What Is The Symbolic Life?

The Daily Need of the Soul

The first point he makes is that “Only the symbolic life can express the daily need of the soul.” So now we know we're talking about something related to the mystery of the human soul.

And once again, we find ourselves confronted with something that resists definition. What is the soul? Well, those individuals who have wrestled with this mystery rarely venture to tell us what the soul is. Instead, they share with us their experience of what the soul is like. For instance, we hear from Julian of Norwich, a Christian mystic from the 14th and 15th centuries -- she says, “our soul may never have rest in anything which is beneath itself.” (2)

So, one aspect of the soul, then, is that it points us to a larger life, a more comprehensive experience of our own existence. “Our soul may never have rest in anything which is beneath itself.” That is, anything that is too narrow, anything that's too small, too mundane. And this is exactly to what Jung says. The second point he makes is this: “And because people have no such thing, [that is, no symbolic life] they can never step out of this mill — this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are 'nothing but.'” 

The contemporary vision of what it means to be a human being has become unbearably diminished. We live in the world of what the poet William Wordsworth called “getting and spending,” and of what Jung, elsewhere, called the world of "the standardized, mass produced, normal human being." (3) Such a life, Jung warned, does not, and cannot, support what he refers to as “the creative meaning and potentialities of adult existence." (3) The “banal life in which we are ‘nothing but’” is one that is cut off from a vision of the meaningfulness of life, and it leaves us with just this experience of the busy-ness of life. And this, Jung says, can make us sick. 

Everything Is Banal

And that's the third point: “Everything is banal,” he says, “everything is 'nothing but'; and that is the reason why people are neurotic.” Without some sense of our participation in the larger life of the soul, we become prone to those “lives of quiet desperation” that Henry David Thoreau spoke about almost 200 years ago. (4)

We need to be wary of any view that attempts to reduce the whole of human existence to just one of its parts, for example, just to biology or just economics. For the whole is always more than the sum of its parts, and though we are certainly biological beings, we are also so much more than that. We are beings who seek meaning. “Man cannot stand a meaningless life,” says Jung late in his own life, summing up everything I've been talking about so far with one succinct remark. (5)

And so we see that what Jung is pointing to as the “daily need of the soul” is meaning. It is meaning of which we are “badly in need.”

So, if I were to give a provisional definition of the symbolic life, it would be something like this:

The symbolic life is a recognition that there is a larger life of some kind that we are subject to and which has the character of meaning. It is an affirmation of the meaningfulness of life and a means, a way of living, that enables us to come into contact with that life of meaning.

This larger life is that which is attested to by the great works of religion and mysticism, of poetry and music and art, and so much more. 

The White Snake

It’s important to remember that meaning is something more than thought. It's not something captured by a concept. It's not grasped, it's glimpsed. It’s not something mechanical or mathematical, it’s metaphorical. We experience it the way that we might experience a beautiful sunset — not as something articulated by reason, but as something wordless encountered by our whole being. To know this experience, we have to turn to things like story and image and symbol, because they speak to the living psyche, they speak to the deep imagination, and not just to the calculating mind. 

And so a crucial part of the symbolic life is learning how to hear the language of symbols. So, in that spirit, I want to turn to a story and I want to see if we can begin to hear what it might have to tell us about the nature of symbolic life.

So, this is the opening sequence of one of the Grimms’ fairy tales, and it's called The White Snake:

Once upon a time there lived a king, whose wisdom was so great that the whole land depended upon his judgments. Nothing remained long unknown to him; it appeared as if intelligence of the most carefully concealed event was carried to him through the air. 

It was the custom of this king each day at noon when the dinner had been removed, and no one else present, for a trustworthy servant to bring in a large bowl, which was always covered up. Neither the servant nor any one else knew what it contained, for the king never took off the cover to eat of the contents until he was quite alone. 

This had continued for a long time, but there came a day when the curiosity of the servant was too strong to be overcome, and after removing the dish from the king's table he took it into his own room. He carefully locked the door and then lifted up the cover, and saw to his surprise a white snake lying at full length in the dish. He no sooner caught sight of it than he became unable to resist a desire to taste it, so he cut a little piece off and put it in his mouth. 

Scarcely had it touched his tongue than he heard outside his window strange whisperings, and soft voices. He went and listened, and then noticed two sparrows who were talking together and telling each other all that they had seen in the woods and fields. The little piece of snake which he had so enjoyed had given him the power to understand the languages of animals. (6)

The Art of Living

But we shouldn't confuse wisdom with "possession of knowledge" or "possession of information." It's not the same thing. A wise person is not someone who knows a lot of things or who is very smart. Wisdom is more like an attunement with life, what the ancient philosophers called the ars vitae — the art of living.

And what the fairy tale suggests is that the king’s wisdom is somehow connected with his daily practice of eating of the white snake after he has finished his dinner and when, as the story puts it, “he was quite alone.”

It would seem, then, that the experience of wisdom is somehow connected with times of quiet, times of contemplation, and times of solitude. The king waits until he is completely alone before he lifts the cover off of his secret dish. And later, the servant will wait until he is completely alone in his own room before he sees and eats of the white snake.

Every tradition insists on the centrality of stillness and silence as a prerequisite for an encounter with the deeper dimensions of reality. Wisdom, in other words, is not found in the bustle of everyday life. It is not found in the “grinding mill” that Jung talks about. Rather, it is to be found in the kind of reflection that can only occur in the practice of solitude.

It is in solitude, freed from the distractions of our everyday lives, that the conditions are created for an unfiltered encounter with ourselves and with the power and poignancy of life. Solitude confronts us with the meaning of our life, and like a sudden encounter with a snake gliding across our path, it can be both fascinating and frightening.

The Language of the Animals

Whatever else the image of the snake represents — and its symbolic resonances are far too numerous to get into here — it is, according to the story, the means by which the king and the servant are able to attain to wisdom, which the story also gives the name “the language of the animals.” 

The gift of human consciousness is a mixed blessing. Our ability to separate ourselves from the flow of life and become observers of life is key to our technological development and mastery of life — from the harnessing of fire right up to the technologies of our present day. But it is also a separation from our own instinctual nature and it results in a sense of alienation from life and nature. This is why the great religious traditions have images and stories about the fall of humankind — the Garden of Eden, Prometheus chained to the rock, the descending Yugas of the Hindu tradition that witness the decline of human wisdom and knowledge and virtue.

The image of eating the white snake and learning the language of the animals is a reversal of that decline. This is a frequent theme in myths and fairy tales — the hero who tastes a magical creature and gains access to a profound wisdom.

The “language of the animals” is, of course, the language of nature, which also means our nature, that is to say, our own creative unconscious, our living psyche, our soul.

The eating of the white snake that confers an understanding of the “language of animals,” then, is an image of overcoming our alienation from life, of achieving a new and complete communion with life.

A Discipline of Deep Listening

So, if there were one main takeaway from all that I have been talking about here, it is exactly this: the Symbolic Life is a means of overcoming our alienation from life, of stepping out of the “grinding mill” of the workaday world, and remembering the meaningfulness of our existence.

And a key component of this kind of life is to carve out space for a discipline of deep listening, so that we can hear that “language of the animals,” that voice of wisdom, and the call of our own true nature.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening, we shall hear the right word.” (7)

References

1. C.G. Jung from 'The Symbolic Life' in Collected Works (CW), vol. 18, par. 627
2. Julian of Norwich from 'Showings' (Classics of Western Spirituality)
3. C.G. Jung, from 'The Development of Personality' in CW17, par. 284
4. Henry David Thoreau in 'Walden'
5. C.G. Jung in "The 'Face to Face' Interview" from C.G. Jung Speaking
6. The White Snake ~ Grimm's Fairy Tales
7. Ralph Waldo Emerson in 'Spiritual Laws' from Essays: First Series