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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.

-Carl Jung

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The Decisive Question For

Carl Jung

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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.

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Dreams Are The Facts From Which We Must Proceed.

There Can Be No Transforming Of Darkness Into Light And Of Apathy Into Movement Without Emotion.

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

Astrology Is Assured Of Recognition From Psychology, Without Further Restrictions, Because Astrology Represents The Summation Of All The Psychological Knowledge Of Antiquity.

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.

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

In The Last Analysis, The Essential Thing Is The Life Of Individual. This Alone Makes History, Here Alone Do The Great Transformations Take Place, And The Whole Future, The Whole History Of The World, Ultimately Springs As A Gigantic Summation From These Hidden Source In Individuals.

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.

Individualization Does Not Shut One Out From The World, But Gathers The World To Oneself.

Six Weeks After His Death My Father Appeared To Me In A Dream... It Was An Unforgettable Experience, And It Forced Me For The First Time To Think About Life After Death.

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.

In Actual Life It Requires The Greatest Discipline To Be Simple, And The Acceptance Of Oneself Is The Essence Of The Moral Problem And The Epitome Of A Whole Outlook Upon Life.

Outlook On Life

It Is Really The Mistake Of Our Age. We Think It Is Enough To Discover New Things, But We Don't Realize That Knowing More Demands A Corresponding Development Of Morality.

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.

Projection [of Our Own Shadow] Makes The Whole World A Replica Of Our Own Unknown Face.

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.

Too Much Of The Animal Disfigures The Civilized Human Being, Too Much Culture Makes A Sick Animal.

The Mandala Is An Archetypal Image Whose Occurrence Is Attested Throughout The Ages. It Signifies The Wholeness Of The Self. This Circular Image Represents The Wholeness Of The Psychic Ground Or, To Put It In Mythic Terms, The Divinity Incarnate In Man.

The Self Then Functions As A Union Of Opposites And Thus Constitutes The Most Immediate Experience Of The Divine Which It Is Psychologically Possible To Imagine

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.

...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

The Creative Process, So Far As We Are Able To Follow It At All, Consists In The Unconscious Activation Of An Archetypal Image And Elaborating And Shaping The Image Into The Finished Work. By Giving It Shape, The Artist Translates It Into The Language Of The Present And So Makes It Possible For Us To Find Our Way Back To The Deepest Springs Of Life.

It Was Most Essential For Me To Have A Normal Life In The Real World As A Counterpoise To That Strange Inner World. My Family And My Profession Remained The Base To Which I Could Return.

We Do Not Know Whether Hitler Is Going To Found A New Islam. He Is Already On The Way; He Is Like Mohammad. The Emotion In Germany Is Islamic; Warlike And Islamic. They Are All Drunk With Wild God. That Can Be The Historic Future.

The Longing For Light Is The Longing For Consciousness.

One Is Forced To Speak Not Of What Is Held In Common Between The Cultures, But What Is Held In Common Between The Myths, And That In Its Simplest Archetypal Forms.

In Knowing Ourselves To Be Unique, We Possess The Capacity For Becoming Conscious Of The Infinite. But Only Then!

The Privilege Of A Lifetime Is To Become Who You Truly Are.

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.’

The 'squaring Of The Circle' Is One Of The Many Archetypal Motifs Which Form The Basic Patterns Of Our Dreams And Fantasies. But It Is Distinguished By The Fact That It Is One Of The Most Important Of Them From The Functional Point Of View. Indeed, It Could Even Be Called The Archetype Of Wholeness.

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

I Deliberately And Consciously Give Preference To A Dramatic, Mythological Way Of Thinking And Speaking, Because This Is Not Only More Expressive But Also More Exact Than An Abstract Scientific Terminology, Which Is Wont To Toy With The Notion That Its Theoretic Formulations May One Fine Day Be Resolved Into Algebraic Equations.

Everyone Can Afford To Give Away A Smile.

You Must Live Life In Such A Spirit That You Make In Every Moment The Best Of Possibilities.

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 Divine Process Of Change Manifests Itself To Our Human Understanding . . . As Punishment, Torment, Death, And Transfiguration.

Process Of Change

Archetypes, In Spite Of Their Conservative Nature, Are Not Static But In A Continuous Dramatic Flux. Thus The Self As A Monad Or Continuous Unit Would Be Dead. But It Lives Inasmuch As It Splits And Unites Again. There Is No Energy Without Opposites!

The Seat Of Faith, However, Is Not Consciousness But Spontaneous Religious Experience, Which Brings The Individual's Faith Into Immediate Relation With God.

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

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

Faith Hope Love

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.

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

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.

It Is My Mind, With Its Store Of Images, That Gives The World Colour And Sound; And That Supremely Real And Rational Certainty Which I Call "experience" Is, In Its Most Simple Form, An Exceedingly Complicated Structure Of Mental Images. Thus There Is, In A Certain Sense, Nothing That Is Directly Experienced Except The Mind Itself. Everything Is Mediated Through The Mind.

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.

Simple Things Are Always The Most Difficult.

Criticism Can Be Effective When There Is Something That Must Be Destroyed Or Dissolved, But It Is Capable Only Of Harm When There Is Something To Be Built.

Only By Discovering Alchemy Have I Clearly Understood That The Unconscious Is A Process And That Ego's Rapport With The Unconscious And Its Contents Initiate An Evolution, More Precisely, A Real Metamorphosis Of The Psyche.

Man's Task Is To Become Conscious Of The Contents That Press Upward From The Unconscious.

How Else Could It Have Occurred To Man To Divide The Cosmos, On The Analogy Of Day And Night, Summer And Winter, Into A Bright Day-world And A Dark Night-world Peopled With Fabulous Monsters, Unless He Had The Prototype Of Such A Division In Himself, In The Polarity Between The Conscious And The Invisible And Unknowable Unconscious?

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

Real Liberation Comes Not From Glossing Over Or Repressing Painful States Of Feeling, But Only From Experiencing Them To The Full.

Dreams Are Symbolic In Order That They Cannot Be Understood; In Order That The Wish, Which Is The Source Of The Dream, May Remain Unknown.

Intuition (is) Perception Via The Unconscious

Sentimentality Is A Superstructure Covering Brutality.

I Have Always Said To My Pupils: "learn As Much As You Can About Symbolism; Then Forget It When You Are Analyzing A Dream."

If There Is Anything That We Wish To Change In The Child, We Should First Examine It And See Whether It Is Not Something That Could Better Be Changed In Ourselves.

Mistakes Are, After All, The Foundations Of Truth, And If A Man Does Not Know What A Thing Is, It Is At Least An Increase In Knowledge If He Knows What It Is Not.

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

People Are Never Helped In Their Suffering By What They Think For Themselves, But Only By Revelation Of A Wisdom Greater Than Their Own. It Is This Which Lifts Them Out Of Their Distress.

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.

I Would Rather Be Whole Than Good.

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

Everyone Carries A Shadow, And The Less It Is Embodied In The Individual's Conscious Life, The Blacker And Denser It Is. At All Counts, It Forms An Unconscious Snag, Thwarting Our Most Well-meant Intentions.

A Man Who Has Not Passed Through The Inferno Of His Passions Has Never Overcome Them. As Far As We Can Discern, The Sole Purpose Of Human Existence Is To Kindle A Light In The Darkness Of Mere Being. Everything That Irritates Us About Others Can Lead Us To An Understanding Of Ourselves.

In Each Of Us There Is Another Whom We Do Not Know.

Memories Dreams Reflections

Nature Seemed To Me Full Of Wonders, And I Wanted To Steep Myself In Them. Every Stone, Every Plant, Every Single Thing Seemed Alive And Indescribably Marvelous. I Immersed Myself In Nature, Crawled, As It Were, Into The Very Essence Of Nature And Away From The Whole Human World.

Unconscious Assumptions Or Opinions Are The Worst Enemy Of Woman; They Can Even Grow Into A Positively Demonic Passion That Exasperates And Disgusts Men, And Does The Woman Herself The Greatest Injury By Gradually Smothering The Charm And Meaning Of Her Femininity And Driving It Into The Background. Such A Development Naturally Ends In Profound Psychological Disunion, In Short, In A Neurosis.

The Separation Of Psychology From The Premises Of Biology Is Purely Artificial, Because The Human Psyche Lives In Indissoluble Union With The Body.

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

Man And Woman Become A Devil To Each Other When They Do Not Separate Their Spiritual Paths, For The Nature Of Created Beings Is Always The Nature Of Differentiation.

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.

Our Blight Is Ideologies — They Are The Long-expected Antichrist!

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.

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

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

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.

Nobody Doubts The Importance Of Conscious Experience; Why Then Should We Doubt The Significance Of Unconscious Happenings? They Also Are Part Of Our Life, And Sometimes More Truly A Part Of It For Weal Or Woe Than Any Happenings Of The Day.

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

I Had To Make A Confession Of Faith In Stone. That Was The Beginning Of The Tower, The House I Built For Myself At Bollingen.

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.

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.

Astrologers Are Influenced By Theosophy, So They Say, "that Is Very Simple, It Is Just Vibration!" ... But What Is Vibration? They Say It Is Light Energy, Perhaps Electricity, They Are Not Quite Informed. At All Events The Vibrations That Could Influence Us Have Never Been Seen, So It Remains Just A Word.

Nature Does Not Deceive Or Conceal, But Reveals.

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

Unfortunately, There Can Be No Doubt That Man Is, On The Whole, Less Good Than He Imagines Himself Or Wants To Be. Everyone Carries A Shadow, And The Less It Is Embodied In The Individual's Conscious Life, The Blacker And Darker It Is. If An Inferiority Is Conscious, One Always Has A Chance To Correct It

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

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.

In Thirty Years I Have Treated Many Patients. Among All My Patients In The Second Half Of Life, Every One Of Them Fell Ill Because He Had Lost That Which The Living Religions Of Every Age Had Given Their Followers, And None Of Them Was Really Healed Who Did Not Regain His Religious Outlook.

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.

Man Is In Need If A Symbolical Life- Badly In Need. We Only Live Banal, Ordinary, Rational Or Irrational Things- But We Have No Symbolic Life. Where Do We Live Symbolically? Nowhere Except Where We Participate In The Ritual Of Life

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 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.

Rebirth Is An Affirmation That Must Be Counted Among The Primordial Affirmations Of Mankind. The Concept Of Rebirth Necessarily Implies The Continuity Of Personality. Here The Human Personality Is Regarded As Continuous And Accessible To Memory, So That, When One Is Incarnated Or Born, One Is Able, Potentially, To Remember That One Has Lived Through Previous Existences, And That These Existences Were One's Own, Ie, They Had The Same Ego Form As The Present Life. As A Rule, Reincarnation Means Rebirth In A Human Body.

Eternal Truth Needs A Human Language That Alters With The Spirit Of The Times.

I Think It Is Better For All People To Live On, To Look Forward To The Next Stage (after Death), As If He Had To Spend Centuries, Then He Lives Properly... Looking Forward To The Great Adventure Ahead, Then He Lives!

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.

The Secret To Hitler's Power Is ... That His Unconscious Has Exceptional Access To His Conscious And ... That He Allows Himself To Be Moved By It. [others] Have Too Much Rationality, Too Much Cerebrum To Obey It [but] Hitler Listens.

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.

When You Walk With Naked Feet, How Can You Ever Forget The Earth?

No Psychic Value Can Disappear Without Being Replaced By Another Of Equivalent Intensity.

Astrology Is Knocking At The Gates Of Our Universities: A Tübingen Professor Has Switched Over To Astrology And A Course On Astrology Was Given At Cardiff University Last Year. Astrology Is Not Mere Superstition But Contains Some Psychological Facts (like Theosophy) Which Are Of Considerable Importance. Astrology Has Actually Nothing To Do With The Stars But Is The 5000-year-old Psychology Of Antiquity And The Middle Ages.

Shadow Work Is The Path Of The Heart Warrior.

Our Mania For Rational Explanations Obviously Has Its Roots In Our Fear Of Metaphysics, For The Two Were Always Hostile Brothers. Hence, Anything Unexpected That Approaches Us From The Dark Realm Is Regarded Either As Coming From Outside And, Therefore, As Real, Or Else As A Hallucination And, Therefore, Not True. The Idea That Anything Could Be Real Or True Which Does Not Come From Outside Has Hardly Begun To Dawn On Contemporary Man.

Everything Psychic Is Pregnant With The Future.

Dream The Dream Onward.

Ultimate Truth, If There Be Such A Thing, Demands The Concert Of Many Voices.

I Have Gradually Learned To Be Cautious Even In Disbelief

Man Is The Microcosm Of The Macrocosm ; The God On Earth Is Built On The Pattern Of The God In Nature. But The Universal Consciousness Of The Real Ego Transcends A Million Fold The Self-consciousness Of The Personal For False Ego.

Whatever Is Rejected From The Self, Appears In The World As An Event.

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.

The Main Interest Of My Work Is Not Concerned With The Treatment Of Neuroses But Rather With The Approach To The Numinous. But The Fact That The Approach To The Numinous Is The Real Therapy, And Inasmuch As You Attain To The Numinous Experience You Are Released From The Curse Of Pathology. Even The Very Disease Takes On A Numinous Character.

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

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

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.

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

Everyone Knows Nowadays That People 'have Complexes'. What Is Not So Well Known, Though Far More Important Theoretically, Is That Complexes Can Have Us.

The Most Terrifying Thing Is To Accept Oneself Completely.

It Is Just Man's Turning Away From Instinct--his Opposing Himself To Instinct--that Creates Consciousness. Instinct Is Nature Andseeks To Perpetuate Nature; While Consciousness Can Only Seek Culture Or Its Denial.

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

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.

I Know Every Numbskull Will Babble On About "black Man," "maneater," "chance," And "retrospective Interpretation," In Order To Banish Something Terribly Inconvenient That Might Sully The Familiar Picture Of Childhood Innocence. Ah, These Good, Efficient, Healthy-minded People, They Always Remind Me Of Those Optimistic Tadpoles Who Bask In A Puddle In The Sun, In The Shallowest Of Waters, Crowding Together And Amiably Wriggling Their Tails, Totally Unaware That The Next Morning The Puddle Will Have Dried Up And Left Them Stranded.

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

People Will Do Anything, No Matter How Absurd, In Order To Avoid Facing Their Own Souls. They Will Practice Indian Yoga And All Its Exercises, Observe A Strict Regimen Of Diet, Learn The Literature Of The Whole World - All Because They Cannot Get On With Themselves And Have Not The Slightest Faith That Anything Useful Could Ever Come Out Of Their Own Souls.

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 More Intelligent And Cultured A Man Is, The More Subtly He Can Humbug Himself.

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.

The Greatest Tragedy Of The Family Is The Unlived Lives Of The Parents.

Fortunately, In Her Kindness And Patience, Nature Has Never Put The Fatal Question As To The Meaning Of Their Lives Into The Mouths Of Most People. And Where No One Asks, No One Needs To Answer.

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

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.

Anyone Who Wants To Know The Human Psyche Will Learn Next To Nothing From Experimental Psychology. He Would Be Better Advised To Abandon Exact Science, Put Away His Scholar's Gown, Bid Farewell To His Study, And Wander With Human Heart Through The World.

Knowing Your Own Darkness Is The Best Method For Dealing With The Darkness's Of Other People. One Does Not Become Enlightened By Imagining Figures Of Light, But By Making The Darkness Conscious. The Most Terrifying Thing Is To Accept Oneself Completely. Your Visions Will Become Clear Only When You Can Look Into Your Own Heart. Who Looks Outside, Dreams; Who Looks Inside, Awakes.

What Usually Has The Strongest Psychic Effect On The Child Is The Life Which The Parents Have Not Lived

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.

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

I Am Astonished, Disappointed, Pleased With Myself. I Am Distressed, Depressed, Rapturous. I Am All These Things At Once And Cannot Add Up The Sum.

Memories Dreams Reflections

The World Begins To Exist When The Individual Discovers It.

A Man Who Has Not Passed Through The Inferno Of His Passions Has Never Overcome Them.

What We Lack Is Intensity Of Life.

Only One Who Has Risked The Fight With The Dragon And Is Not Overcome By It Wins The "treasure Hard To Attain." He Alone Has A Genuine Claim To Self-confidence, For He Has Faced The Dark Ground Of His Self And Thereby Has Gained Himself. This Experience Gives Him Faith And Trust.

Self Confidence

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

The Greatest Sin Is To Be Unconscious.

The Majority Of My Patients Consisted Not Of Believers But Of Those Who Had Lost Their Faith.

The Self Is Our Life's Goal, For It Is The Completest Expression Of That Fateful Combination We Call Individuality.

Healing Proceeds From The Depths To The Heights.

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.

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.

Creative Power Is Mightier Than Its Possessor.

The Squaring Of The Circle Is A Stage On The Way To The Unconscious, A Point Of Transition Leading To A Goal Lying As Yet Unformulated Beyond It. It Is One Of Those Paths To The Centre.

We Cannot Imagine Events That Are Connected Non-causally And Are Capable Of A Non-causal Explanation. But That Does Not Mean That Such Events Do Not Exist.

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

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

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.

Psychiatrists Classify A Person As Neurotic If He Suffers From His Problems In Living, And A Psychotic If He Makes Others Suffer.

Shame Is A Soul Eating Emotion.

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 Gods Have Become Our Diseases.

Memories Dreams Reflections

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

Lunatic Asylums

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.

Thank God I'm Not A Jungian.

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

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

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 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 Psychic Depths Are Nature, And Nature Is Creative Life.

No Man Can Change Himself Into Anything From Sheer Reason; He Can Only Change Into What He Potentially Is.

I Feel Very Strongly That I Am Under The Influence Of Things Or Questions Which Were Left Incomplete And Unanswered By My Parents And Grandparents And More Distant Ancestors. It Often Seems As If There Were An Impersonal Karma Within A Family Which Is Passed On From Parents To Children. It Has Always Seemed To Me That I Had To Answer Questions Which Fate Had Posed To My Forefathers, And Which Had Not Yet Been Answered, Or As If I Had To Complete, Or Perhaps Continue, Things Which Previous Ages Had Left Unfinished.

The Curve Of Life Is Like The Parabola Of A Projectile Which, Disturbed From Its Initial State Of Rest, Rises And Then Returns To A State Of Repose... Like A Projectile Flying To Its Goal, Life Ends In Death. Even Its Ascent And Its Zenith Are Only Steps And Means To This Goal... For, Enlightenment Or No Enlightenment, Consciousness Or No Consciousness, Nature Prepares Itself For Death.

Dream Analysis Stands Or Falls With [the Hypothesis Of The Unconscious]. Without It The Dream Appears To Be Merely A Freak Of Nature, A Meaningless Conglomerate Of Memory-fragments Left Over From The Happenings Of The Day.

And What Shall We Know Of This Life On Earth After Death? The Dissolution Of Our Timebound Form In Eternity Brings No Loss Of Meaning. Rather, Does The Little Finger Know Itself A Member Of The Hand.

I Think That One Should View With Philosophic Admiration The Strange Paths Of The Libido And Should Investigate The Purposes Of Its Circuitous Ways.

Nobody Can Fall So Low Unless He Has A Great Depth. If Such A Thing Can Happen To A Man, It Challenges His Best And Highest On The Other Side; That Is To Say, This Depth Corresponds To A Potential Height, And The Blackest Darkness To A Hidden Light.

One Cannot Live Without Inconsistency.

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

Only A Few Individuals Succeed In Throwing Off Mythology In A Time Of A Certain Intellectual Supremacy--the Mass Never Frees Itself.

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

Collective Unconscious

I Am An Orphan, Alone: Nevertheless I Am Found Everywhere. I Am One, But Opposed To Myself. I Am Youth And Old Man At One And The Same Time. I Have Known Neither Father Nor Mother, Because I Have Had To Be Fetched Out Of The Deep Like A Fish, Or Fell Like A White Stone From Heaven. In Woods And Mountains I Roam, But I Am Hidden In The Innermost Soul Of Man. I Am Mortal For Everyone, Yet I Am Not Touched By The Cycle Of Aeons.

Much Of The Evil In The World Is Due To The Fact That Man In General Is Hopelessly Unconscious.

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.

Intuition Does Not Denote Something Contrary To Reason, But Something Outside Of The Province Of Reason.

A Collection Of A Hundred Great Brains Makes One Big Fathead.

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.

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

From The Living Fountain Of Instinct Flows Everything That Is Creative; Hence The Unconscious Is Not Merely Conditioned By History, But Is The Very Source Of The Creative Impulse. It Is Like Nature Herself - Prodigiously Conservative, And Yet Transcending Her Own Historical Conditions In Her Acts Of Creation.

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

Nothing Is Possible Without Love ... For Love Puts One In A Mood To Risk Everything.

Knowledge Rests Not Upon Truth Alone, But Upon Error Also.

I Could Not Say I Believe. I Know! I Have Had The Experience Of Being Gripped By Something That Is Stronger Than Myself, Something That People Call God.

So They Speak Soothingly About Progress And The Greatest Possible Happiness, Forgetting That Happiness Is Itself Poisoned If The Measure Of Suffering Has Not Been Fulfilled.

Whatever Is Not Conscious Will Be Experienced As Fate.

The Upheaval Of Our World And The Upheaval In Consciousness Is One And The Same. Everything Becomes Relative And Therefore Doubtful. And While Man, Hesitant And Questioning, Contemplates... His Spirit Yearns For An Answer That Will Allay The Turmoil Of Doubt And Uncertainty.

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.

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.

The Best Political, Social, And Spiritual Work We Can Do Is To Withdraw The Projection Of Our Shadow Onto Others.

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

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