot,
even if you don't learn what you should've done,
you're going to continually learn what you shouldn't keep doing.
And if you learn enough about what you
shouldn't keep doing, then that's tantamount at some point
to learning at the same time what you should be doing.
So it's okay.
So it's like this. Now, what's cool about it, though,
I think, is that as you progress, the degree of overshooting starts to decline.
Right?
And we know that there's nothing hypothetical about that.
As you learn a new skill,
like even to play a song on the piano, for example, you overshoot madly.
You're making all sorts of mistakes to begin with, and then the mistakes
they disappear. There's a great TED Talk.
I think it was about... This guy set up a really
advanced computational recording system in his home and recorded
every single utterance his young child made while learning to speak.
And then he put together
the child's attempts to say certain phonemes and put them in a list,
and you can hear the child deviating madly to begin with.
And then after hundreds and hundreds
of repetitions, just zeroing right in on the exact phoneme.
So you might not know this.
But when kids babble, because they start babbling when they're quite young,
they babble every human phoneme, including all sorts of phonemes
that adults can't say, and then they die into their language, so that after
they learn, say English,
then there's all sorts of phonemes they can no longer hear or pronounce,
but to begin with, it's all there, which is really quite interesting.
As they learn a particular language,
they zero in on the proper way to pronounce that.
And their errors minimize every time you learn something.
That's how it is.
And that's really useful to know, too, because it means that it's okay to wander
around stupidly before you fix your destination.
Now you see that echoed in Exodus, right?
Because what happens is that the Egyptians or the Hebrews escape a tyranny,
which is kind of whatever you do personally and psychologically
when you escape from your previous set of stupidly,
held and ignorant and stubborn axioms. It's like - away from that tyranny.
It's like, great. I freed myself from that.
Well, then what? Well, you think?
Well, now I'm on the way. It's no, you're not.
Now you're in the desert
where you wander around stupidly and worship the wrong things
until you finally organize yourself morally again and head in the proper
direction so that's worth knowing, too, because you think,
well, I got rid of a lot of
things baggage, excess baggage that I didn't need in my life.
And now everything's okay.
It's like, no, it's not.
You've got rid of a whole set of scaffolds
that were keeping you in place, even though they were pathological.
Now you have nothing,
and nothing actually turns out to be better than something pathological.
But you're still stuck with the problem of nothing.
Well, that's exactly why Exodus is structured the way that it is.
It's that you escape from a tyranny. It's Hooray.
We're no longer slaves.
Yeah, well, now you're nihilistic and lost.
It's not necessarily an improvement. (lol)
It's also useful to know that because
you can also be diluted into the idea that, imagine that you're trying to become
enlightened, which might mean to turn all those parts of you on that could be turned
on, you think, well, that's just a linear pathway uphill.
It's just from one success to another.
No, it's not.
It's like here you are, and you're not doing too badly.
And the first step is a complete bloody catastrophe.
It's worse.
And then maybe you can pull yourself together and you hit a new Plateau.
And then that crumbles and shakes and bang.
It's worse again,
because part of the reason that people don't become enlightened is because it's
punctuated by intermittent deserts, essentially by intermittent catastrophes.
And if you don't know that, well,
then you're basically screwed because you go ahead on your movement forward
and you collapse and you think, Well, that didn't work.
I collapsed. It's like, no, that's hard for the course.
It's not indication that you failed.
It's just indication that it's really
hard, and that when you learn something, you also unlearn something.
And the thing you unlearn is probably useful,
and unlearning it actually is painful.
Let's say, if you have to get out of a bad relationship, it's like not every...
There isn't any relationship that's 100% bad.
And so when you jump out of it, well,
maybe you're in better shape, but you're still lonesome and disoriented
and you don't know what your past was,
and you don't know what your present is, and you don't know what your future is.
That's why people stay with the devil they
know instead of looking for the devil they don't know.
So...
The fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean you have to stop
and thank God for that.
That's a really useful thing.
And the fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean that you can't learn.
And so you can pose into an ideal and you're going to be wrong about it.
But it doesn't matter,
because what you're right about is positing the ideal moving towards it.
If the actual ideal isn't conceptualized perfectly.
Well, first surprise, surprise, because what are you going to do?
That's perfect.
So...
It doesn't matter that it's imperfect.
It just matters that you do it and that you move forward.
So that's really positive news as far as
I'm concerned, because you can actually do that, right?
You can do it badly. Anyone can do that.
So that's useful.
Okay, so, like, if you were an efficient person, you would have just done that,
but you're not. But who cares?
You still end up in the same place.
And maybe the trip is even more interesting.
Who knows? Probably too interesting.
Jung,
I began to understand that the goal of psychic development
by which he means psychological development or spiritual development,
is the self.
There's no linear evolution.
There's only a circumambulation of the self.
And getting closer, it's like you're spiraling into something,
something like that. And the thing that you're spiraling
into recedes as you move towards it and gets more and more
sophisticated and well developed as you move towards it.
Because you're not going to run out of goals, right?
No matter how much you have your act together, there's probably undoubtedly
30 dimensions along which you could get your act together a lot more.
And some of those aren't even conceivable to you in your initial uncarved state, let's say.
"Uniform development exists at most
at the beginning and later, everything points towards the center."
This insight gave me stability.
And gradually my inner peace returned.