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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.

-Carl Jung

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The Reason For Such

Carl Jung

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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.

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The Distinction Between Mind And Body Is An Artificial Dichotomy, A Discrimination Which Is Unquestionably Based Far More On The Peculiarity Of Intellectual Understanding Than On The Nature Of Things.

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.

Just As We Tend To Assume That The World Is As We See It, We Naively Suppose That People Are As We Imagine Them To Be.

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.

Individuation Is To Divest The Self Of False Wrappings.

To The Critical Intelligence, Nothing Is Left Of Absolute Reality.

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.

We Are So Accustomed To The Apparently Rational Nature Of Our World That We Can Scarcely Imagine Anything Happening That Cannot Be Explained By Common Sense. The Primitive Man Confronted By A Shock Of This Kind Would Not Doubt His Sanity; He Would Think Of Fetishes, Spirits Or Gods

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.

It Seems As If It Is Only Through An Experience Of Symbolic Reality That Man, Vainly Seeking His Own “existence” And Making A Philosophy Out Of It, Can Find His Way Back To A World In Which He Is No Longer A Stranger.

On The Level Of The Son There Is No Answer To The Question Of Good And Evil; There Is Only An Incurable Separation Of The Opposites. . . . It Seems To Me To Be The Holy Spirit's Task And Charge To Reconcile And Reunite The Opposites In The Human Individual Through A Special Development Of The Human Soul.

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

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.

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.

The Creative Process Is A Living Thing, Implanted, As It Were In The Souls Of Men.

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

Commendation Heals; Condemnation Destroys.

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.

All Neurotics Seek The Religious

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.

It Is Proverbial, Of Course, That Man Never Learns From History, And, As A Rule, In Respect To A Problem Of The Present, It Can Teach Us Simply Nothing. The New Must Be Made Through Untrodden Regions, Without Suppositions, And Often, Unfortunately, Without Piety Also.

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

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.

The Gigantic Catastrophes That Threaten Us Today Are Not Elemental Happenings Of A Physical Or Biological Order, But Psychic Events. To A Quite Terrifying Degree We Are Threatened By Wars And Revolutions Which Are Nothing Other Than Psychic Epidemics. At Any Moment Several Million Human Beings May Be Smitten With A New Madness, And Then We Shall Have Another World War Or Devastating Revolution. 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.

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.

Our Souls As Well As Our Bodies Are Composed Of Individual Elements Which Were All Already Present In The Ranks Of Our Ancestors. The "newness" In The Individual Psyche Is An Endlessly Varied Recombination Of Age-old Components.

In Each Of Us There 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. When, Therefore, We Find Ourselves In A Difficult Situation To Which There Is No Solution, He Can Sometimes Kindle A Light That Radically Alters Our Attitude - The Very Attitude That Led Us Into The Difficult Situation.

The Teacher Pretended That Algebra Was A Perfectly Natural Affair, To Be Taken For Granted, Whereas I Didn't Even Know What Numbers Were. Mathematics Classes Became Sheer Terror And Torture To Me. I Was So Intimidated By My Incomprehension That I Did Not Dare To Ask Any Questions.

The Primordial Image, Or Archetype, Is A Figure--be It A Daemon, A Human Being, Or A Process--that Constantly Recurs In The Course Of History And Appears Wherever Creative Fantasy Is Freely Expressed. Essentially, Therefore, It Is A Mythological Figure. . . . In Each Of These Images There Is A Little Piece Of Human Psychology And Human Fate, A Remnant Of The Joys And Sorrows That Have Been Repeated Countless Times In Our Ancestral History. . . .

Archetypes Resemble The Beds Of Rivers: Dried Up Because The Water Has Deserted Them, Though It May Return At Any Time. An Archetype Is Something Like An Old Watercourse Along Which The Water Of Life Flowed For A Time, Digging A Deep Channel For Itself. The Longer It Flowed The Deeper The Channel, And The More Likely It Is That Sooner Or Later The Water Will Return.

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

Neurosis Is The Suffering Of A Soul Which Has Not Discovered Its Meaning.

The Unconscious Psyche Believes In Life After Death

I Find That All My Thoughts Circle Around God Like The Planets Around The Sun, And Are As Irresistibly Attracted By Him. I Would Feel It To Be The Grossest Sin If I Were To Oppose Any Resistance To This Force.

I Came To Freud For Facts. I Read 'the Interpretation Of Dreams' And I Thought- 'oh, Here Is A Man Who Is Not Just Theorizing Away, Here Is A Man Who Has Got Facts.

Life Is Crazy And Meaningful At Once.

Our World Has Become Dehumanized. Man Feels Himself Isolated In The Cosmos, Because He Is No Longer Involved In Nature.

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 Greater The Contrast, The Greater The Potential. Great Energy Only Comes From A Correspondingly Great Tension Of Opposites.

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 God-image In Man Was Not Destroyed By The Fall But Was Only Damaged And Corrupted (“deformed”), And Can Be Restored Through God's Grace. The Scope Of The Integration Is Suggested By The Descensus Ad Inferos, The Descent Of Christ's Soul To Hell, Its Work Of Redemption Embracing Even The Dead. The Psychological Equivalent Of This Is The Integration Of The Collective Unconscious Which Forms An Essential Part Of The Individuation Process.

Collective Unconscious

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 Underlying, Primary Psychic Reality Is So Inconceivably Complex That It Can Be Grasped Only At The Farthest Reach Of Intuition, And Then But Very Dimly. That Is Why It Needs Symbols.

Dawn Is Born At Midnight.

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.

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

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

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.

The Gods Have Become Our Diseases.

Memories Dreams Reflections

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

You Always Become The Thing You Fight The Most.

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

Process Of Change

From The Middle Of Life Onward, Only He Remains Vitally Alive Who Is Ready To Die With Life.

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

I Could Well Imagine That I Might Have Lived In Former Centuries And There Encountered Questions I Was Not Yet Able To Answer; That I Had Been Born Again Because I Had Not Fulfilled The Task Given To Me.

Masses Are Always Breeding Grounds Of Psychic Epidemics.

Invited Or Not, God Is Present.

Be Grateful For Your Difficulties And Challenges, For They Hold Blessings. In Fact... Man Needs Difficulties; They Are Necessary For Health Personal Growth, Individuation And Self-actualisation.

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 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

It Is The Individual's Task To Differentiate Himself From All The Others And Stand On His Own Feet. All Collective Identities . . . Interfere With The Fulfillment Of This Task. Such Collective Identities Are Crutches For The Lame, Shields For The Timid, Beds For The Lazy, Nurseries For The Irresponsible. . . .

As A Child I Felt Myself To Be Alone, And I Am Still, Because I Know Things And Must Hint At Things Which Others Apparently Know Nothing Of, And For The Most Part Do Not Want To Know.

Every Mother Contains Her Daughter In Herself And Every Daughter Her Mother And Every Mother Extends Backwards Into Her Mother And Forwards Into Her Daughter.

Find Out What A Person Fears Most And That Is Where He Will Develop Next.

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.

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

The Girl Dreams She Is Dangerously Ill. Suddenly Birds Come Out Of Her Skin And Cover Her Completely ... Swarms Of Gnats Obscure The Sun, The Moon, And All The Stars Except One. That One Start Falls Upon The Dreamer.

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.

St. Thomas Is Really A Great Man Quite Apart From His Saintliness.

If You Should See People In A Room, You Would Not Think That You Had Made Those People, Or That You Were Responsible For Them.

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 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.

Understanding Does Not Cure Evil, But It Is A Definite Help, Inasmuch As One Can Cope With A Comprehensible Darkness.

The Puzzling Thing Is That There Is Really A Curious Coincidence Between Astrological And Psychological Facts, So That One Can Isolate Time From The Characteristics Of An Individual, And Also, One Can Deduce Characteristics From A Certain Time.

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

The Dream Arises From A Part Of The Mind Unknown To Us, But None The Less Important, And Is Concerned With The Desires For The Approaching Day.

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?

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

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.

We Can Hardly Escape The Feeling That The Unconscious Process Moves Spiral-wise Round A Centre, Gradually Getting Closer, While The Characteristics Of The Centre Grow More And More Distinct.

I Saw That Everything, All Paths I Had Been Following, All Steps I Had Taken, Were Leading Back To A Single Point - Namely, To The Mid-point. 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. I Knew That In Finding The Mandala As An Expression Of The Self I Had Attained What Was For Me The Ultimate.

The Dream Is A Series Of Images, Which Are Apparently Contradictory And Nonsensical, But Arise In Reality From Psychologic Material Which Yields A Clear Meaning.

We Discover Ourselves Through Others.

No Tree, It Is Said, Can Grow To Heaven Unless Its Roots Reach Down To Hell.

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

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

Free Will Is The Ability To Do Gladly That Which I Must Do.

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.

How Can Anyone See Straight When He Does Not See Himself And The Darkness He Unconsciously Carries With Him Into All His Dealings?

It Is Not For Us . . . To Send Out Missionaries To Foreign Peoples; It Is Our Task To Build Up Our Own Western Culture.

Western Culture

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.

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

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.

One Does Not Become Enlightened By Imagining Figures Of Light, But By Making The Darkness Conscious.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Everyone You Meet Knows Something You Don't Know But Need To Know. Learn From Them.

Psychological Type Is Nothing Static - It Changes In The Course Of Life.

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.’

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.

What We Lack Is Intensity Of Life.

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

Nature Has No Use For The Plea That One 'did Not Know'.

Memories Dreams Reflections

Naturally, Every Age Thinks That All Ages Before It Were Prejudiced, And Today We Think This More Than Ever And Are Just As Wrong As All Previous Ages That Thought So. How Often Have We Not Seen The Truth Condemned! It Is Sad But Unfortunately True That Man Learns Nothing From History.

No Matter What The World Thinks About Religious Experience, The One Who Has It Possesses A Great Treasure, A Thing That Has Become For Him A Source Of Life, Meaning, And Beauty, And That Has Given A New Splendor To The World And To Mankind.

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.

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.

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.

We Want To Have Certainties And No Doubts- Results And No Experiments- Without Even Seeing That Certainties Can Arise Only Through Doubt And Results Only Thorough Experiment.

If There Is A Fear Of Falling, The Only Safety Consists In Deliberately Jumping.

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.

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

The Psychiatrist Knows Only Too Well How Each Of Us Becomes The Helpless But Not Pitiable Victim Of His Own Sentiments. Sentimentality Is The Superstructure Erected Upon Brutality.

Whatever Is Not Conscious Will Be Experienced As Fate.

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.

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.

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

I Cannot Prove To You That God Exists, But My Work Has Proved Empirically That The Pattern Of God Exists In Every Man And That This Pattern In The Individual Has At Its Disposal The Greatest Transforming Energies Of Which Life Is Capable. Find This Pattern In Your Own Individual Self And Life Is Transformed.

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.

One Looks Back With Appreciation To The Brilliant Teachers, But With Gratitude To Those Who Touched Our Human Feelings. The Curriculum Is So Much Necessary Raw Material, But Warmth Is The Vital Element For The Growing Plant And For The Soul Of The Child.

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.

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.

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.

I Use [heraclitus' Discovery Of] Enantiodromia For The Emergence Of The Unconscious Opposite In The Course Of Time. This Characteristic Phenomenon Practically Always Occurs When An Extreme, Onesided Tendency Dominates Conscious Life; In Time An Equally Powerful Counterposition Is Built Up, Which First Inhibits The Conscious Performance And Subsequently Breaks Through The Conscious Control.

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

That Which We Do Not Confront In Ourselves We Will Meet As Fate.

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.

Everyone Can Afford To Give Away A Smile.

What You Call Knowledge Is An Attempt To Impose Something Comprehensible On Life.

I Cannot Define For You What God Is. I Can Only Say That My Work Has Proved Empirically That The Pattern Of God Exists In Every Man And That This Pattern Has At Its Disposal The Greatest Of All His Energies For Transformation And Transfiguration Of His Natural Being. Not Only The Meaning Of His Life But His Renewal And His Institutions Depend On His Conscious Relationship With This Pattern Of His Collective Unconscious.

Collective Unconscious

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.

Through Pride We Are Ever Deceiving Ourselves. But Deep Down Below The Surface Of The Average Conscience A Still, Small Voice Says To Us, Something Is Out Of Tune.

Shadow Work Is The Path Of The Heart Warrior.

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 Collective Unconscious Appears To Consist Of Mythological Motifs Or Primordial Images, For Which Reason The Myths Of All Nations Are Its Real Exponents. In Fact The Whole Of Mythology Could Be Taken As A Sort Of Projection Of The Collective Unconscious. We Can See This Most Clearly If We Look At The Heavenly Constellations, Whose Originally Chaotic Forms Are Organized Through The Projection Of Images. This Explains The Influence Of The Stars As Asserted By Astrologers. These Influences Are Nothing But Unconscious Instrospective Perceptions Of The Collective Unconscious.

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?

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

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

The First Half Of Life Is Devoted To Forming A Healthy Ego, The Second Half Is Going Inward And Letting Go Of It.

So Far As The Personality Is Still Potential, It Can Be Called Transcendent, And So Far As It Is Unconscious, It Is Indistinguishable From All Those Things That Carry Its Projections...that Is, Symbols Of The Outside World And The Cosmic Symbols. These Form The Psychological Basis For The Conception Of Man As A Macrocosm Through The Astrological Components Of His Character.

The Descent Into The Depths Always Seems To Precede The Ascent.

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.

The Unconscious Mind Of Man Sees Correctly Even When Conscious Reason Is Blind And Impotent.

The Cinema, Like The Detective Story, Makes It Possible To Experience Without Danger All The Excitement, Passion And Desirousness Which Must Be Repressed In A Humanitarian Ordering Of Life.

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 World Hangs On A Thin Thread, And That Is The Psyche Of Man.

The Fact Is That Certain Ideas Exist Almost Everywhere And At All Times And Can Even Spontaneously Create Themselves Quite Independently Of Migration And Tradition.

There Is Rarely A Creative Man Who Does Not Have To Pay A High Price For The Divine Spark Of His Greatest Gifts... The Human Element Is Frequently Bled For The Benefit Of The Creative Element And To Such An Extent That It Even Brings Out The Bad Qualities, As For Instance, Ruthless, Naive Egoism (so-called "auto-eroticism"), Vanity, All Kinds Of Vices-and All This In Order To Bring To The Human I At Least Some Life-strength, Since Otherwise It Would Perish Of Sheer Inanition.

We Should Not Pretend To Understand The World Only By The Intellect; We Apprehend It Just As Much By Feeling. Therefore, The Judgment Of The Intellect Is, At Best, Only The Half Of Truth, And Must, If It Be Honest, Also Come To An Understanding Of Its Inadequacy.

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.

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.

One Of The Most Difficult Tasks Men Can Perform, However Much Others May Despise It, Is The Invention Of Good Games.

The Person Who Looks Outward Dreams, The Person Who Looks Inward Awakens.

Midlife Is The Time To Let Go Of An Overdominant Ego And To Contemplate The Deeper Significance Of Human Existence.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The Mind Has Grown To Its Present State Of Consciousness As An Acorn Grows Into An Oak, Or As Saurians Developed Into Mammals.

For Better To Come, Good Must Stand Aside.

Water Is The Commonest Symbol For The Unconscious.

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.

All Art Intuitively Apprehends Coming Changes In The Collective Unconsciousness.

Unconsciousness

The Unconscious Is The Unwritten History Of Mankind From Time Unrecorded.

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.

Life Calls Not For Perfection, But For Completeness.

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

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.

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

I Have Gradually Learned To Be Cautious Even In Disbelief

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

The Greatest And Most Important Problems Of Life Are All Fundamentally Insoluble. They Can Never Be Solved But Only Outgrown.

Once Upon A Time Men Were Possessed By Devils. Now They Are Not Less Obsessed By Ideas

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

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 Wrong We Have Done, Thought, Or Intended Will Wreak Its Vengeance On Our Souls.

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

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.

It Is My Mind, With Its Store Of Images, That Gives The World Color And Sound; And That Supremely Real And Rational Certainty Which I Can "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, Translated, Filtered, Allegorized, Twisted, Even Falsified By It. We Are . . . Enveloped In A Cloud Of Changing And Endlessly Shifting Images.

Conflicts Create The Fire Of Affects And Emotions; And Like Every Fire It Has Two Aspects: That Of Burning And That Of Giving Light.

Synchronicity: A Meaningful Coincidence Of Two Or More Events Where Something Other Than The Probability Of Chance Is Involved.

Every Human Being Is Inherently A Unique And Individual Form Of Life. He Or She Is Made Like That. But There Is Something Which A Person Can Do Over And Above The Given Material Of Her Nature, And That Is She Can Become Conscious Of What Makes Her The Person She Is, And He Can Work Consciously Toward Relating What Is Himself To The World Around Him.

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

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.

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.

An Old Man Who Cannot Bid Farewell To Life Appears As Feeble And Sickly As The Young Man Who Is Unable To Embrace It.

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Giorgos Seferis

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