Jung: Using internal and external

Friday, May 24, 2013

7:30 a.m. So, Dr. Jung, motivation?

Sometimes you must just do what you have resolved to do, and the routine of it carries you along. If you do not have to spend your energy gearing yourself up, you can use that energy to accomplish what you wish to accomplish.

Yesterday you heard that the difficulty is the difference between your life circumstances and your expectations of your life’s circumstances. Another way to put it might be, see what is in front of you – yes, and behind you, and to the sides, and above and below you! See, don’t intuit! You understand, to a different type I should offer different advice.

So – pay more attention to the sensory world.

Let us put it this way – use those sensory functions you were equipped with, in their proper way, and they will assist you to lead a more satisfactory life. Excess is not bad in itself, but carried on too long – excess carried to excess! – it may tend to warp your experience.

I was moved, some while ago, to subscribe to the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, but I found I had little interest in them. I was glad when the subscriptions lapsed.

Yes. And who is to say that the ideas and information you might have received there was any more valuable than what you receive from other less likely sources? Similarly, you are sometimes tempted to take a course at the university or at the community college, and yet it does not move you to action as The Monroe Institute does.

Following impulse. I don’t know what else to trust.

Impulse should be complemented, balanced, by routine, or let us say method. As you do not wish to succumb to Psychic’s Disease, so you do not wish to succumb to – what should we call it? – Impulse Disease? Intuitive’s Disease?

Hmm. And so method would not only allow me to accomplish something, it would keep me from going off the rails?

We need not add drama to the situation! You are not going off the rails. Your engine is much more likely to run out of steam because you did not methodically stoke the boilers!

9:20 a.m. So if I heard you clearly, I will find motivation partly by paying more attention to the world around me?

To your place as part of the world.

Does this mean, consider my own life from an external perspective?

It means, rather, consider yourself and the world from a perspective that includes internal and external.

How can I do that?

You know what you feel. You know what interests you. You know how you react to emails or news or other people. All this is internal. External is the reconceptualizing of the same events from outside of you. it is merely shifting point of view. But the complementary views will give you what neither alone can give.

For example, to use your today’s life: You are engaged in an email correspondence with a man you haven’t met, who knew you only by way of your book. The process of engaging with him lures you out of self-referential thinking because you must make a coherent response to questions. If he were asking about trivia, your answers would do nothing for you, perhaps, because perhaps they would not call upon your inner life. But he is not asking about trivia, but about the only things you care about. So, you reach externally to communicate an internal. Do you see? It is the same when you do a Monroe program, or more when you speak to one. It engages you externally about internal matters.

So the only way I will maintain motivation to write something will be to focus on it communicating to people who may need it, and not focus on whether it succeeds externally.

No, nor on how to give it that chance. Do your work and assume that the rest of the universe will do its part.

All right, I see it, and it does make sense emotionally, not merely logically, so I think I may be able to put it into practice. Thank you.

Paint.

Paint? Mandalas, or something?

Painting for you is non-verbal expression and exploration. Go back to doing it.

All right. Many thinks.

Leave a Reply