The word “holy” is often used to refer to someone (or something) devoted to God. It is a sacred quality sought by religious practitioners, for to be holy is to be one with God. But while many follow the path of God, it is rare to come across someone holy. Why? Is it something mystical, abstract, or just too tough to achieve in a single lifetime?

The word “holy” is related to the German word “Heilig” meaning “blessed.” But it is also related to the English word “whole,” probably because it makes the believers “complete.” In a way, to be “holy” is to be “wholly” one with life.

But if holy means complete, and is a rare trait, does it mean most of us are incomplete?

The Embroidery of Our Being

In our lives, we take up different roles, of a student, parent, child, guide, citizen, and so on. But there is a shared human experience in the moments when we are all by ourselves: a feeling that we are not the roles we play. There is more to us.

This is the starting point of discovering self. The roles we play are the persona (Latin for “mask”), the masks we put to conform with the society. And when we put on these masks of our different roles, we suppress a part of our personality, expressing only a fraction acceptable by the societal entities we interact with. Some of these roles can get so restrictive that we get suffocated in our masks, feeling fake. At that point, under the fear of being ostracized, many people surrender to the process to the point where they forget themselves. They start thinking of themselves as their persona itself.

For most people, this struggle of persona and a nagging feeling of being more is the max they ever attempt or get to face in the search of self, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, as this is still in the realm of consciousness. But there is a much deeper domain of unconsciousness, as explored by the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung (the same person who inspired Mihaly to learn psychology for his flow state research).

According to Jung, our unconscious has the repressed self, considered primitive and childish or something completely barred by societal norms, like the traits of the opposite sex. Since these aspects lie in the unconscious, as contrary to persona, we are completely unaware of their existence, until the rare events where they take over our psyche in moments of emergency or impulse, and we feel out of control. In many cases, such sudden eruption from the unconscious can lead to neurosis.

Philosopher Alan Watts compares this way of living to stitching an embroidery, where we present a beautiful, expected design to the society, but the backside is a mess of unattended threads, just like our unconsciousness. And as long as we live in this manner, unaware of ourselves, we will continue to feel limited and unfulfilled.

And Jung suggests the solution as a path to become an individual, someone who is “in-dividual,” whole. And he named this process “individuation.”

The Hurdles in Holiness

Individuation is the process of shedding the light of the conscious on the unconscious and integrating it as a part of the whole. As we embrace our innermost and incomparable uniqueness, we come closer to becoming our own complete self, an in-dividual being, who is not divided within.

But the process is tough, not just because we are against the norms, but also because it’s easy to get lost in the myriad of ways and self-deception. Since the difference between liberation and falling in love with our own prison can be very subtle, let’s explore some of the most common pitfalls.

Arguably, the easiest trap is passivity. As we age, our psyche deepens with experiences, and we get a sense of growth. This “natural” discovery of our unconscious runs at its own pace and our conscious nowhere intervenes. But this makes us miss out on countless revelations that could have helped in individuation. As Jung said, “the end remains as dark as the beginning.” It is just like the growth of our body. If we take conscious care of it (study, eat, play, work, etc.), it can grow better, capable of everything that a human potentially can, but in lack of effort, it is up to the whims of the environment.

Another pitfall occurs by virtue of our beliefs and biases. In this form, we are deceived by our convictions of self and refuse anything that does not match our idea of self. This is most common in strict followers of an ideology (political, religious, pop, etc.). In this case, we are essentially playing a role to ourselves and forever stuck in a subtle form of persona. This is a common reason why many of us who practice the idea of “accept yourself,” still feel lost and suffer from neurosis and depression. We need to question whether we are accepting “self” or our “conviction of self.”

Once we are aware of these traps, the path to individuation gets much clearer.

Build Your Halo

Jung says, “Wisdom begins only when one takes things as they are… So, it is a healing attitude when one can agree with the facts as they are… only then can we thrive.”

The path to individuation requires radical self-acceptance. This means identifying and accepting not only our flaws and weaknesses but also our interests and strengths. For it is only when we accept who we are that we find where we are, and it is only from where we are, and nowhere else, that we can go forward. But for this, we first need a method to shed light on the contents of our unconscious.

The beauty of individuation is that we can pick any path, as long as it is challenging enough to stretch us and we feel passionate enough to pour all our being into it. It has to be an active engagement, not a passive meditation. We need to pick a life mission, a goal that makes us fully participate in life and exposes us to novel experiences which bring out the hidden aspects of our “self” into the light of consciousness.

From this perspective, it makes sense why, “to find strength, you must act strong first.” The strength is always there, just repressed, along with many other aspects of our self, like anger, fear, love, and so on. The forms of these forces we usually see are the inhibited “pygmy self” as famous poet Kahlil Gibran once put it. But to be truly whole, we need to accept and integrate your full capacities into your consciousness. This includes acceptance of our deepest guilts, blinding lust, and many more powers locked up in the deep cellars of unconsciousness by generations of social conditioning.

When we come to terms with self, we build an attitude that affirms life, which in the words of Jung, “is beyond the reach of emotional entanglements and violent shocks – a consciousness detached from the world.” We are no longer subject to the whims of religion or state, but a free being that transcends all boundaries. In this state, where no part of ourselves is hidden any longer, we become complete.

This is the holy embroidery of our being. As is the front, so is the back, all beautifully done.