You Can't Think Your Way Through This.
Why the biggest things in life require something else entirely.
Carl Jung mentioned a fifth function beyond the four physical ones as human beings: sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Sensation tells us that something exists. Thinking tells us what it is. Feeling evaluates its worth. Intuition reveals the possibilities. Feeling guides us to what matters, but it’s still tied to the world around us.
The fifth function, he calls it the “transcendent,” right in the centre of us. It works through symbols, not logic—though logic can guide us toward it. It emerges from conflict, often revealed through dreams, active imagination, or creative expression, leading to deeper self-understanding and renewal, rather than just thinking.
Richard Rohr, in “Falling Upward,” explains that the opposite of rational is often transrational. The rational lives in opposites and logic. The transrational doesn’t act as an opposite but as things that are bigger than what our minds can process, like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity. The transrational keeps us within an open system so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down in a small space. Otherwise, the mind tends to either avoid, deny or blame somebody else for transrational things, when in fact they are the greatest spiritual teachers of all, if we let them.
For Jung’s concept, we need to learn to express through our creative selves. For Rohr’s concept, we need to learn how to better contemplate. When we hold both—when we feel something that goes beyond our understanding and give it permission to stay, when that requires us to spend time in solitude with what we cannot yet understand—and then we give it form through our craft, whether writing, painting, singing, or others, we connect the physical and immaterial, and become our whole self.