Each of us is called and born with a character

Psychologist James Hillman, former director of the C. G. Jung Institute and author of The Soul’s Code (1997), never wrote about near-death experiences. But he described the soul-image as a bridge between the invisible world of the unconscious and our visible conscious world. His writings challenge us to “imagine”—to look for our calling in the myths and stories of our culture—and then to fulfill this image in our lives.

Hillman also gave me a new understanding of parenting (and grandparenting) and is great reading for those of us getting old: “Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.”* Hillman helped me imagine who I might yet be.]

The Soul’s Code begins: “There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this ‘Something’ as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.

“Because the ‘traumatic’ view of early years so controls psychological theory of personality and its development, the focus of our rememberings and the language of our personal story-telling have already been infiltrated by the toxins of these theories. Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods.

“At the outset we need to make clear that today’s main paradigm for understanding a human life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential—the particularity you feel to be you. By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. We are victims of academic, scientistic and even therapeutic psychology, whose paradigms do not sufficiently account for or engage with, and therefore ignore, the sense of calling, that essential mystery at the heart of each human life.

“In a nutshell, then, this book is about calling, about fate, about character, about innate image. Together they make up the ‘acorn theory,’ which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.

“Your person is not a process or a development. You are that essential image that develops, if it does. As Picasso said, ‘I don’t develop; I am.’ You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth. Each person enters the world called.”

 

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code.

*James Hillman’s Quotes & Sayings, https://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/2605-james-hillman.