You may have found your way here because of the implication of achieving “self-actualization”. Although it is a term that many people use, the concept of self-actualization is shrouded in obscurity.
What does it mean to self-actualize? Is it simply a psychological buzz-word? Or is there something deeper entangled with the concept?
Let’s start with what it means to be actual.
The actual is the real. It follows then that to actualize oneself is to make oneself real.
Many of us today are not real. We have become like marionettes pulled this way or that by the strings of our cultural landscape, living what Carl Jung called “the provisional life”.
He described it thus: “The provisional life; where one does not exist really, they are only a spectator; so any experience is ghost-like, perfectly abstract, without a trace of realization.”
The ghost-like spectator, who reacts but does not act, who doesn’t know what he’s living for, who is barely alive…
He moves through the world without a trace of realization. In other words, he is completely un-actualized.
We have all been this person at times in our lives. Perhaps we are being this person now.
And yet we are seeking self-actualization because we don’t want to be that hungry ghost trying to fulfill our deepest needs with surface solutions, all the while failing over and again.
So, how do we become real? How do we transcend the provisional life? For that answer we must look to the Blue Fairy of lore.
In Pinocchio, the woodcarver Gepetto crafts a marionette. Before falling asleep he asks the cosmos to transform the puppet—to make it real—to actualize it.
That night the Blue Fairy descends from the heavens, and she gives life to Pinocchio— provisional life.
He is still a puppet. He still is made of wood, hollow inside. He can now walk and talk and move through the world, but he is not real. He wants to be real, but he doesn’t know how to be.
Fortunately for Pinocchio, he is dealing with a cosmic being, and she knows exactly what it takes to become real. She says it succinctly:
“Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday you will be a real boy.”
It is here we receive the recipe for actualization, as simply put as it can be.
We must prove to the world and ourselves, that we are brave, truthful, and unselfish, and once we have embodied these qualities, once we have become these things, we will have become real.
The cultural strings pull us this way and that—marketing, politics, media, and so forth—and until we become actualized, we will be pulled all the way along with them.
But why, in her great power and wisdom, did the Blue Fairy not endow Pinocchio with actualization? Why did she only provide provisional life?
Because there is no path to actualization other than self-actualization. We must do it ourselves, and there is no other way.
And yet, we are not alone. All of us, striving to achieve self-actualization through our own action and will, as it must be done, can come together in this pursuit. And together we are stronger than the sum of our parts.
We may enlist our fellow human beings in our self-actualization journey, as they have enlisted us. For to go it completely alone is a recipe for failure. And we are not here to fail.
So let us go out into the world as the brave, truthful, unselfish real individuals that we truly are. And let’s watch as the world comes alive around us.
