Another description of the soul's path can be found in Jung's concept of individuation. I've heard people acquainted with Jung's writings ask one another, "Are you individuated?"-as though individuation were some pinnacle of therapeutic achievement. But individuation is not a goal or destination, it is a process. As the essence of individuation, I would emphasize the sense of being a unique individual, being actively involved in soul work. All my gifts and gaps and efforts coalesce and coagulate-to use alchemical language-into the unique individual I am. Nicholas of Cusa wrote to a man named Giuliano, "All things Giulianize in you." The individual hard at work in the process of soul-making is becoming a microcosm, a "human world." When we allow the great possibilities of life to enter into us, and when we embrace them, then we are most individual. This is the paradox Cusanus described in so many ways. Over a lifetime, however long or short, cosmic humanity and the spiritual ideal are revealed in human flesh, in various degrees of imperfection. Divinity-the body of Christ, the Buddha nature-becomes incarnated in us in all our complexity and in all our foolishness.
— Thomas Moore
Moore's correction of the "Are you individuated?" question is sharp, but the correction alone may not go far enough. When individuation gets turned into a credential — a pinnacle, a destination, something one either has or is still working toward — what is operating underneath that question is not confusion about Jungian theory. It is the soul's oldest strategy: *if I become complete enough, refined enough, psychologically mature enough, I will not suffer.* The question "Are you individuated?" is the growth-and-progress logic wearing depth-psychological clothes. Moore hears this and refuses the destination — rightly — and then moves toward something genuinely interesting: Cusanus's *omnia giulianizzant*, the idea that everything in the cosmos takes on the flavor, the particular pitch, of this singular human life. That is not a therapeutic goal. It is closer to what happens when the soul stops trying to escape its own particularity.
The passage's real weight, though, is in the last sentence — the imperfection, the foolishness, the complexity as the *site* of incarnation, not its obstacle. Not *despite* the gaps but *in* them. This does not resolve the soul's longing for arrival; it relocates it. The longing is still running. But what it runs *toward* has become, unexpectedly, already here.
Thomas Moore·Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide·1992