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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.

-Carl Jung

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Every Man Carries Within

Carl Jung

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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.

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Doesn't The World Bring Forth Thinking In Human Heads With The Same Necessity That It Brings Forth Blossoms On The Plant?

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 Great Decisions Of Human Life Have As A Rule Far More To Do With The Instincts And Other Mysterious Unconscious Factors Than With Conscious Will And Well-meaning Reasonableness. The Shoe That Fits One Person Pinches Another; There Is No Recipe For Living That Suits All Cases. Each Of Us Carries His Own Life-form- An Indeterminable Form Which Cannot Be Superseded By Any Other.

It Isn't Possible To Kill Part Of Your “self” Unless You Kill Yourself First. If You Ruin Your Conscious Personality, The So-called Ego-personality, You Deprive The Self Of Its Real Goal, Namely To Become Real Itself. The Goal Of Life Is The Realization Of The Self. If You Kill Yourself You Abolish That Will Of The Self To Become Real, But It May Arrest Your Personal Development Inasmuch It Is Not Explained. You Ought To Realise That Suicide Is Murder, Since After Suicide There Remains A Corpse Exactly As With Any Ordinary Murder. Only It Is Yourself That Has Been Killed.

It Will Seem As If You Were Making The Visions Banal — But Then You Need To Do That — Then You Are Freed From The Power Of Them Then When These Things Are In Some Precious Book You Can Go To The Book And Turn Over The Pages And For You It Will Be Your Church — Your Cathedral — The Silent Places Of Your Spirit Where You Will Find Renewal. If Anyone Tells You That It Is Morbid Or Neurotic And You Listen To Them — Then You Will Lose Your Soul — For In That Book Is Your Soul.

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.

The More Veiled Becomes The Outside World, Steadily Losing In Colour, Tone And Passions, The More Urgently The Inner World Calls Us

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

The Decisive Question For Man Is: Is He Related To Something Infinite Or Not? That Is The Telling Question Of His Life. Only If We Know That The Thing Which Truly Matters Is The Infinite Can We Avoid Fixing Our Interest Upon Futilities, And Upon All Kinds Of Goals Which Are Not Of Real Importance.

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

Knowing Your Own Darkness Is The Best Method For Dealing With The Darknesses Of Other People.

Far From Being A Material World, This Is A Psychic World, Which Allows Us To Make Only Indirect And Hypothetical Inferences About The Real Nature Of Matter. The Psychic, Alone Has Immediate Reality, And This Includes All Forms Of The Psychic, Even

The Only Thing That Really Matters Now Is Whether Man Can Climb Up To A Higher Moral Level, To A Higher Plane Of Consciousness, In Order To Be Equal To The Superhuman Powers Which The Fallen Angels Have Played Into His Hands. But He Can Make No Progress Until He Becomes Very Much Better Acquainted With His Own Nature.

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.

The Prerequisite For A Good Marriage ... Is The License To Be Unfaithful.

Mind And Matter Are Two Different Aspects Of One And The Same Thing.

Paul Hardly Ever Allows The Real Jesus Of Nazareth To Get A Word In.

The Sure Path Can Only Lead To Death.

Memories Dreams Reflections

In The End, The Only Events Of My Life Worth Telling Are Those When The Imperishable World Erupted Into This Transitory One All Other Memories Of Travels, People And My Surroundings Have Paled Beside These Interior Happenings But My Encounters With The 'other' Reality, My Bouts With The Unconscious, Are Indelibly Engraved On My Memory. In That Realm There Has Always Been Wealth In Abundance, And Everything Else Has Lost Importance By Comparison.

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.

Without Freedom There Can Be No Morality.

Memories Dreams Reflections

God Enters Through The Wound.

But We Must Not Forget That Only A Very Few People Are Artists In Life; That The Art Of Life Is The Most Distinguished And Rarest Of All The Arts.

Therein Lies The Social Significance Of Art: It Is Constantly At Work Educating The Spirit Of The Age, Conjuring Up The Forms In Which The Age Is More Lacking. The Unsatisfied Yearning Of The Artist Reaches Back To The Primordial Image In The Unconscious, Which Is Best Fitted To Compensate The Inadequacy And One-sidedness Of The Present. The Artist Seizes On This Image And, In Raising It From Deepest Unconsciousness, He Brings It Into Relation With Conscious Values, Thereby Transforming It Until It Can Be Accepted By The Minds Of His Contemporaries According To Their Powers.

In All Earnestness I Asked Myself What Kind Of World I Had Stumbled Into.

My Work As A Psychoanalyst Is To Help Patients Recover Their Lost Wholeness And To Strengthen The Psyche So It Can Resist Future Dismemberment.

I Have Treated Many Hundreds Of Patients. Among Those In The Second Half Of Life - That Is To Say, Over 35 - There Has Not Been One Whose Problem In The Last Resort Was Not That Of Finding A Religious Outlook On Life.

Finding The One

Outlook On Life

I Hold The View That The Alchemist’s Hope Of Conjuring Out Of Matter The Philosophical Gold, Or The Panacea, Or The Wonderful Stone, Was Only In Part An Illusion, An Effect Of Projection; For The Rest It Corresponded To Certain Psychic Facts That Are Of Great Importance In The Psychology Of The Unconscious. As Is Shown By The Texts And Their Symbolism, The Alchemist Projected What I Have Called The Process Of Individuation Into The Phenomena Of Chemical Change.

The Man Who Speaks With Primordial Images, Speaks With A Thousand Tongues.

But We Cannot Live The Afternoon Of Life According To The Programme Of Life's Morning — For What Was Great In The Morning Will Be Little At Evening, And What In The Morning Was True Will At Evening Have Become A Lie.

The Facts Of Nature Cannot In The Long Run Be Violated. Penetrating And Seeping Through Everything Like Water, They Will Undermine Any System That Fails To Take Account Of Them, And Sooner Or Later They Will Bring About Its Downfall. But An Authority Wise Enough In Its Statesmanship To Give Sufficient Free Play To Nature - Of Which Spirit Is A Part - Need Fear No Premature Decline.

In Order To Know The Light, We Must First Experience The Darkness.

The Symbols Of The Self Arise In The Depths Of The Body, And They Express Its Materiality Every Bit As Much As The Perceiving Consciousness. The Symbol Is Thus A Living Body

...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.

In Such Doubtful Matters, Where You Have To Work As A Pioneer, You Must Be Able To Put Some Trust In Your Intuition And Follow Your Feeling Even At The Risk Of Going Wrong.

I Am Looking Forward Enormously To Getting Back To The Sea Again, Where The Overstimulated Psyche Can Recover In The Presence Of That Infinite Peace And Spaciousness.

Looking Forward

My Mandalas Were Cryptograms Concerning The State Of The Self Which Was Presented To Me Anew Each Day...i Guarded Them Like Precious Pearls....it Became Increasingly Plain To Me That The Mandala Is The Center. It Is The Exponent Of All Paths. It Is The Path To The Center, To Individuation.

With A Truly Tragic Delusion,” Carl Jung Noted, “these Theologians Fail To See That It Is Not A Matter Of Proving The Existence Of The Light, But Of Blind People Who Do Not Know That Their Eyes Could See. It Is High Time We Realized That It Is Pointless To Praise The Light And Preach It If Nobody Can See It. It Is Much More Needful To Teach People The Art Of Seeing.

Loneliness Does Not Come From Having No People About One, But From Being Unable To Communicate The Things That Seem Important To Oneself, Or From Holding Certain Views Which Others Find Inadmissible.

The Fact That Astrology Nevertheless Yields Valid Results Proves That It Is Not The Apparent Positions Of The Stars Which Work, But Rather The Times Which Are Measured Or Determined By Arbitrarily Named Stellar Positions. Time Thus Proves To Be A Stream Of Energy Filled With Qualities And Not, As Our Philosophy Would Have It, An Abstract Concept Or Precondition Of Knowledge.

The Sight Of A Child…will Arouse Certain Longings In Adult, Civilized Persons — Longings Which Relate To The Unfulfilled Desires And Needs Of Those Parts Of The Personality Which Have Been Blotted Out Of The Total Picture In Favor Of The Adapted Persona.

A Dream That Is Not Understood Remains A Mere Occurrence; Understood It Becomes A Living Experience.

We Often Dream About People From Whom We Receive A Letter By The Next Post. I Have Ascertained On Several Occasions That At The Moment When The Dream Occurred The Letter Was Already Lying In The Post-office Of The Addressee.

The Serious Problems In Life...are Never Fully Solved. If Ever They Should Appear To Be So It Is A Sure Sign That Something Has Been Lost. The Meaning And Purpose Of A Problem Seem To Lie Not In Its Solution But In Our Working At It Incessantly.

Creative Power Is Mightier Than Its Possessor.

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.

The Unconscious Wants To Flow Into Consciousness In Order To Reach The Light, But At The Same Time It Continually Thwarts Itself, Because It Would Rather Remain Unconscious. That Is To Say, God Wants To Become Man, But Not Quite.

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

To Ask The Right Question Is Already Half The Solution Of A Problem.

We Are Convinced That Certain People Have All The Bad Qualities We Do Not Know In Ourselves.

If Our Religion Is Based On Salvation, Our Chief Emotions Will Be Fear And Trembling. If Our Religion Is Based On Wonder, Our Chief Emotion Will Be Gratitude.

The Upheaval Of Our World And The Upheaval Of Our Consciousness Are One And The Same.

Those Who Look Outside, Dream. Those Who Look Inside, Awaken.

The Greater The Tension, The Greater Is The Potential.

The Creation Of Something New Is Not Accomplished By The Intellect But By The Play Instinct Acting From Inner Necessity. The Creative Mind Plays With The Objects It Loves.

Whenever We Touch Nature We Get Clean. People Who Have Got Dirty Through Too Much Civilization Take A Walk In The Woods, Or A Bath In The Sea. Entering The Unconscious, Entering Yourself Through Dreams, Is Touching Nature From The Inside And This Is The Same Thing, Things Are Put Right Again.

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 True Leader Is Always Led.

The Dream Is The Small Hidden Door In The Deepest And Most Intimate Sanctum Of The Soul.

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.

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

Religion Is A Defense Against The Experience Of God.

We Don't Get Wounded Alone And We Don't Heal Alone.

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

Securities, Certitudes And Peace Do Not Lead To Discoveries.

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

The Artist's Life Cannot Be Otherwise Than Full Of Conflicts, For Two Forces Are At War Within Him [or Her]-on The One Hand, The Common Human Longing For Happiness, Satisfaction And Security In Life, And On The Other A Ruthless Passion For Creation Which May Go So Far As To Override Every Personal Desire ... There Are Hardly Any Exceptions To The Rule That A Person Must Pay Dearly For The Divine Gift Of Creative Fire.

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.

For Better To Come, Good Must Stand Aside.

The Right Way To Wholeness Is Made Up Of Fateful Detours And Wrong Turnings.

All Fanaticism Is Repressed Doubt.

Consciousness Succumbs All Too Easily To Unconscious Influences, And These Are Often Truer And Wiser Than Our Conscious Thinking.

The Creative Person Is Overpowered, Captive Of And Driven By A Demon... They Become Our Legendary Heroes.

In The Products Of The Unconscious We Discover Mandala Symbols, That Is, Circular And Quaternity Figures Which Express Wholeness, And Whenever We Wish To Express Wholeness, We Employ Just Such Figures.

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

We Should Not Pretend To Understand The World Only By The Intellect. The Judgement Of The Intellect Is Only Part Of The Truth.

If A Man Knows More Than Others, He Becomes Lonely.

The More One Sees Of Human Fate And The More One Examines Its Secret Springs Of Action, The More One Is Impressed By The Strength Of Unconscious Motives And By The Limitations Of Free Choice

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.

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

But What Will He Do When He Sees Only Too Clearly Why His Patient Is Ill; When He Sees That It Arises From His Having No Love, But Only Sexuality; No Faith, Because He Is Afraid To Grope In The Dark; No Hope, Because He Is Disillusioned By The World And By Life; And No Understanding, Because He Has Failed To Read The Meaning Of His Own Existence?

When We Must Deal With Problems, We Instinctively Resist Trying The Way That Leads Through Obscurity And Darkness. We Wish To Hear Only Of Unequivocal Results, And Completely Forget That These Results Can Only Be Brought About When We Have Ventured Into And Emerged Again From The Darkness. But To Penetrate The Darkness We Must Summon All The Powers Of Enlightenment That Consciousness Can Offer.

If People Can Be Educated To See The Lowly Side Of Their Own Natures, It May Be Hoped That They Will Also Learn To Understand And To Love Their Fellow Men Better. A Little Less Hypocrisy And A Little More Tolerance Towards Oneself Can Only Have Good Results In Respect For Our Neighbor; For We Are All Too Prone To Transfer To Our Fellows The Injustice And Violence We Inflict Upon Our Own Natures.

You Are A Slave Of What You Need In Your Soul.

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

This Whole Creation Is Essentially Subjective, And The Dream Is The Theater Where The Dreamer Is At Once: Scene, Actor, Prompter, Stage Manager, Author, Audience, And Critic.

We Deem Those Happy Who From The Experience Of Life Have Learnt To Bear Its Ills Without Being Overcome By Them.

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.

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

The Greatest And Most Important Problems Of Life Are All In A Certain Sense Insoluble. They Can Never Be Solved, But Only Outgrown. This 'outgrowing', As I Formerly Called It, On Further Experience Was Seen To Consist In A New Level Of Consciousness. Some Higher Or Wider Interest Arose On The Person's Horizon, And Through This Widening Of View, The Insoluble Problem Lost Its Urgency. It Was Not Solved Logically In Its Own Terms, But Faded Out When Confronted With A New And Stronger Life-tendency.

A Book Of Mine Is Always A Matter Of Fate. There Is Something Unpredictable About The Process Of Writing, And I Cannot Prescribe For Myself Any Predetermined Course.

Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit.

My Evenings Are Taken Up Very Largely With Astrology. I Make Horoscopic Calculations In Order To Find A Clue To The Core Of Psychological Truth.

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.

It Had Become Clear To Me, In A Flash Of Illumination, That For Me The Only Possible Goal Was Psychiatry. Here Alone The Two Currents Of My Interest Could Flow Together And In A United Stream Dig Their Own Bed. Here Was The Empirical Field Common To Biological And Spiritual Facts, Which I Had Everywhere Sought And Nowhere Found. Here At Last Was The Place Where The Collision Of Nature And Spirit Became A Reality.

It Is High Time That We Realized That It Is Pointless To Praise The Light And Preach It If Nobody Can See It. It Is Much More Needful To Preach The Art Of Seeing.

There Is No Birth Of Consciousness Without Pain.

Collective Unconscious

The Woman Who Fights Against Her Father Still Has The Possibility Of Leading An Instinctive, Feminine Existence, Because She Rejects Only What Is Alien To Her. But When She Fights Against The Mother She May, At The Risk Of Injury To Her Instincts, Attain To Greater Consciousness, Because In Repudiating The Mother She Repudiates All That Is Obscure, Instinctive, Ambiguous, And Unconscious In Her Own Nature.

It Is Often Tragic To See How Blatantly A Man Bungles His Own Life And The Lives Of Others Yet Remains Totally Incapable Of Seeing How Much The Whole Tragedy Originates In Himself, And How He Continually Feeds It And Keeps It Going. Not Consciously, Of Course—for Consciously He Is Engaged In Bewailing And Cursing A Faithless World That Recedes Further And Further Into The Distance. Rather, It Is An Unconscious Factor Which Spins The Illusions That Veil His World. And What Is Being Spun Is A Cocoon, Which In The End Will Completely Envelop Him.

Wherever An Inferiority Complex Exists, There Is A Good Reason For It.

Inferiority Complex

We Don't Really Heal Anything; We Simply Let It Go.

Where Love Rules, There Is No Will To Power; And Where Power Predominates, There Love Is Lacking. The One Is The Shadow Of The Other.

Freedom Stretches Only As Far As The Limits Of Our Consciousness.

Memories Dreams Reflections

We Cannot Change Anything Until We Accept It. Condemnation Does Not Liberate, It Oppresses.

The Difference Between The "natural" Individuation Process, Which Runs Its Course Unconsciously, And The One That Is Consciously Realized Is Tremendous. In The First Case, Consciousness Nowhere Intervenes; The End Remains As Dark As The Beginning. In The Second Case, So Much Darkness Comes To Light That The Personality Is Permeated With Light And Consciousness Necessarily Gains In Scope And Insight. The Encounter Between Conscious And Unconscious Has To Ensure That The Light That Shines In The Darkness Is Not Only Comprehended By The Darkness, But Comprehends It.

Liverpool Is The Pool Of Life, It Makes To Live.

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.

Like The Sea Itself, The Unconscious Yields An Endless And Self-replenishing Abundance Of Creatures, A Wealth Beyond Our Fathoming.

I Have Gradually Learned To Be Cautious Even In Disbelief

What Did You Do As A Child That Made That Hours Pass Like Minutes? [herein Lies The Key To Your Earthy Pursuits.]

Faith, Hope, Love, And Insight Are The Highest Achievements Of Human Effort. They Are Found-given-by Experience.

Faith Hope Love

As One Grows Older One Must Try Not To Work Oneself To Death Unnecessarily. At Least That's How It Is With Me... I Can Scarcely Keep Pace And Must Watch Out That The Creative Forces Do Not Chase Me Around The Universe In A Wallop.

Even The Enlightened Person Remains What He Is, And Is Never More Than His Own Limited Ego Before The One Who Dwells Within Him, Whose Form Has No Knowable Boundaries, Who Encompasses Him On All Sides, Fathomless As The Abysms Of The Earth And Vast As The Sky

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.

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.

Instinct Is Like Nature Herself - Prodigiously Conservative, And Yet Transcending Her Own Historical Conditions In Her Acts Of Creation.

The General Function Of Dreams Is To Try To Restore Our Psychological Balance By Producing Dream Material That Re-establishes, In A Subtle Way, The Total Psychic Equilibrium.

Resistance To The Organized Mass Can Be Effected Only By The Man Who Is As Well Organized In His Individuality As The Mass Itself.

The Bigger The Crowd, The More Negligible The Individual.

It Is Often Tragic To See How Blatantly A Man Bungles His Own Life And The Lives Of Others Yet Remains Totally Incapable Of Seeing How Much The Whole Tragedy Originates In Himself, And How He Continually Feeds It And Keeps It Going.

The Apparently Unendurable Conflict Is Proof Of The Rightness Of Your Life. A Life Without Contradiction Is Only Half A Life; Or Else A Life In The Beyond, Which Is Destined Only For Angels. But God Loves Human Beings More Than The Angels.

I Want To Be Freed Neither From Human Beings, Nor From Myself, Nor From Nature; For All These Appear To Me The Greatest Of Miracles.

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

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.

Hurry Is Not Of The Devil; Hurry Is The Devil.

There Is A Deep Need In The World Just Now For Guidance - Almost Any Sort Of Spiritual Guidance.

Every Civilized Human Being, Whatever His Conscious Development, Is Still An Archaic Man At The Deeper Levels Of His Psyche.

Neurosis Is An Inner Cleavage-the State Of Being At War With Oneself.

Commendation Heals; Condemnation Destroys.

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.

In Some Way Or Other We Are Part Of A Single, All-embracing Psyche, A Single 'greatest Man. . . .'

Masses Are Always Breeding Grounds Of Psychic Epidemics.

The Longing For Light Is The Longing For Consciousness.

Madness Is A Special Form Of The Spirit And Clings To All Teachings And Philosophies, But Even More To Daily Life, Since Life Itself Is Full Of Craziness And At Bottom Utterly Illogical. Man Strives Toward Reason Only So That He Can Make Rules For Himself.

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

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

My Whole Being Was Seeking For Something Still Unknown Which Might Confer Meaning Upon The Banality Of Life.

All The Most Powerful Ideas In History Go Back To Archetypes.

Sometimes A Tree Tells You More Than Can Be Read In Books.

Whenever You Hear Anyone Talking About A Cultural Or Even About A Human Problem, You Should Never Forget To Inquire Who The Speaker Really Is. The More General The Problem, The More The Person Will Smuggle His Or Her Own Personal Psychology Into The Account He Or She Gives Of It.

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.

Embrace Your Grief. For There, Your Soul Will Grow.

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.

We Are Living In What The Greeks Called The Kairos - The Right Moment - For A 'metamorphosis Of The Gods', Of The Fundamental Principles And Symbols. This Peculiarity Of Our Time, Which Is Certainly Not Of Our Conscious Choosing, Is The Expression Of The Unconscious Man Within Us Who Is Changing.

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. To Become Conscious Of It Involves Recognizing The Dark Aspects Of The Personality As Present And Real. This Act Is The Essential Condition For Any Kind Of Self-knowledge, And It Therefore, As A Rule, Meets With Considerable Resistance. Indeed, Self-knowledge As A Psychotherapuetic Measure Frequently Requires Much Painstaking Work Extending Over A Long Period Of Time.

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.

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

Individuation Is To Divest The Self Of False Wrappings.

If You Are Unhappy, You Are Too High Up In Your Mind.

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.

Dreams Are Impartial, Spontaneous Products Of The Unconscious Psyche, Outside The Control Of The Will. They Are Pure Nature; They Show Us The Unvarnished, Natural Truth, And Are Therefore Fitted, As Nothing Else Is, To Give Us Back An Attitude That Accords With Our Basic Human Nature When Our Consciousness Has Strayed Too Far From Its Foundations And Run Into An Impasse.

I Had Always Been Impressed By The Fact That There Are Surprisingly Many Individuals Who Never Use Their Minds If They Can Avoid It, And Yet Are Not Stupid, And An Equal Number Who Obviously Do Use Their Minds But In An Amazingly Stupid Way.

Everyone Is In Love With His Own Ideas

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.

Man Is The Mirror God Holds Up To Himself, The Sense Organ With Which He Apprehends His Being.

Shadow Work Is The Path Of The Heart Warrior.

Without Consciousness There Would, Practically Speaking, Be No World, For The World Exists As Such Only In So Far As It Is Consciously Reflected And Considered By A Psyche. Consciousness Is A Precondition Of Being.

Memories Dreams Reflections

Identification With One's Office Or Title Is Very Attractive Indeed, Which Is Precisely Why So Many Men Are Nothing More Than The Decorum Accorded To Them By Society. In Vain Would One Look For A Personality Behind The Husk. Underneath One Would Find A Very Pitiable Little Creature. That Is Why The Office Is So Attractive: It Offers Easy Compensation For Personal Deficiencies.

I Believe That History Is Capable Of Anything. There Exists No Folly That Men Have Not Tried Out.

The Utter Failure Came At The Crucifixion In The Tragic Words, 'my God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?' If You Want To Understand The Full Tragedy Of Those Words You Must Realize What They Meant: Christ Saw That His Whole Life, Devoted To The Truth According To His Best Conviction, Had Been A Terrible Illusion. He Had Lived It To The Full Absolutely Sincerely, He Had Made His Honest Experiment, But It Was Nevertheless A Compensation. On The Cross His Mission Deserted Him. But Because He Had Lived So Fully And Devotedly He Won Through To The Resurrection Body.

There Is No Such Thing As A Pure Extrovert Or A Pure Introvert. Such A Man Would Be In The Lunatic Asylum.

Lunatic Asylums

Science Is Not ... A Perfect Instrument, But It Is A Superb And Invaluable Tool That Works Harm Only When Taken As An End In Itself.

One Finds One's Destiny On The Path One Takes To Avoid 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.

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

The World Will Ask You Who You Are, And If You Don't Know, The World Will Tell You.

Dreams Are The Guiding Words Of The Soul.

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

Life Is Something That Has To Be Lived And Not Talked About.

No Nation Keeps Its Word. A Nation Is A Big, Blind Worm, Following What? Fate Perhaps. A Nation Has No Honor, It Has No Word To Keep.

The Christian Missionary May Preach The Gospel To The Poor Naked Heathen, But The Spiritual Heathen Who Populate Europe Have As Yet Heard Nothing Of Christianity.

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

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

At The Moment I Am Looking Into Astrology, Which Seems Indispensable For A Proper Understanding Of Mythology. There Are Strange And Wondrous Things In These Lands Of Darkness. Please, Don't Worry About My Wanderings In These Infinitudes. I Shall Return Laden With Rich Booty For Our Knowledge Of The Human Psyche.

Learn Your Techniques Well And Be Prepared To Let Them Go When You Touch The Human Soul.

When Religion Stops Talking About Animals It Will Be All Downhill.

Memories Dreams Reflections

A Man's Hatred Is Always Concentrated Upon That Which Makes Him Conscious Of His Bad Qualities.

The Whole Point Of Jesus's Life Was Not That We Should Become Exactly Like Him, But That We Should Become Ourselves In The Same Way He Became Himself. Jesus Was Not The Great Exception But The Great Example.

Children Are Educated By What The Grown-up Is And Not By His Talk.

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

Collective Unconscious

The Psychotherapist Learns Little Or Nothing From His Successes. They Mainly Confirm Him In His Mistakes, While His Failures, On The Other Hand, Are Priceless Experiences In That They Not Only Open Up The Way To A Deeper Truth, But Force Him To Change His Views And Methods.

I Studiously Avoided All So-called "holy Men." I Did So Because I Had To Make Do With My Own Truth, Not Accept From Others What I Could Not Attain On My Own. I Would Have Felt It As A Theft Had I Attempted To Learn From The Holy Men And To Accept Their Truth For Myself. Neither In Europe Can I Make Any Borrowings From The East, But Must Shape My Life Out Of Myself-out Of What My Inner Being Tells Me, Or What Nature Brings To Me.

What Was Given To Us By The Past Is Adapted To The Possibilities Of The Future.

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

But What If I Should Discover That The Least Amongst Them All, The Poorest Of All Beggars, The Most Impudent Of All Offenders, Yea The Very Fiend Himself— That These Are Within Me, And That I Myself Stand In Need Of The Alms Of My Own Kindness, That I Myself Am The Enemy Who Must Be Loved— What Then?

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

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

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.

Special Knowledge Is A Terrible Disadvantage.

...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

Intuition Is Perception Via The Unconscious That Brings Forth Ideas, Images, New Possibilities And Ways Out Of Blocked Situations.

One Of The Main Functions Of Formalized Religion Is To Protect People Against A Direct Experience Of God.

I Don't Aspire To Be A Good Man. I Aspire To Be A Whole Man.

What Happens In The Life Of Christ Happens Always And Everywhere. In The Christian Archetype All Lives Of This Kind Are Prefigured.

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

Synchronistic Phenomena Prove The Simultaneous Occurrence Of Meaningful Equivalences In Heterogenous, Causally Unrelated Processes; In Other Words, They Prove That A Content Perceived By An Observer Can, At The Same Time, Be Represented By An Outside Event, Without Any Causal Connection. From This It Follows Either That The Psyche Cannot Be Localized In Time, Or That Space Is Relative To The Psyche.

The Symbol In The Dream Has More The Value Of A Parable: It Does Not Conceal, It Teaches.

The Debt We Owe To The Play Of Imagination Is Incalculable.

Not Nature, But The "genius Of Mankind," Has Knotted The Hangman's Noose With Which It Can Execute Itself At Any Moment.

Aging People Should Know That Their Lives Are Not Mounting And Unfolding But That An Inexorable Inner Process Forces The Contraction Of Life. For A Young Person It Is Almost A Sin And Certainly A Danger To Be Too Much Occupied With Himself; But For The Aging Person It Is A Duty And A Necessity To Give Serious Attention To Himself.

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Michael Polanyi

Richard J. Needham

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