Masters of Fate, Captains of Soul
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate”
- C. G. Jung
In my previous post (inspired by my own experience) touching on the stupid ways we perpetuate our own suffering, I suggested that this next post which was going to be related to how to find the right therapist, coach, or mentor to enlist in helping this process. As I began to write, however, it occurred to me that in order to fully understand the role of the helping professional in our personal process of healing and growth, it is important to establish a basic understanding of how psychological transformation works. This is obviously a large topic that I intend to write much more about, but for now, I wish to share some essential principles as I understand them.
Beyond setting the stage for understanding how to find the right helping professional, my intention for this essay (and broader topic) is to also provide a basis for hope and optimism for men who, like myself, have attempted (or are currently attempting) to kindle a warm fire amidst the unforgiving, cold, and dark turbulence of their lives. It is also part of my broader wish to make the abstract, mysterious realm of psychology more accessible, relatable, and actionable to the average man who simply wants to experience real, lasting change in his life.
To begin with, it may be most useful to start with the question: What are the origins of human qualities such as “confidence”, “self-esteem”, and “clarity”? My position is that these subjective qualities of the human experience emerge from the workings of an objective psyche. Just as our sense physical health and vitality emerges from the properly functioning systems in the body, so too do senses of confidence, self-esteem, and clarity emerge from properly functioning systems in the psyche. The question obvious to most readers then is, “What are these psychic systems, and how do I get them to function properly?” For the purposes of maximizing simplicity, I will focus on the minimum necessary distinctions and principles that will (hopefully) shed light on meaningful answers to this question.
The first distinction is to draw a solid line which divides the psyche into two distinct fields: (1) the conscious and (2) the unconscious. Metaphorically speaking, this might be conceptualized as a singular ship floating in the middle of an ocean. Within the field of consciousness is everything that is seen, heard, and felt, including the rocking of the boat with the waves and currents of the ocean. At the center of of this boat is the ego, represented by the captain of the ship. This is the center around which everything in the field of consciousness is experienced. The ego is a “structure” in the sense that it has a capacity to not only contain experience , but it also contains an ability to control and steer the focus of its awareness. Despite the unpredictable nature of the ocean, part of the ego’s ability is to man the oars and steer the ship in coordination with everything happening in the external environment.
This leaves the other primary component: the unconscious. Put simply, the unconscious is everything that falls outside of the conscious field of the ego. Into this category falls everything under the surface of the ocean, including fish, sharks, and the wreckage of other boats whose captains failed to navigate the ocean effectively. In addition to the ocean on which the ship floats, the unconscious contains the vast infinitudes of space in the sky above, used by the captain for navigation purposes. In psychological terms, the unconscious is the field from which every emotion, instinct, thought, image, or memory emerges into consciousness. Needless to say, the realm of unconscious is vast beyond comprehension, and in psychological terms it is safe to consider it as effectively infinite.
The essential principles to understand about one’s field of conscious and unconscious, respectively, are as follows. First, while it may seem hopelessly futile for our captain to attempt to navigate an oceanic universe that is infinite in its vastness and unpredictability, the ability of the ego to shift the focus of its concentration, grasp the rudder, and steer the boat is (as far as we can tell) singularly unique to the human organism. Second, while the conscious field of the ego is quite limited in comparison to the scale of the unconscious and has a recognizable boundary, the ability of the ego to expand this boundary and effectively steer itself is a quality that can be strengthened and improved without any known limitations.
With regard to the unconscious, I will draw the reader’s attention to the various fields of astronomy, oceanography, and ecology, among others, which illuminate the structured, ordered mechanisms of the celestial bodies as well as the patterns and behavior of currents and wildlife in the ocean, respectively. Suffice it to say that within the unconscious, similar patterns and structures have been discovered, and are available for understanding to any man who decides to turn his attention inward to the dark and mysterious, yet knowable realm of his inner world.
Bringing the discussion back to our original inquiry regarding the origin of qualities such as “confidence”, “self-esteem”, “and “clarity”, the most important takeaway I wish to impress upon you, dear reader, is this: These qualities of your human experience (in addition to all other qualities) emerge from the proper orientation of your ego to your own unconscious. Imagine the ship captain who knows nothing of celestial navigation, weather and ocean patterns, or how to catch fish. This is an individual who is doomed to drift aimlessly at sea until storm and starvation claims him and his ship to the bottom of the ocean. On the other hand, imagine the captain who, instead of drifting aimlessly through the vast infinitudes of the ocean, deliberately focuses his attention towards the underlying patterns in the currents of the ocean, the behavior of the fish that swim in it, and the patterns of the stars above it.
If you were to meet this ship captain, what qualities would you likely notice about his character? It is very likely that you would be stuck by his sense of confidence, among other qualities of self-assuredness and a distinct sense of clarity in who he was and where he was going. You might even find yourself - depending on your experience with powerful masculinity - awash with feelings of deep insecurity or, perhaps, feeling overcome with harsh feelings of judgement and hatred. There is a part of you deep down that knows: he has something that you don’t. Being in the presence of someone who embodies the qualities we desire in ourselves has the uncanny tendency to reveal the precise inner feelings where our own confidence should be, but isn’t.
And here is where the majority of men make the same mistake. Instead of deliberately turning their conscious awareness towards the pain, the insecurity, the judgement, or the anger that they feel, they turn away from the discomfort with any number of useful distractions. What we fail to realize is the pain we are experiencing is in fact a signal from the unconscious attempting to communicate a message: “This is what hurts (the insecurity), and that’s how I want feel (confidence)”. Were we not capable of feeling a sense of confidence, our psyche would not be sensitive to it when we experience it in other people.
It is in this process of deliberately bringing together the conscious and the unconscious that the natural healing capacity of the psyche activates itself. In the same way that our bodies spontaneously heal themselves when we are physically injured, so too does the same capacity exist within our psyche. The physical qualities of a healthy body such as flexibility, strength, and sensitivity find their psychic equivalents in aspects such as confidence, self-esteem, and clarity in our subjective experience. All that is required of us is to be willing to engage with the healing process as the active participants that we are. We can indeed be the masters of our fate and captains of our soul, as William Ernest Henley put it, should we simply decide to recognize it.