Measure of My Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

heights and depths of experience. If we no longer seek the spirit, if love and relationship should become small because sexual experience has few barriers around it to mark it as important, if the sense of sin is no longer self-recognition, then where is the intensity of our humanity?
    Equality could become our greatest danger asit becomes more true of greater numbers, who live not from the depths built in the past, nor from the uniqueness knit from self-knowledge, but at the herd level where the human being tends to be depotentialised. Facing this with the gravity it warrants may be the truest way to lessen dangers more feared.
    These suppositions seem true to me, but I also believe that there is an increase in honesty, in insight, of which some are aware and thus are able to live a larger area of their natures, so that there is an increase in individuality. In fact, we have a new inequality.
    I am so caught
in my own experience of age that it occurs to me only now that it matters who speaks of age, and anyone would have the right to ask, “By what road did you arrive where you are? What experiences formed your viewpoint?”. For over twenty-five years I was a Jungian analyst, and it is this experience, those long years ofobservation that force on me the idea that modernity is like an analysis in reverse. Instead of gathering oneself together, it is a dispersal of oneself.
    In analysis, as I have known it, you are confronted by your qualities and cannot disown them, though you try to. The animal, the primitive, the child, the crowd, the hero, the criminal, both sexes, the initiate, they are all in you. They appear in your dreams, you cannot deny them. By becoming responsible for them, in as far as you do, you know the pain of becoming conscious. This is made endurable and creative by figures beyond the personal, wisdom greater than yours, mysteries inspiring awe, all formed, one has to presume, by the endless generations whom life has presented with the same problems we all share. This rich and searing process of gathering a centre where you know what you are and are not makes me feel at moments as though modern ethics are a vast evasion. Of what? Subjective values, cause and effect, a many-sided reality that I miss and cannot name.
    It is easier to be everyone rather than integrate diversity in yourself, but is the ease not paid for in human quality? In analysis, while never forgetting the degree of one’s own incurability, one experiences eternal truths that give dignity to man. Is that a frequent experience today?
    I f in this time
of planning for order there seems to be an increase of disorder, is it not possible by the strange swing of the opposites that the young as they mature will make a new choice, having tried many ways, and create an order we do not yet see? Will necessity, which can be as good a taskmaster as analysis, teach us that we are contained in an order we do not understand. And how many will accept the discipline of the discovery?
    T o be dominated
by abstract ideas is part of the helplessness of age. Is my emptiness invaded, or do I try to come nearer to my kind by viewing their problems from my isolation? I care, I am torn with care for the quality of humanity. If I suffer fruitlessly, guttering candle that I am, I choose to burn to the end. Though it is mostly under protest. That is understood.
    W hile equality is thought possible
, even a basic right, I want to remember the stimulus and interest of inequality. At once I feel heartless, as though I might wound or dishonour someone who had had less than I. The degree of our lack naturally determines the keenness of our claim. I have lacked much, vital things, and the ache has spurred me to intense living. But isn’t reality the rousing shock we all need, and do we not lose ourselves in pretence if the truth and tragedy of inequality is not accepted? If we could be equal,what would happen to reverence and compassion?
    When I see nature’s inherent