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All My Writings May Be Considered Tasks Imposed From Within, Their Source Was A Fateful Compulsion. What I Wrote Were Things That Assailed Me From Within Myself. I Permitted The Spirit That Moved Me To Speak Out.

-Carl Jung

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All My Writings May

Carl Jung

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All My Writings May Be Considered Tasks Imposed From Within, Their Source Was A Fateful Compulsion. What I Wrote Were Things That Assailed Me From Within Myself. I Permitted The Spirit That Moved Me To Speak Out.

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We Know That The Wildest And Most Moving Dramas Are Played Not In The Theatre But In The Hearts Of Ordinary Men And Women.

...the Soul Does Not Require The Organs Of Sense In Order To See, Hear, Smell, Taste And Feel, In A Much More Perfect State; But With This Great Difference, That In Such A State, It Stands In Much Nearer Connection With The Spirtual Than The Material World.

One Cannot Free Oneself By Bowing To The Yoke, But By Breaking It.

One Could Say, With A Little Exaggeration, That The Persona Is That Which In Reality One Is Not, But Which Oneself As Well As Others Think One Is.

To Become Conscious Of It Involves Recognizing The Dark Aspects Of The Personality As Present And Real.

His Retreat Into Himself Is Not A Final Renunciation Of The World, But A Search For Quietude, Where Alone It Is Possible For Him To Make His Contribution To The Life Of The Community.

The Most Dangerous Things In The World Are Immense Accumulations Of Human Beings Who Are Manipulated By Only A Few Heads.

Plants Were Bound For Good Or Ill To Their Places. They Expressed Not Only Beauty But Also The Thoughts Of God's World, With An Intent Of Their Own And Without Deviation. Trees In Particular Were Mysterious And Seemed To Me Direct Embodiments Of The Incomprehensible Meaning Of Life. For That Reason, The Woods Were The Places Where I Felt Closest To Its Deepest Meaning And To Its Awe-inspiring Workings.

Meaning Of Life

The Reason For Such An “unreasonable” Attitude With Me Is That I Am Not At All Sure What Will Happen To Me After Death. I Have Good Reasons To Assume That Things Are Not Finished With Death. Life Seems To Be An Interlude In A Long Story.

The Great Problems Of Life — Sexuality, Of Course, Among Others — Are Always Related To The Primordial Images Of The Collective Unconscious. These Images Are Really Balancing Or Compensating Factors Which Correspond With The Problems Life Presents In Actuality. This Is Not To Be Marveled At, Since These Images Are Deposits Representing The Accumulated Experience Of Thousands Of Years Of Struggle For Adaptation And Existence.

Collective Unconscious

I Have Never Since Entirely Freed Myself Of The Impression That This Life Is A Segment Of Existence Which Is Enacted In A Three-dimensional Boxlike Universe Especially Set Up For It.

That Which You Do Not Bring To Consciousness Comes To You As Your Fate, That Which You Do Bring To Consciousness, Whether It Was What You Thought You Wanted Or Not, Is Your Destiny.

Language, In Its Origin And Essence, Is Simply A System Of Signs Or Symbols That Denote Real Occurrences Or Their Echo In The Human Soul.

Envy Does Not Allow Humanity To Sleep.

Seldom, Or Perhaps Never, Does A Marriage Develop Into An Individual Relationship Smoothly And Without Crises; There Is No Coming To Consciousness Without Pain.

Man Can Try To Name Love, Showering Upon It All The Names At His Command, And Still He Will Involve Himself In Endless Self Deceptions. If He Possesses A Grain Of Wisdom He Will Lay Down His Arms And Name The Unknown By The More Unknown - Ignotum Per Ignotius - That Is By The Name Of God.

Fidelity To The Law Of Your Own Being Is An Act Of High Courage Flung In The Face Of Life.

The Self As The Essence Of Individuality Is Unitemporal And Unique; As An Archetypal Symbol It Is A God-image And Therefore Universal And Eternal.

Most Of Our Difficulties Come From Losing Contact With Our Instincts, With The Age-old Forgotten Wisdom Stored Up In Us.

For A Woman, The Typical Danger Emanating From The Unconscious Comes From Above, From The "spiritual" Sphere Personified By The Animus, Whereas For A Man It Comes From The Chthonic Realm Of The "world And Woman," I.e., The Anima Projected On To The World.

Trust That Which Gives You Meaning And Accept It As Your Guide

There Is A Thinking In Primordial Images, In Symbols Which Are Older Than The Historical Man, Which Are Inborn In Him From The Earliest Times, Eternally Living, Outlasting All Generations, Still Make Up The Groundwork Of The Human Psyche. It Is Only Possible To Live The Fullest Life When We Are In Harmony With These Symbols; Wisdom Is A Return To Them.

Myth Is More Individual And Expresses Life More Precisely Than Does Science.

The Least Of Things With A Meaning Is Worth More In Life Than The Greatest Of Things Without It.

We Cannot Change Anything Unless We Accept It.

When You Succeed In Awakening The Kundalini, So That It Starts To Move Out Of Its Mere Potentiality, You Necessarily Start A World Which Is Totally Different From Our World. It Is The World Of Eternity.

The Inner Man Has Access To The Sense Organs Of God.

Creative Powers Can Just As Easily Turn Out To Be Destructive. It Rests Solely With The Moral Personality Whether They Apply Themselves To Good Things Or To Bad. And If This Is Lacking, No Teacher Can Supply It Or Take Its Place.

Observance Of Customs And Laws Can Very Easily Be A Cloak For A Lie So Subtle That Our Fellow Human Beings Are Unable To Detect It. It May Help Us To Escape All Criticism, We May Even Be Able To Deceive Ourselves In The Belief Of Our Obvious Righteousness. But Deep Down, Below The Surface Of The Average Man's Conscience, He Hears A Voice Whispering, 'there Is Something Not Right,' No Matter How Much His Rightness Is Supported By Public Opinion Or By The Moral Code.

Between The Dreams Of Night And Day There Is Not So Great A Difference.

Our Unconscious Is The Key To Our Life's Pursuits.

The Shadow Is A Moral Problem That Challenges The Whole Ego-personality, For No One Can Become Conscious Of The Shadow Without Considerable Moral Effort.

The Images Of The Unconscious Place A Great Responsibility Upon A Man. Failure To Understand Them, Or A Shirking Of Ethical Responsibility, Deprives Him Of His Wholeness And Imposes A Painful Fragmentariness On His Life.

...it Seemed To Me I Was Living In An Insane Asylum Of My Own Making. I Wnt About With All These Fantastic Figures: Centaurs, Nymphs, Satyrs, Gods And Goddesses, As Though They Were Patients And I Was Analyzing Them. I Read A Greek Or Negro Myth As If A Lunatic Were Telling Me His Anamnesis.

You Are What You Do, Not What You Say You'll Do.

Do Not Compare, Do Not Measure. No Other Way Is Like Yours. All Other Ways Deceive And Tempt You. You Must Fulfill The Way That Is In You.

A 'scream' Is Always Just That - A Noise And Not Music.

I Must Also Have A Dark Side If I Am To Be Whole.

Life Is Teleology Par Excellence; It Is The Intrinsic Striving Towards A Goal, And The Living Organism Is A System Of Directed Aims Which Seek To Fulfill Themselves.

You Can Exert No Influence If You Are Not Susceptible To Influence.

Every Man Carries Within Himself The Eternal Image Of Woman, Not The Image Of This Or That Particular Woman, But A Definite Feminine Image. This Image Is Fundamentally Unconscious, A Hereditary Factor Of Primordial Origin.

Art Is A Kind Of Innate Drive That Seizes A Human Being And Makes Him Its Instrument. To Perform This Difficult Office It Is Sometimes Necessary For Him To Sacrifice Happiness And Everything That Makes Life Worth Living For The Ordinary Human Being.

We Carry Our Past With Us, To Wit, The Primitive And Inferior Man With His Desires And Emotions, And It Is Only With An Enormous Effort That We Can Detach Ourselves From This Burden. If It Comes To A Neurosis, We Invariably Have To Deal With A Considerably Intensified Shadow.

Our Western Mind Lacking All Culture In This Respect, Has Never Yet Devised A Concept, Not Even A Name For "the Union Of Opposites Through The Middle Path", That Most Fundamental Item Of Inward Experience Which Could Respectably Be Set Against The Chinese Concept Of Tao.

It Seems To Be Very Hard For People To Live With Riddles Or To Let Them Live, Although One Would Think That Life Is So Full Of Riddles As It Is That A Few More Things We Cannot Answer Would Make No Difference. But Perhaps It Is Just This That Is So Unendurable, That There Are Irrational Things In Our Own Psyche Which Upset The Conscious Mind In Its Illusory Certainties By Confronting It With The Riddle Of Its Existence.

The Individual Disposition Is Already A Factor In Childhood; It Is Innate, And Not Acquired In The Course Of A Life.

We Don't So Much Solve Our Problems As We Outgrow Them. We Add Capacities And Experiences That Eventually Make Us Bigger Than The Problems.

Deep Down, Below The Surface Of The Average Man's Conscience, He Hears A Voice Whispering, "there Is Something Not Right," No Matter How Much His Rightness Is Supported By Public Opinion Or Moral Code.

I Live In My Deepest Hell And From There I Cannot Fall Any Further.

The World Of Gods And Spirits Is Truly 'nothing But' The Collective Unconscious Inside Me.

Collective Unconscious

People Cannot Stand Too Much Reality.

A Sign Is Always Less Than The Thing It Points To, And A Symbol Is Always More Than We Can Understand At First Sight. Therefore We Stop At The Sign But Go On To The Goal It Indicates; But We Remain With The Symbol Because It Promises More Than It Reveals.

I Am No Longer Alone With Myself, And I Can Only Artificially Recall The Scary And Beautiful Feeling Of Solitude. This Is The Shadow Side Of The Fortune Of Love.

Dream The Dream Onward.

Astrology Is Of Particular Interest To The Psychologist, Since It Contains A Sort Of Psychological Experience Which We Call Projected - This Means That We Find The Psychological Facts As It Were In The Constellations. This Originally Gave Rise To The Idea That These Factors Derive From The Stars, Whereas They Are Merely In A Relation Of Synchronicity With Them. I Admit That This Is A Very Curious Fact Which Throws A Peculiar Light On The Structure Of The Human Mind.

So Often Among So-called "primitives" One Comes Across Spiritual Personalities Who Immediately Inspire Respect, As Though They Were The Fully Matured Products Of An Undisturbed Fate.

To Find Out What Is Truly Individual In Ourselves, Profound Reflection Is Needed; And Suddenly We Realize How Uncommonly Difficult The Discovery Of Individuality Is.

Just As Man As A Social Being, Cannot In The Long Run Exist Without A Tie To The Community, So The Individual Will Never Find The Real Justification For His Existence, And His Own Spiritual And Moral Autonomy, Anywhere Except In An Extramundane Principle Capable Of Relativizing The Overpowering Influence Of External Factors.

Where Do We Live Symbolically? Nowhere Except Where We Participate In The Ritual Of Life.

It Is Only Through The Psyche That We Can Establish That God Acts Upon Us, But We Are Unable To Distinguish Whether These Actions Emanate From God Or From The Unconscious. We Cannot Tell Whether God And The Unconscious Are Two Different Entities. Both Are Border-line Concepts For Transcendental Contents. But Empirically It Can Be Established, With A Sufficient Degree Of Probability, That There Is In The Unconscious An Archetype Of Wholeness.

Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit.

The Unconscious Is Not A Demoniacal Monster, But A Natural Entity Which, As Far As Moral Sense, Aesthetic Taste, And Intellectual Judgment Go, Is Completely Neutral.it Only Becomes Dangerous When Our Conscious Attitude To It Is Hopelessly Wrong. To The Degree That We Repress It, Its Danger Increases.

Great Talents Are The Most Lovely And Often The Most Dangerous Fruits On The Tree Of Humanity. They Hang Upon The Most Slender Twigs That Are Easily Snapped Off.

An Understanding Heart Is Everything In A Teacher, And Cannot Be Esteemed Highly Enough.

There Is No Light Without Shadow, And No Psychic Wholeness Without Imperfection.

Personality Is The Supreme Realization Of The Innate Idiosyncracy Of A Living Being. It Is An Act Of High Courage Flung In The Face Of Life, The Absolute Affirmation Of All That Constitutes The Individual, The Most Successful Adaptation To The Universal Conditions Of Existence Coupled With The Greatest Possible Freedom For Self-determination.

Everything That Irritates Us About Others Can Lead Us To An Understanding Of Ourselves.

The Self Is Defined Psychologically As The Psychic Totality Of The Individual. Anything That A [person] Postulates As Being A Greater Totality Than [oneself] Can Become A Symbol Of The Self. For This Reason The Symbol Of The Self Is Not Always As Total As The Definition Would Require.

Astrology Is One Of The Intuitive Methods Like The I Ching, Geomantics, And Other Divinatory Procedures. It Is Based Upon The Synchronicity Principle, Meaningful Coincidence. ... Astrology Is A Naively Projected Psychology In Which The Different Attitudes And Temperaments Of Man Are Represented As Gods And Identified With Planets And Zodiacal Constellations.

I Have No Theory About Dreams. I Do Not Know How Dreams Arise. On The Other Hand, I Know That If We Meditate On A Dream Sufficiently Long And Thoroughly – If We Take The Boat With Us And Turn It Over And Over – Something Almost Always Comes Out Of It.

A Patient Doesn't Select His Physical Ailments. They Happen To Him. You Could Just As Well Ask When You Are Eaten By A Crocodile, 'how Did You Select That Crocodile?'. Nonsense. He Has Selected You. The Patient Doesn't Even Select The Symptoms Unconsciously. That Is An Extraordinary Exaggeration Of The Subject To Say He Was Choosing Such Things. They Get Him.

Where Wisdom Reigns, There Is No Conflict Between Thinking And Feeling.

One Cannot Live Without Inconsistency.

Just Imagine What Would Happen If Practicing Physicians, The Ones Who Have Come Into Contact Directly With Suffering Humanity, Had Some Acquaintance With Eastern Systems Of Healing. The Spirit Of The East Surges Through Every Pore As A Balm For All Afflictions.

However Far-fetched It May Sound, Experience Shows That Many Neuroses Are Caused By The Fact That People Blind Themselves To Their Own Religious Promptings Because Of A Childish Passion For Rational Enlightenment.

The Most Terrifying Thing Is To Accept Oneself Completely.

I Shall Not Commit The Fashionable Stupidity Of Regarding Everything I Cannot Explain As A Fraud.

In Sleep, Fantasy Takes The Form Of Dreams. But In Waking Life, Too, We Continue To Dream Beneath The Threshold Of Consciousness, Especially When Under The Influence Of Repressed Or Other Unconscious Complexes.

The Self Is Not Only The Centre But Also The Whole Circumference Which Embraces Both Conscious And Unconscious; It Is The Centre Of This Totality, Just As The Ego Is The Centre Of Consciousness.

Twelve Experts Gathered In One Room Equal One Big Idiot.

Individuation Is To Divest The Self Of False Wrappings.

A Purely Psychological Explanation Is Ruled Out... The Discs Show Signs Of Intelligent Guidance, By Quasi-human Pilots.

I've Realized That Somebody Who's Tired And Needs A Rest, And Goes On Working All The Same Is A Fool.

If One Does Not Understand A Person, One Tends To Regard Him As A Fool.

Nothing Has A Stronger Influence Psychologically On Their Environment And Especially On Their Children Than The Unlived Life Of The Parent.

I Am This Bundle Of What Has Been, And What Has Been Accomplished.

Part Of The Human Self Or Soul Is Not Subject To Laws Of Space And Time.

Solitude Is For Me A Fount Of Healing Which Makes My Life Worth Living.

The Word 'happiness' Would Lose Its Meaning If It Were Not Balanced And Contrasted And Compared To Sadness. In Comparing How An Experience Could Have Been Worse We Develop Gratitude And Happiness, While If We Compare It How It Could Have Been Better We Develop Bitterness And Sadness.

Wholeness Is Not Achieved By Cutting Off A Portion Of One’s Being, But By Integration Of The Contraries.

In Each Of Us Is Another Whom We Do Not Know. He Speaks To Us In Dreams And Tells Us How Differently He Sees Us From The Way We See Ourselves.

Nothing Is More Repulsive Than A Furtively Prurient Spirituality; It Is Just As Unsavoury As Gross Sensuality.

The Difference Between A Good Life And A Bad Life Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire

What Is Essential In A Work Of Art Is That It Should Rise Far Above The Realm Of Personal Life And Speak To The Spirit And Heart Of The Poet As Man To The Spirit And Heart Of Mankind.

The Educated Man Tries To Repress The Inferior One In Himself, Without Realizing That By This He Forces The Latter To Become Revolutionary.

Nobody, As Long As He Moves About Among The Chaotic Currents Of Life, Is Without Trouble.

We Do Not Know Whether Hitler Is Going To Found A New Islam. He Is Already On The Way; He Is Like Muhammad.

Follow That Will And That Way Which Experience Confirms To Be Your Own.

Follow Your Heart

One Might Expect, Perhaps, That A Man Full Of Genius Could Pasture In The Greatness Of His Own Thoughts, And Renounce The Cheap Approbation Of The Crowd Which He Despises; Yet He Succumbs To The More Powerful Impulse Of The Herd Instinct. His Searching And His Finding, His Call, Belong To The Herd.

To Confront A Person With Their Own Shadow Is To Show Them Their Own Light.

The Greatest Potential For Growth And Self-realisation Exists In The Second Half Of Life.

The Psychic Depths Are Nature, And Nature Is Creative Life.

Without Playing With Fantasy, No Creative Work Has Yet Come Into Being.

The Reason For Evil In The World Is That People Are Not Able To Tell Their Stories.

There Are Cases Where Psychoanalysis Works Worse Than Anything Else. But Who Said That Psychoanalysis Was To Be Applied Always And Everywhere.

The Little World Of Childhood With Its Familiar Surroundings Is A Model Of The Greater World. The More Intensively The Family Has Stamped Its Character Upon The Child, The More It Will Tend To Feel And See Its Earlier Miniature World Again In The Bigger World Of Adult Life. Naturally This Is Not A Conscious, Intellectual Process.

Thoroughly Unprepared, We Take The Step Into The Afternoon Of Life. Worse Still, We Take This Step With The False Presupposition That Our Truths And Our Ideals Will Serve Us As Hitherto. But We Cannot Live The Afternoon Of Life According To The Program Of Life’s Morning, For What Was Great In The Morning Will Be Little At Evening And What In The Morning Was True, At Evening Will Have Become A Lie.

Contemporary Man Is Blind To The Fact That, With All His Rationality And Efficiency, He Is Possessed By "powers" That Are Beyond His Control. His Gods And Demons Have Not Disappeared At All; They Have Merely Got New Names. They Keep Him On The Run With Restlessness, Vague Apprehensions, Psychological Complications, An Insatiable Need For Pills, Alcohol, Tobacco, Food - And, Above All, A Large Array Of Neuroses

Explore Daily The Will Of God.

We Are Not What Happened To Us, We Are What We Wish To Become.

Somewhere, Right At The Bottom Of One’s Own Being, One Generally Does Know Where One Should Go And What One Should Do. But There Are Times When The Clown We Call “i” Behaves In Such A Distracting Fashion That The Inner Voice Cannot Make Its Presence Felt.

The Woman Is Increasingly Aware That Love Alone Can Give Her Full Stature, Just As The Man Begins To Discern That Spirit Alone Can Endow His Life With Its Highest Meaning. Fundamentally, Therefore, Both Seek A Psychic Relation To The Other, Because Love Needs The Spirit, And The Spirit Love, For Their Fulfillment.

Hitler Is A Medicine Man Type Of Leader.

During My Medical Education At The University Of Basle I Found Vivisection Horrible, Barbarous And Above All Unnecessary

The Only Important Thing Is To Follow Nature. A Tiger Should Be A Good Tiger; A Tree, A Good Tree. So People Should Be People. But To Know What People Are, One Must Follow Nature And Go Alone, Admitting The Importance Of The Unexpected. Still, Nothing Is Possible Without Love. . . . For Love Puts One In A Mood To Risk Everything, And Not To Withhold Important Elements.

Recognition Of The Reality Of Evil Necessarily Relativizes The Good, And The Evil Likewise, Converting Both Into Halves Of A Paradoxical Whole.

From The Viewpoint Of Analytic Psychology, The Theatre, Aside From Any Aesthetic Value, May Be Considered As An Institution For The Treatment Of The Mass Complex.

Every Living Soul Has Different Talents, Different Desires, Different Faculties. Be Yourself, For Even If You Deceive The Entire World, You Will Be Ten Thousand Times Worse Than Nothing.

He Who Looks Without, Dreams; He Who Looks Within, Awakes.

The Capacity For Inner Dialogue Is A Touchstone For Outer Objectivity.

When Facts Are Few, Speculations Are Most Likely To Represent Individual Psychology.

The Totality Of The Psyche Can Never Be Grasped By The Intellect Alone.

We Are So Full Of Apprehensions, Fears, That We Don't Know Exactly To What It Points... A Great Change Of Our Psychoglocal Attitude Is Imminent, That Is Certain...because We Need More Understanding Of Human Nature Because ...the Only Real Danger That Exists Is Man Himself... And We Know Nothing Of Man - His Psyche Should Be Studied Because We Are The Origin Of All Coming Evil.

The Whole Nature Of Man Presupposes Woman, Both Physically And Spiritually. His System Is Tuned Into Woman From The Start, Just As It Is Prepared For A Quite Definite World Where There Is Water, Light, Air, Salt, Carbohydrates Etc.

The Maintenance Of Secrets Acts Like A Psychic Poison Which Alienates The Possessor From The Community.

In The History Of The Collective As In The History Of The Individual, Everything Depends On The Development Of Consciousness.

The Man Of Today, Who Resembles More Or Less The Collective Ideal, Has Made His Heart Into A Den Of Murderers, As Can Easily Be Proved By The Analysis Of His Unconscious, Even Though He Himself Is Not In The Least Disturbed By It.

We Live In A World Which In Some Respects Is Mysterious; Things Can Be Experienced Which Remain Inexplicable; Not Everything Which Happens Can Be Anticipated. The Unexpected And The Incredible Belong In This World. Only Then Is Life Whole. For Me The World Has From The Beginning Been Infinite And Ungraspable.

Mysterious Things

The Need For Mythic Statements Is Satisfied When We Frame A View Of The World Which Adequately Explains The Meaning Of Human Existence In The Cosmos, A View Which Springs From Our Psychic Wholeness, From The Co-operation Between Conscious And Unconscious. Meaninglessness Inhibits Fullness Of Life And Is Therefore Equivalent To Illness. Meaning Makes A Great Many Things Endurable - Perhaps Everything.

Fullness Of Life

If Only Simplicity Were Not The Most Difficult Of All Things. It Consists Of Watching Objectively The Development Of Any Fragment Of Fantasy.

People Will Do Anything, No Matter How Absurd, To Avoid Facing Their Own Souls.

The Starry Vault Of Heaven Is In Truth The Open Book Of Cosmic Projection, In Which Are Reflected The Mythologems, I.e., The Archetypes. In This Vision Astrology And Alchemy, The Two Classical Functionaries Of The Psychology Of The Collective Unconscious, Join Hands.

Collective Unconscious

Intuition Is One Of The Four Basic Psychological Functions Along With Thinking, Feeling,and Sensing.

Science Is The Art Of Creating Suitable Illusions Which The Fool Believes Or Argues Against, But The Wise Man Enjoys For Their Beauty Or Their Ingenuity, Without Being Blind To The Fact That They Are Human Veils And Curtains Concealing The Abysmal Darkness Of The Unknowable

The Platonic World Of Ideas Corresponds To Thinking And Sensation On The Mystical Level.

Not Only Does The Psyche Exist, But It Is Existence Itself. It Is An Almost Absurd Prejudice To Suppose That Existence Can Only Be Physical...we Might Well Say, On The Contrary, That Physical Existence Is A Mere Inference, Since We Know Of Matter Only In So Far As We Perceive Psychic Images Mediated By The Senses.

The Unconscious Is The Only Available Source Of Religious Experience. This In Certainly Not To Say That What We Call The Unconscious Is Identical With God Or Is Set Up In His Place. It Is Simply The Medium From Which Religious Experience Seems To Flow. As To What The Further Cause Of Such Experience Might Be, The Answer To This Lies Beyond The Range Of Human Knowledge.

Special Knowledge Is A Terrible Disadvantage.

Observance Of Customs And Laws Can Very Easily Be A Cloak For A Lie So Subtle That Our Fellow Human Beings Are Unable To Detect It.

As Any Change Must Begin Somewhere, It Is The Single Individual Who Will Experience It And Carry It Through. The Change Must Indeed Begin With An Individual; It Might Be Any One Of Us. Nobody Can Afford To Look Round And To Wait For Somebody Else To Do What He Is Loath To Do Himself.

Life Is Crazy And Meaningful At Once.

...the Western 'god-image' Is A Representation Of The Collective Unconscious, An Archetype Of The Psyche That Undergoes A Continual Process Of Transformation...the God Image Evolves Through Its Relationship To Humanity. Whoever Knows God Has An Effect On 'him'. For The Individual, Knowing God, Is The Process Of Recognizing And Assimilating The Pressured And Paradoxical Contents Of The Self, Which Come To Consciousness- Seek Incarnation- Within The Ego.

Collective Unconscious

Everything Psychic Is Pregnant With The Future.

Nature Does Not Deceive Or Conceal, But Reveals.

Life Calls Not For Perfection, But For Completeness.

There Is, However, A Strong Empirical Reason Why We Should Cultivate Thoughts That Can Never Be Proved. It Is That They Are Known To Be Useful. Man Positively Needs General Ideas & Convictions That Will Give A Meaning To His Life & Enable Him To Find A Place For Himself In The Universe. He Can Stand The Most Incredible Hardships When He Is Convinced That They Make Sense; He Is Crushed When On Top Of All His Misfortunes, He Has To Admit That He Is Taking Part In A ‘tale Told By An Idiot.’

There Are All Too Many Who, On Account Of Their Notorious Ineptitude, Thrive Better In A Rationalist System Than In Freedom. Freedom Is One Of Those Difficult Things.

New Ideas Are Not Only The Enemies Of Old Ones; They Also Appear Often In An Extremely Unacceptable Form.

But India Did Not Pass Me By Without A Trace: It Left Tracks Which Lead Me From One Infinity To Another Infinity.

The Brain Is Viewed As An Appendage Of The Genital Glands.

It Is The Function Of The Church To Oppose All Original Experience, Because This Can Only Be Unorthodox.

Enlightenment Doesnt Occur From Sitting Around Visualizing Images Of Light, But From Integrating The Darker Aspects Of The Self Into The Conscious Personality.

Instead Of Being At The Mercy Of Wild Beasts, Earthquakes, Landslides, And Inundations, Modern Man Is Battered By The Elemental Forces Of His Own Psyche. This Is The World Power That Vastly Exceeds All Other Powers On Earth. The Age Of Enlightenment, Which Stripped Nature And Human Institutions Of Gods, Overlooked The God Of Terror Who Dwells In The Human Soul.

Words Are Animals, Alive With A Will Of Their Own

A True Symbol Appears Only When There Is A Need To Express What Thought Cannot Think Or What Is Only Divined Or Felt.

Whenever Justice Is Uncertain And Police Spying And Terror Are At Work, Human Beings Fall Into Isolation, Which, Of Course, Is The Aim And Purpose Of The Dictator State, Since It Is Based On The Greatest Possible Accumulation Of Depotentiated Social Units.

How Difficult It Is To Reach Anything Approaching A Moderate And Relatively Calm Point Of View In The Midst Of One's Emotions.

You Must Go In Quest Of Yourself, And You Will Find Yourself Again Only In The Simple And Forgotten Things.

Forgotten Things

Finding Yourself

We All Must Do What Christ Did. We Must Make Our Experiment. We Must Make Mistakes. We Must Live Out Our Own Version Of Life. And There Will Be Error. If You Avoid Error You Do Not Live.

Thanks To The Acuteness Of His Mind, He Saw Through The Poverty Of Philosophical And Gnostic Knowledge, And Contemptuously Rejected It.

In All Chaos There Is A Cosmos, In All Disorder A Secret Order.

The Christian Religion Seems To Have Fulfilled Its Great Biological Purpose, In So Far As We Are Able To Judge. It Has Led Human Thought To Independence, And Has Lost Its Significance, Therefore, To A Yet Undetermined Extent.... It Seems To Me That We Might Still Make Use In Some Way Of Its Form Of Thought, And Especially Of Its Great Wisdom Of Life, Which For Two Thousand Years Has Proven To Be Particularly Efficacious.

If We Feel Our Way Into The Human Secrets Of The Sick Person, The Madness Also Reveals Its System, And We Recognize In The Mental Illness Merely An Exceptional Reaction To Emotional Problems Which Are Not Strange To Us. --"the Content Of The Psychoses

Life Has Always Seemed To Me Like A Plant That Lives On Its Rhizome. Its True Life Is Invisible, Hidden In The Rhizome. The Part That Appears Above Ground Lasts Only A Single Summer. Then It Withers Away—an Ephemeral Apparition. When We Think Of The Unending Growth And Decay Of Life And Civilizations, We Cannot Escape The Impression Of Absolute Nullity. Yet I Have Never Lost A Sense Of Something That Lives And Endures Underneath The Eternal Flux. What We See Is The Blossom, Which Passes. The Rhizome Remains.

You Can Take Away A Man's Gods, But Only To Give Him Others In Return.

When Goals Go, Meaning Goes. When Meaning Goes, Purpose Goes. When Purpose Goes, Life Goes Dead On Our Hands.

Normality Is A Fine Ideal For Those Who Have No Imagination.

The Healthy Man Does Not Torture Others.

A Criminal Becomes A Popular Figure Because He Unburdens In No Small Degree The Consciences Of His Fellow Man, For Now They Know Once More Where Evil Is To Be Found.

I Think There Will Be A Reaction - A Reaction Will Set In Against This Communal Dissociation. You Know, Man Doesn't Stand Forever, His Nullification. Once, There Will Be A Reaction, And I See It Setting In, You Know, When I Think Of My Patients, They All Seek Their Own Existence And To Assure Their Existence Against That Complete Atomization Into Nothingness Or Into Meaninglessness. Man Cannot Stand A Meaningless Life.

The Starry Vault Of Heaven Is In Truth The Open Book Of Cosmic Projection.

Perhaps, I Myself Am The Enemy Who Needs To Be Loved.

Real Work Is Completed In Silence And Strikes A Chord In The Minds Of Only A Very Few.

As A Plant Produces Its Flower, So The Psyche Creates Its Symbols.

I Cannot Love Anyone If I Hate Myself. That Is The Reason Why We Feel So Extremely Uncomfortable In The Presence Of People Who Are Noted For Their Special Virtuousness, For They Radiate An Atmosphere Of The Torture They Inflict On Themselves. That Is Not A Virtue But A Vice.

Life Is A Luminous Pause Between Two Mysteries That Are Yet One.

Since Psyche And Matter Are Contained In One And The Same World, And Moreover Are In Continuous Contact With One Another And Ultimately Rest On Irrepresentable, Transcendental Factors, It Is Not Only Possible But Fairly Probable, Even, That Psyche And Matter Are Two Different Aspects Of The Same Thing.

Filling The Conscious Mind With Ideal Conceptions Is A Characteristic Of Western Theosophy, But Not The Confrontation With The Shadow And The World Of Darkness. One Does Not Become Enlightened By Imagining Figures Of Light, But By Making The Darkness Conscious. The Latter Procedure, However, Is Disagreeable And Therefore Not Popular.

I Am The Triple Owner Of The World, The Finest Turkey, The Lorelei, Germania And Helvetia Of Exclusively Sweet Butter And Naples, And I Must Supply The Whole World With Macaroni.

The Darkness Which Clings To Every Personality Is The Door Into The Unconscious And The Gateway Of Dreams, From Which Those Two Twilight Figures, The Shadow And The Anima, Step Into Our Nightly Visions Or, Remaining Invisible, Take Possession Of Our Ego-consciousness.

Whenever There Is A Reaching Down Into Innermost Experience, Into The Nucleus Of Personality, Most People Are Overcome By Fear And Many Run Away. . . The Risk Of Inner Experience, The Adventure Of The Spirit, Is In Any Case Alien To Most Human Beings. The Possibility That Such Experience Might Have Psychic Reality Is Anathema To Them.

A Complex Is A Cluster Of Energy In The Unconscious, Charged By Historic Events, Reinforced Through Repitition, Embodying A Fragment Of Our Personality, And Generating A Programmed Response And An Implicit Set Of Expectations.

Sometimes, Indeed, There Is Such A Discrepancy Between The Genius And His Human Qualities That One Has To Ask Oneself Whether A Little Less Talent Might Not Have Been Better.

Discrepancies Between

Our Intellect Has Created A New World That Dominates Nature, And Has Populated It With Monstrous Machines.

Called Or Not, God Is Always There.

In The Second Half Of Life The Necessity Is Imposed Of Recognizing No Longer The Validity Of Our Former Ideals But Of Their Contraries. Of Perceiving The Error In What Was Previously Our Conviction, Of Sensing The Untruth In What Was Our Truth, And Of Weighing The Degree Of Opposition, And Even Of Hostility, In What We Took To Be Love.

A Man Who Has Not Passed Through The Inferno Of His Passions Has Never Overcome Them. They Then Dwell In The House Next Door, And At Any Moment A Flame May Dart Out And Set Fire To His Own House. Whenever We Give Up, Leave Behind, And Forget Too Much, There Is Always The Danger That The Things We Have Neglected Will Return With Added Force.

In Every Adult There Lurks A Child— An Eternal Child, Something That Is Always Becoming, Is Never Completed, And Calls For Unceasing Care, Attention, And Education. That Is The Part Of The Personality Which Wants To Develop And Become Whole.

It Is On The Whole Probably That We Continually Dream, But That Consciousness Makes Such A Noise That We Do Not Hear It.

The Less We Understand Of What Our Fathers And Forefathers Sought, The Less We Understand Ourselves, And Thus We Help With All Our Might To Rob The Individual Of His Roots And His Guiding Instincts, So That He Becomes A Particle In The Mass, Ruled Only By What Nietzsche Called The Spirit Of Gravity.

Simple Things Are Always The Most Difficult.

But The Meaning Of Life Is Not . . . Explained By One's Business Life, Nor Is The Deep Desire Of The Human Heart Answered By A Bank Account.

Meaning Of Life

When One Is Not Understood One Should As A Rule Lower One's Voice, Because When One Really Speaks Loudly Enough And Is Not Heard, It Is Because People Do Not Want To Hear. One Had Better Begin To Mutter To Oneself, Then They Get Curious.

The Decisive Question For Man Is: Is He Related To Something Infinite Or Not? That Is The Telling Question Of His Life.

Knowledge Does Not Enrich Us; It Removes Us More And More From The Mythic World In Which We Were Once At Home By Right Of Birth.

We Should Know What Our Convictions Are, And Stand For Them. Upon One's Own Philosophy, Conscious Or Unconscious, Depends One's Ultimate Interpretation Of Facts. Therefore It Is Wise To Be As Clear As Possible About One's Subjective Principles. As The Man Is, So Will Be His Ultimate Truth.

The Doctor Is Effective Only When He Himself Is Affected. Only The Wounded Physician Heals.

There Was Need Of A Phantastic, Indestructible Optimism, And One Far Removed From All Sense Of Reality, In Order, For Example, To Discover In The Shameful Death Of Christ Really The Highest Salvation And The Redemption Of The World.

Only A Life Lived In A Certain Spirit Is Worth Living. It Is A Remarkable Fact That A Life Lived Entirely From The Ego Is Dull Not Only For The Person Himself But For All Concerned.

A Sense Of A Wider Meaning To One's Existence Is What Raises A Man Beyond Mere Getting And Spending. If He Lacks This Sense, He Is Lost And Miserable.

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Anthony Burgess

Jean-Francois Lyotard

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