Jung referred to a potential for living whose opposite he called ‘The Unlived Life.’
For most of us there appears to be a sense of potential for living that many have come to call living your best life, or living out your true potential; living that version of yourself you consider to be your truest, most authentic self.
But what is this potential version of you? Does it really exist, and if so, how might you become it?
Your Potential
Your potential in life is shaped by a number of factors.
At one level it is genomic. Your genetic heritage is an archive of sorts that is the result of every successful adaptation your many ancestors made one their way.
The actualisation of this potential depends on the environment in which you are located – e.g. it’s hard to build a log cabin in the desert where there is a lack of trees. So in part it is a question of the accessible resources at hand.
Then it is a question of knowing what to do with them, and believing that you can. This we could call attitude.
There is also having the energy to do it too.
The balance of all this makes the difference between surviving and thriving.
The Unlived Life
The frustrations of an unlived life could be put down to a number of factors, but for those that lie within reach of individual agency, attitude and mobility are two that are key.
The simple fact that, generally speaking, we can get up and move away from environments that are causing us harm or where opportunities are restricted, and go to places where we can live more fully is one thing. Making the most of the opportunities in those environments is another. This is the result of attitude, the posture we take, where we hold ourselves in relation to other things. How we locate ourselves in this way is fundamental because it sets up a sense of what we come to realise is possible.
Essential Spirit
The foundation of attitude essentially comes from two places.
In part it will be the result of our own measure of the world, the sense that we make of things and the meaning and value that emerge as a result of our direct experience. In alchemy this is our essential spirit. It is a quality of maturity in some ways – the keeping of our own counsel. Working out what makes sense to us and what we value in the face of the society and culture, or elements therein, that try to impose their own values and meanings upon us.
What is this essential spirit? Where does it come from? It is, in part our conscious reflections and analysis of the facts of life as we meet them – in relation to how we meet ourselves. In part it is a result of unconscious psychodynamic forces that emerged into consciousness as intuitions.
Your Discovery of the World
What ultimately reveals your potential then is the attitude you bring to bear on the living of your life. The degree to which you believe something possible and act towards it is one way it can play out. Another way is to discover what it can be in the act of exploration. As you engage with life, with new environments, it is through your relationship to them that potential emerges. The only limitations, other than exist in reality can be those that you impose upon the concept of yourself.
This does not mean that anything is possible, only that, anything is a possibility. Attempting to find out is the realisation of potential, not the succeeding at an imagined outcome. At least this might be one way of looking at it, one way of living that you might appreciate exploring – if only to see what potentials might be revealed in the process.
Let go of any restrictions that you have imposed upon yourself in terms of what you believe is possible – not to then believe that anything is possible, but rather to explore the realm of possibility that lays before you.
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