In the well-known Biblical story, God tells Jonah to go talk to his people, and to tell them things they do not want to hear.
Jonah refuses because he is too scared. While he is on a boat with others, a storm appears out of nowhere. He elects to be thrown off because he knows it’s his fault, then he is swallowed by a whale. Three days later he appears on the shore to pursue his proper destiny.
The moral is: if you don’t follow the path you’re supposed to follow, the seas will become stormy and you’ll be in a terrible place for a length of time, and then if you’re lucky you’ll be spit back out and you will get the opportunity to do what you’re supposed to do.
Maslow wrote about the impediments that stand in the way of man’s self-actualization — why man is afraid of his own greatness and of his own destiny, even though in some moments, imagining the highest possibilities for himself brings the greatest joy. He called this fear the “Jonah Syndrome.”
It is what we would expect from a weak organism, to shy away from the full intensity of life.
“For some people this evasion of one’s own growth, setting low levels of; aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudo-stupidity, mock-humility are in fact defenses against grandiosity.”
Maslow
Because life is overwhelming and miraculous, humans need to repress some of it. We cannot gape at every single moment in wonder, because such a life would not be technically possible. We need to maintain some semblance of normalcy by ignoring the majestic and the beautiful, most of the time.
The problem with man is that nature has endowed him with the capacity to take in everything — an ability not available to any other animal. Man can relate not only to his own kind, but even to other species, he can choose to travel to the past or he can live billions of years into the future.
And everything inside man is strange to him. He does not understand why he was born, what he should be doing, what to make of his dreams and fantasies, or even how he should interpret his thoughts.
Man recoils from grandiosity for the same reason that he recoils from himself and his own thoughts, it is because this concept too is strange to him. But the only salvation that is available to him is to plunge into the unknown even though the dangers of doing so are numerous. He may lose the battle, he may isolate his friends, or his ego may become so inflated that he loses the ability to think clearly.
The ancient myths have consistently forewarned us of the greatest danger, and that is the betrayal of self by failing to live up to one’s potential. Should we take this warning seriously? Yes, but not without understanding ourselves first.
We are programmed to avoid danger, not only because grandiosity is strange to us, but because danger is familiar to us. We content ourselves with a comfortable routine because we want to prevent what we most want to avoid.
Be heroic, but with restraint, with an understanding of your loss aversive nature. Do not recoil from grandiosity or your potential but temper it with an honest assessment of your abilities and circumstances and innate nature.
While failing to live up to one’s potential is a form of self-betrayal, it is not the only form — a denial of one’s own nature is a more pernicious form of self-betrayal.
Originally published at https://unearnedwisdom.com.
