Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world..."
Tennyson, "Ulysses"
Over my lifetime I have learned that the more I experience, the more aware I am of what the possibilities for additional experience are. I think that is what Tennyson was saying in the lines above, and I think it is a statement that describes the individuation process. I am currently engaged in writing a memoir. As I look back to recapture the past, I realize again and again how little I could imagine the twists and turns my life would take over the years. Gradually, through the experience of being surprised by events in my life I could not have imagined years before, I have come to acknowledge that I cannot see the future and know what is on the road ahead, though the part of me that wants to be in control of things very much wants to plan everything out and know exactly where I'm going. One of the great lessons of experience, for me, has been learning how to surrender my need to control and have the future all planned, so that things I haven't dreamed of can take place.
Experience has taught me also that had I lived my life as I imagined it long ago when I was in college or the years immediately thereafter, I would have confined myself to a narrow box with many limits. I had a great deal of fear of the unknown. I think it is natural for us all to have some of that. But fear can constrict and limit. Thus, it is understandable that Jung talks of following the path of individuation and developing one's personality as "an act of high courage flung in the face of life..." (Storr 195) That is why following the path of individuation can be like a hero's quest or the search for the Holy Grail. Heroes in myths and fairy tales, as well as the knights from the legends of the Middle Ages, often had to set out on seemingly impossible journeys without knowing exactly where they were going. But there was always a point to the quest - something for which they were searching that can be taken as symbolic of wholeness or self.
Heroes and knights on quests typically encountered people or other creatures that in one way or another may have influenced the continuing journey. In the process of individuation we likewise may come into relationships we could not have imagined. Often those relationships give us a chance to develop and see some aspect of ourselves we haven't previously recognized. Jung says in talking about integration and wholeness, "All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections." (Storr 242) If we never have the courage to surrender what we think we know and learn from experience, we may not realize how much we are projecting, how little we really know.
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