“Carl Jung raised the great question of our time: How do we find a way “to get everything back into connection with everything else?” In struggling to find an answer, he warned, “We must resist the vice of intellectualization, and get it understood that we cannot only understand,” We have to get out of our heads and into the wilds. We have to risk ourselves to mystery. We have to love what we’re finally unable to explain.”
Belden Lane, author of the words just quoted, was a university professor who himself got out of his head and into the wilds. Despite being competent, Lane was less than confident and comfortable in academia and more at home in the realms of the soul and of the natural world; it was there that he found himself in the good company of psychoanalyst Carl Jung who, along with being an intellectual, was also a proponent of down-to-earth wisdom.
When we become comfortable in the wilds, in the non-rational dimension of ourselves, our inability to explain the “great questions” concerning life, death, and the elusive connection of everything to everything else, becomes not the cause of frustration but a portal to wonder, to awe, to the mystery at the heart of life. Our ability to think, to reason, and to use our intelligence to explore and explain is truly a gift, but there is value and freedom in understanding that “we cannot only understand.”
I have found that it is not theologians and philosophers who best guide us when it comes to the unexplainable, but poets and mystics like Jalaluddin Rumi who encourages us to “Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.” Life’s most profound questions defy intellectual explanation, but they can be comprehended by love – not head over heels love, but heart over head!
Attuned to Soul 