How it Still Happens Today: The Eternal Quest for Knowledge

Jung tells a story in Four Archetypes about an old man who retreats into a cave. He’s not there to dispense wisdom. He’s not a guru sitting on a mountaintop waiting for followers. He’s there because he’s realized how much he doesn’t know, and that realization sent him underground.

In the cave, he meditates. He reaches beyond what he can perceive with his senses. And at some point, he picks up red chalk and draws on the walls—a circle with a quadrangle inside it. He’s not decorating. He’s trying to give form to something he can feel but can’t see. A symbolic expression of the forces moving through his psyche.

His disciples watch all of this. And they do what disciples have always done: they copy the visible part and skip the invisible work. They see the shapes on the wall, they mimic them, they reverse the order—and they think they’ve captured the wisdom. They’ve captured nothing. They took the form without the process.

This is everywhere right now.

We live in an era of shortcuts. Summarized books. Five-minute videos that promise to teach you what took someone a lifetime to learn. “Hacks” for everything. The temptation is to grab the output without doing the work that produces it. To draw the circle and the square on your cave wall because you saw someone else do it, and hope the insight follows.

It doesn’t work that way.

The old man’s wisdom didn’t come from the drawing. It came from the confrontation with his own not-knowing. The solitude. The patience. The willingness to sit with what he didn’t understand until something crystallized. The drawing was a byproduct. The process was everything.

If you’re doing inner work—whether that’s through dreams, meditation, therapy, coaching, whatever—the process matters more than the product. There’s no shortcut to honest self-confrontation. No one else’s insight will replace the one you discover by sitting with your own uncertainty long enough for it to reveal something.

The cave is still there. The invitation is the same as it was thousands of years ago: go in, sit down, and be willing to not know.