Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

66 Developing a Personality
say it would be useful or advisable:
Nature has never yet been taken in by well-meaning advice. The
only thing that moves nature is causal necessity, and that goes for
human nature too. Without necessity nothing budges, the human
personality least of all. It is tremendously conservative, not to say
torpid. . . . The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command,
no insight, only brute necessity; it needs the motivating force
of inner or outer fatalities. Any other development would be no better
than individualism. . . . [which] is a cheap insult when flung at
the natural development of personality. 55
Simply and naturally, those who know themselves (as opposed to
those who say they do) become a magnet for those whose souls
long for life. You have to own up to the person you’ve become.
Working on yourself has an inductive effect on others. To my mind
this is all to the good, for if enough individuals become more conscious
psychologically, then the collective will too, and life on this
earth will go on.
The guiding principle is this: Be the one through whom you wish
to influence others. Mere talk is hollow. There is no trick, however
artful, by which this simple truth can be evaded in the long run. The
fact of being convinced, and not the things we are convinced of—
that is what has always, and at all times, worked a change in others.
55 “The Development of Personality,” The Development of Personality, CW 17,
par. 293.