"In everything there’s a lesson. The lesson isn’t designed to make life easier, harder, better or worse. It’s designed to increase your wisdom (balance). When the unawakened human intellect seeks to define itself it differentiates things & experiences into categories. But this isn’t the way holistic consciousness works. Of course you need to make sense of the experiences surrounding you – but you should try to do so inclusively, not by focusing on a tiny area of knowledge and excluding everything else. At first the all-ness of everything swamps your awareness, and holding one part steady when all is in motion can be a real ordeal – but then slowly it dawns on you that everything is meant to be in motion. And you discover that the only way you can only make a contribution is by joining in the dance, and so balancing and coordinating your own motions as a dancer within the all-ness of everything."
In The Grail Legend (p133) Emma Jung & Marie-Louise von Franz express a similar idea
> In the dreams and fantasy pictures of modern man this hidden, invisible something is occasionally depicted as a meaningful and numinous void. Thcre is one picture in which an egg-shaped void, from which rays stream forth, forms the centre of a world or of a mandala with an empty centre. The words of Meister Eckhart beautifully express what is meant by this image: "Everything must be lost, the soul must exist in unhampered nothingness," or "Whosoever would come to God must come as nothiug." Or, expressed in Eastern imagery: "In the purple hall of the city of jade dwells the God of Utmost Emptiness and Life." The Confucians call it "the centre of the void:' A nothingness, a void, is therefore the inescapable condition for the emergence of the Self. The outer and inner realizations of a life lived to its end. For this reason Jung has likened it to the "crystal lattice' present as a potential form in a solution which first becomes visible in the process of crystallization, although crystallization does not necessarily take place. The Self is therefore not complete. but is prescnt in us as a potentiality which can become manifest only in the course of a specific process. Certainly, the Self is not invariably realized through the unfolding of the natural biological life processes. There appear to be many lives where this does not come to pass.
> Then how and by what means can thc Self become manifest? It is realized to that extent in which it is lived in the experience of daily life. It is not achieved, however, when it appears in symbolic form in dreams and inner images, nor is it when consciousness acquires a specific degree of clarity, nor yet when a psychological function has attained a high degree of differentiation. Important as consciousness undoubtedly is—and rightly utilized consciousness is an invaluable means of help for the realization of the Self—it is not by itself the determining factor. For it does not depend so very greatly on knowledge and ability or upon some degree of intelligence, but rather upon the use which is made of these attributes and above all, on the psychic attitude a person adopts in the face of the various circumstances of his life and fate. As the threads of fabric are woven into a pattern, so the Self as the living garment of divinity is woven out of the many decisions and crises, in themselves possibly insignificant, by which we are affected in the course of our lives. Such occasions present themselves at every level of life and intelligence and in every milieu. Whether or not they lead to a manifestation of the Self depends solely on our own response. Many of us have observed that children, even small children, when faced with some difficulty, possess an attitude which many adults could only envy. That "something," the lack of which we experience as soullessness, is a "someone" who takes a position, who is accountable and who feels committed. Where this higher, responsible ego is lacking there can be no Self. Ethos and the Self are therefore mutually interdependent. For this reason, too, an attitude of "beyond good and evil;' such as has been commended in many quarters in modern times and especially since Nietzsche, is the best way to prevent the emergence of the Self.
> From the foregoing we can see that a fascination can emanate from something empty. It longs for completion like an invisible form which calls out for substance; the individual is conscious of the existence of this summons and of the growth of this attraction, but without knowing what it is that calls to him. The influence , emanating from the hidden Grail could be likened to such a summons.
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