The Next and Most Necessary Thing: Listening To Your Deepest Self

It is said that there was a story that C.G. Jung was fond of telling quite often. He even encouraged his early followers to repeat this story whenever they gave a talk on his psychology, as it expressed for him the importance of being in harmony with one’s deepest self.

This story, about an old Taoist rainmaker, was told to him by his colleague Richard Wilhelm, who was a witness to the events that transpired. Wilhelm was a Chinese scholar, the translator of both the Tao Te Ching as well as the I Ching, to which Jung himself wrote a preface. He also introduced Jung to a treatise on Chinese Taoist Alchemy, a text which had a major impact on the direction of Jung’s later work.

This is the story as Jung related it:

The Rainmaker

There was a terrible drought in that part of China where Richard Wilhelm was living. After all the ways to bring rain that the people knew had been tried, they decided to send for a rainmaker. This interested Wilhelm very much, and he was careful to be there when the rainmaker arrived. the man came in a covered cart, a small, wizened, old man who sniffed the air with evident distaste as he got out of the cart, and asked to be left alone in a small cottage outside the village; even his meals were to be laid down outside the door.

Nothing was heard from him for three days, then it not only rained, but there was also a big downfall of snow, unknown at that time of year. Very much impressed, Wilhelm sought  the rainmaker out and asked him how it was that he could make rain, and even snow. The rainmaker replied, “I have not made the snow; I am not responsible for it.” Wilhelm insisted that there was a terrible drought until he came, and then after three days they even had quantities of snow. The old man answered, “Oh, I can explain that. You see, I come from a place where the people are in order; they are in Tao; so the weather is also in order. But directly I got here, I saw the people were out of order and they also infected me. So I remained alone until I was once more in Tao and then, of course, it snowed.”

The Deepest Self is the Tao

This apparently true story tests our credulity. From our modern perspective, we may be skeptical of the notion that one man could have influence over the weather.

On the other hand, our own experience shows that when many people live out of balance with themselves and with nature it can have a destructive effect on the weather, as the reality of global warming amply shows. 

The larger point here is that when we live out of harmony with ourselves, it can have devastating effects on the many “weather patterns” of our lives – our relationships, our communities, our own capacity for contentment and joy. When it feels like life has become an arid desert, something is out of balance.

Furthermore, we can be “infected,” like the old rainmaker, by the environment in which we find ourselves. If the culture, or peer group, or family that surrounds us is out of balance, then it is likely that we will be pulled out of harmony with ourselves, as well.

For the rainmaker it was necessary to separate himself to bring himself in alignment with the Tao. Today we would say that we have lost the connection to our deepest self. And like the rainmaker we need to find our stance outside of the culture in order to put ourselves back in harmony with that deeper self.

Follow Your Bliss

To be in accord with the Tao, however, does not mean arranging reality so that it lines up with your desires, what you think you want. These are usually the ego’s desires and they have more to do with the safety and stability of the ego than with the experience of the fullness of life that is characteristic of living from that deeper center that Jung called the Self.

Being in accord with the Tao, living from the deepest self, means asking the question, “What does life ask of me at this moment?”

Joseph Campbell’s formula for this way of being was “Follow Your Bliss.” When you follow your bliss, says Campbell, you begin to feel as though you are being helped by “invisible hands.” 

This is how he described the experience during his famous interviews with Bill Moyers for The Power of Myth documentary series:

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Note that Campbell calls his idea a “superstition.” What I take him to mean is that he doesn’t know if what he is saying is literally true and, ultimately, it doesn’t even matter if it is or not. What matters is the experience. He experiences this as if it were true and thereby feels the presence of the miraculous in his life.

When we change our experience of the world, we change the world in which we live.

The Next and Most Necessary Thing

Jung has his own formula that parallels that of Campbell. In one of his letters, responding to someone who had sought some advice from him, he writes:

“When one does the next and most necessary thing without fuss and with conviction, one always does what is meaningful and intended by fate.”

Of course, this leads to the question of how one goes about figuring out just what the next and most necessary thing is. How do you discern between a narrow ego impulse and one that flows from a deeper, more expansive source?

Listening to the Deepest Self

Here we return to the story of the rainmaker, who spent three days alone in his hut bringing himself into alignment with the Tao. Learning to listen to your deepest self is not a one-time action or a simple quick fix. It is a practice, a discipline. It is, to use the language of Taoism, a way of cultivation. 

The religions of the world have always understood this need for a sustained practice and so they have developed methods of prayer, meditation and self-cultivation. In certain Taoist practices, for example, the goal was to develop a “one-pointed mind” free from idle thoughts in which “truly efficacious charms” will appear.

And this is just what Jungian psychology seeks to produce, though in place of the word “charms,” it uses “symbolic images of the Self.” Dream work and active imagination are the practices that it uses to produce these truly efficacious symbols.

“The highest good is like water,” says the Tao Te Ching. And here we have another clue. If you are listening to the voice of your deepest self, you should find that things begin to flow more. Whatever leads you to a place of being more fluid, more flexible, more flowing, as opposed to that which feels fixed and rigid, is probably moving you where you need to go.

And whatever weather you may find in this place, is probably just what it needs to be.

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