“But I only achieve the feeling of limitlessness when I am extremely limited. Man’s greatest limitation is that ‘self’ which manifests itself in the experience of ‘I am only this’.
Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination — that is, finitely limited — we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!“
Carl Jung
This is an excellent illustration of the principle of enantiodromy, according to which everything, sooner or later, turns into its opposite.
It also illuminates the process of individuation, whose essence lies in the creative unification of opposites within oneself.
These opposites include the unique and the universal, the individual and the collective, the finite and the infinite. If one truly understands — not intellectually, but inwardly — what limitation is, one begins to seek limitation in life, transforming it into distinction, until one is finally left with the experience of “I am only this.” At that point, one understands why those who have attained enlightenment speak of entering the dimension of the present.
Only in the present are the opposites of past and future united, and only there can one experience what eternity means.
C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1953. p. 225.
