Karl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, once made a statement in which he said: "The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you (end of quote)." Now, this is what first comes to my thinking with regard to Jung's remark. It is maybe right at first sight but, in which case, it should be made clear that the answers we receive or seek out to advance or refrain from advancing to this type of questions are changing all the time as we continue to grow up and learn/unlearn from the world and from ourselves.
A few things then remain more to us hidden and unsaid than what might be found in the answers we give or receive from the world. We are a little better or worse than any questions of containment asked or answers of divergence, resistance and insistence suggested or still things of convergence, nodding and submission to the social norms and orders condoned.
When this is understood, we now trespass the gate of Karl Jung and say the following thing however farfetched or anachronistic it might be seen. There are no sufficient answers to those so called uneasy and deep-end questions grappling with the depth of the human experience in its simple and complex dimensions. And there are no free, easy and ubiquitous answers to come out from there.
To conclude, there currently seems to be, to my thinking, we have got two satisfying answers to this. One of them is already offered by Karl Jung himself. In it, he said: "In each of us there is another, whom we do not know (end of quote)." The second one is perhaps capable of sending shivers down the reader's spine. This is because when emperors ponder and think, they can also become historians and philosophers. And Here is the gist of what Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, had hammered out with his axe on the tree of time: a request instead of a command to think and:
"reflect upon the rapidity with which all that exists and is coming to existence is swept past us and disappears from sight. For substance is like a river in perpetual flow.. And ever at our side is the immeasurable span of the past and the yawning gulf of the future in which all things vanish away. Then how is he not a fool who, in the midst of all this, is puffed up with pride, or torment, or bewails his lot as though his troubles would endure for any great while (end of quote)?"
~ Chokri Omri
(Tunis, 26/08/2020)
