Magnum Opus
How do I become a more and more whole person?
There are people who spend their entire lives renovating the living room.
They replace the sofa. Repaint the walls. Buy new furniture, but stuff into the basement whatever they no longer like, and never find the courage to go down there, nor do they ever climb up to the attic.
One day, the house begins to demand to be lived in fully. And what seems like a renovation is, sometimes, just the way life forces us to go down to the basement and up to the attic.
I think each of us wonders sometimes, in the daily rush, whether life is just this: to work, to raise children (some of us), to come home exhausted after a long and draining day, to sleep, and start all over again in the morning. Is that all there is? Or is there something greater? And if so, what exactly?
But even more important: how do all these existential questions connect to the concrete world we live in?
We spend our days trying to keep everything standing: to perform, to become better leaders, to evolve, to pay the mortgage, to be good parents, to be appreciated, to plant a tree. Without realizing it, life begins to mean only the upkeep of the construction — and with it, the worries, the feelings of powerlessness, the fears: the uncertainty of tomorrow, sleepless nights, anxieties about everything that could damage what we've built.
How do we live without having to choose between the basement, the attic, or maintaining the living room? How do we bring together earthly needs with ideals and existential questions? Can both fit into a single sentence and, more importantly, into a single life?
Or do we leave the existential questions up in the attic, for when we'll have time for them, too busy now keeping the living room clean and comfortable, and stuffing into the basement everything that gets in our way: fears, desires, questions. We close the door, hoping that if we don't go down there, they won't come up either.
Maybe the answer is so simple we can't see it.
Our home with its attic, its basement, its living room, its bedrooms, is what gives us stability, balance, love, and peace: as long as we lovingly keep every corner of it clean and in order, it shines like a piece of gold in sunlight.
It is precisely everyday life that is the laboratory in which our transformation takes place: the transformation of the home we live in.
MAGNUM OPUS - The Great Work
If you feel that in recent years you've become increasingly estranged from yourself, you're probably not falling apart. You've probably entered the first stage of a transformation that people have been describing for thousands of years.
This transformation is called the Great Work — Magnum Opus, the alchemy of human transformation.
What if life is not just a succession of events? What if there is a thread connecting the crises we go through to the person we become because of them? For me, Magnum Opus has become a map of this process.
Carl Gustav Jung showed that Magnum Opus (the Great Work of the alchemists) was not merely an attempt to obtain material gold, but a symbolic projection of the psychological process of maturing and integrating the self (the process of individuation). He realized that the strange texts and images in alchemists' books were, in fact, describing the hidden processes of the human mind. For Jung, the transformation of lead into gold was the perfect metaphor for the transformation of a person into a whole one.
Just as the alchemists transformed lead into gold by passing through four stages, so too can we transform our lives and our home into a magnificent work, by moving through the four stages.
If this is true, then divorce, burnout, illness, and anxiety are no longer just events. They become questions that life is asking you about the person you have become.
Your experience has a place in human history.
Generation after generation, we learn how to pass through the Great Work of becoming. None of us invents the wheel — we rediscover it, again and again. Thinkers such as Zarathustra, Socrates, Buddha, and Jung have touched the same essences, gone through similar metamorphoses, and passed on what humanity has been living for thousands of years, in an endless cycle of self-seeking.
What do you do when life breaks your construction?
The Stages of Transformation
The four stages of Magnum Opus have given me an extraordinary map for understanding human transformation. I didn't first recognize them in books, though rather, most uncomfortably, in my own life. Only then did I begin to recognize them in the people I work with.
Nothing is constant; everything is movement. This movement offers us opportunities to become whole. Life pushes us toward transformation through every challenge it places in our path, like a continuous spiral.
Let's walk through them together:
1. Nigredo (the blackening) — descending into the basement (the initial crisis, the confrontation with the Shadow, and the dissolution of the old ego) — The Observer
2. Albedo (the whitening) — sorting through the basement and entering the attic (purification, clarity, and the integration of deep unconscious aspects) — Introspection / Self-Knowledge
3. Citrinitas (the yellowing) — discovering the forgotten things in the attic and bringing them to light (the maturing of wisdom and the awakening of mature consciousness) — Manifestation and Self-Love
4. Rubedo (the reddening) — the radiance of all things in the house; the house now lives through itself (the union of opposites, the realization of the Self, and the attainment of the Philosopher's Stone as inner wholeness) — Co-creator of your reality
Nigredo (The Blackening)
What I knew collapses.
Look around you and at yourself: Do you feel anxious? Do you sometimes have panic attacks? Are you in burnout, or perhaps simply in a constant state of running? Have you fallen ill, gone through a divorce, or lost everything you built?
The question isn't only "How do I get out of here?" There's a more uncomfortable one: "What in the life I've built can no longer carry me forward?"
And we're not talking about isolated experiences. The 2025 edition of the Headway Mental Health Index 5.0, which tracks 54 indicators of mental health in Europe, shows that between 2015 and 2023, the prevalence of anxiety increased by 43.9%, reaching 8.3 cases per 100 inhabitants, while the prevalence of depression increased by 22.3%.
This is the fracture. It shows you that your identity can no longer go on living in the living room, ignoring the darkness in the basement and the desires left in the attic for later.
It is a painful stage, but a necessary one for change. The masks fall and you realize where you've been lying to yourself. This can be hard to accept, not just because you discover the lie, but because sometimes you have to accept that you participated in building it: you stayed, you tolerated, you postponed, you chose safety, you ignored your body, you kept performing, kept running. You said "I'm fine" when you knew you weren't.
This doesn't mean we need to feel guilty, ashamed, or that we shouldn't forgive ourselves. What we see can no longer be hidden, only alchemized, and this is where our power emerges. If everything has only happened to you from the outside, you are powerless. If you discover where you participated in your own construction, you also discover the place from which you can change it.
Albedo (The Whitening)
Your life doesn't change yet, what changes is the position from which you look at it.
For the first time, a distance appears between you and your thoughts. You are no longer completely absorbed in them. You begin to observe them.
This is the phase of reflection, introspection, and cleansing. For me, this is the most beautiful stage. I embrace it with joy every time someone enters it. It is the stage of exploration and self-discovery.
You notice that you react differently in situations that used to consume you. You begin to ask: "Why does this bother me so much? Which part of me spoke?" Sometimes more peace appears. Other times, more confusion, because you begin to see things you couldn't see before.
You start saying "no" without feeling guilty. You choose to sleep instead of proving something. You apologize more easily, not because you've learned a technique, but because you're beginning to see yourself differently.
What you see, you can no longer hide — and then the process of transformation begins to accelerate through conscious change.
It's like when, from the position of an individual contributor, you move into management. You start seeing things from a new perspective. If before you questioned your manager's decisions about a colleague, now you begin to see the organization's multiple perspectives and the bigger picture.
Or like when you have a child and your sense of responsibility grows. You become more mindful of what you eat and how you behave, knowing that you're impacting another person's life, not just your own.
Or, after going through an illness, you begin eating more healthily and exercising, knowing that any neglect of the body has long-term consequences. Prevention becomes more important.
Citrinitas (The Yellowing)
How would you recognize that what you once called success is no longer success for you?
This is the awakening of energy, vitality, and wisdom. You begin to truly understand who you are. This is the phase in which you find your vocation (if you haven't found it yet), begin to express yourself, and put your gifts to work. Where you once saw shadows, there were in fact gifts and you now learn to express yourself through them, realizing that your potential manifests through what you're naturally good at. You no longer strive to "fit in," but deliberately seek out situations where your abilities and talents align naturally.
This is also the phase in which self-love begins to make its presence felt and grow. You understand that your life has a broader meaning. You observe yourself, recognize patterns immediately, and choose to stay in relationship with yourself, even when you make mistakes. You no longer blame yourself instead, you choose change as the way forward.
This is the moment when intuition grows stronger and you no longer ignore it. You realize that in moments of uncertainty, the only thing capable of helping you navigate is intuition, because the mind excels at implementing the "How": processes, tasks, organization. Intuition doesn't replace thinking; it gives it direction. You give each part of yourself its rightful place, so that they can work together like an experienced, mature team.
„Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. It's had a big impact on my work." Steve Jobs — Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Walter Isaacson
Rubedo (The Reddening)
When did you last feel that you no longer had to prove anything to anyone?
The answer to that question tells you how close you are to Rubedo. Not because life becomes perfect, but because you stop constantly fighting yourself.
You still make mistakes, you still suffer, but you no longer abandon yourself every time you do. You begin to trust that you can get through the next challenge too.
You become whole, integrating all your inner parts: both the good and the shadows and loving yourself fully. If we look at the circle in which yin and yang coexist, we realize that together they form a whole. You no longer deny your shadows, but neither are you controlled by them.
This is the stage in which you finally understand that abstract notion of "co-creating your reality." It's the moment you realize that the life you've been living is, in fact, the one you created yourself. This time, you know how to choose the life you want with wisdom and in balance.
You are no longer distracted by desires or needs, because they no longer drive you.
You become free.
What I know for certain, from my work, is that Rubedo is not a permanent destination. The only constant is change, and so we repeat the four stages each time life brings us a new challenge, as an invitation to a new evolution of ourselves.
If you're a leader in an organization, you've most likely recognized these stages at every step of your career: from individual contributor to manager, then director, then VP or CEO. At every level, with every growth, you hid something in the basement. And there comes a moment when everything you hid demands to be cleared, because every room of the house must be clean for you to live fully, in the richness of life.
Is Magnum Opus inevitable, or is it a choice?
It's one of the best questions. Because sometimes change comes because we choose it, and other times it comes without asking.
Life inevitably brings Nigredo.
No one escapes: we all lose, we are all rejected, we all betray or are betrayed. We all grow old and we all face our own limits.
Therefore, the crisis is not a choice, but the transformation is.
There are three areas where crisis tends to appear: health, money, relationships. When, like a tsunami, we are struck by one of them — or, even worse, by several at once — the moment of awakening arrives. The one that forces us to look at what isn't working in our lives and change what doesn't function.
Then the real transformation begins. Or maybe not…
Some of us make the necessary changes in the moment, but after a while we return to what's familiar. To Nigredo. Until the next challenge that life, inevitably, puts in our path — forcing us once again to look at what truly matters.
Nigredo can find you. Magnum Opus requires your participation.
Life takes all of us, sooner or later, to the door of Nigredo — but not all of us enter. Some of us quickly rebuild what collapsed. We change the job, the relationship, the city, the therapist, the goal. We recover — and continue with the same identity, just in a new setting.
Then life repeats the lesson: perhaps in a different form, perhaps years later. Until we are willing to see what really collapsed.
In the next article, we enter Nigredo. The moment in which your old identity can no longer carry you forward — and you don't yet know who you will become.
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