“consult the hermit deep inside”
The path of our life leads naturally to a crossroads. One road is a more outgoing life filled with friends and parties and Twitter followers—the extrovert. The other road is more reserved, quiet, and not unfriendly but not necessarily very “social”—the introvert.
The road most taken, that of the extrovert, can quickly become a slog. “We often become creatures of our limbic systems … . Our self-regulation deserts us; our prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function and impulse control, goes offline; we become reward-seeking Scud missiles, addicts in search of a fix.”[i]
The majority of humans will continue along this tortuous road choosing the pursuit of plenty, pleasure and power with gregarious companions all eager to assure one another that they are having the time of their lives. Party on my friends!
Insight # 15 comes to us from Robert Johnson (1921-2018) an American Jungian analyst and author. He was a student of Jiddu Krishnamurti an Indian spiritual teacher.
“The hermit within is the highly introverted part of one’s nature that has been waiting and storing energy in a far-off corner waiting for this very moment. Extroversion is usually dominant in the first half of one’s life and that is correct. But when one’s extroversion has run its race and taken one on that very valuable part of life’s journey—then one must consult the hermit deep inside for the next step. We do this very badly in our culture and few people know how to draw upon the genius of their introvert nature for the next step. It frequently happens to a modern person that he is forced into his introversion by an illness or accident or paralyzing symptom of some kind.”[ii]
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Additional Reading:
- Introversion and Extroversion, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
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#15 Introversion and Extroversion
[i] Senior, Jennifer. “A High School We Can’t Escape.” The New York Times. August 5, 2018, p. 7.
[ii] Johnson, Robert. He: Understanding Masculine Psychology. New York: Harper, 1989, p. 74.
