Background Image

...

Thunder Is No Longer The Voice Of An Angry God... No River Contains A Spirit... No Snake The Embodiment Of Wisdom, No Mountain Cave The Home Of A Great Demon. No Voices Now Speak To Man From Stones, Plants And Animals, Nor Does He Speak To Them Thinking They Can Hear. His Contact With Nature Has Gone, And With It Has Gone The Profound Emotional Energy That This Symbolic Connection Supplied.

-Carl Jung

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Thunder Is No Longer

Carl Jung

...

Thunder Is No Longer The Voice Of An Angry God... No River Contains A Spirit... No Snake The Embodiment Of Wisdom, No Mountain Cave The Home Of A Great Demon. No Voices Now Speak To Man From Stones, Plants And Animals, Nor Does He Speak To Them Thinking They Can Hear. His Contact With Nature Has Gone, And With It Has Gone The Profound Emotional Energy That This Symbolic Connection Supplied.

Views: 3

Topic

More From Carl Jung

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

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.

Life Really Does Begin At Forty. Up Until Then, You Are Just Doing Research.

The Discussion Of The Sexual Problem Is Only A Somewhat Crude Prelude To A Far Deeper Question, And That Is The Question Of The Psychological Relationship Between The Sexes. In Comparison With This The Other Pales Into Insignificance, And With It We Enter The Real Domain Of Woman. Woman's Psychology Is Founded On The Principle Of Eros, The Great Binder And Loosener, Whereas From Ancient Times The Ruling Principle Ascribed To Man Is Logos.

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. . . .

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

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.

Yoga In Mayfair Or Fifth Avenue, Or In Any Other Place Which Is On The Telephone, Is A Spiritual Fake.

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

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.

Every Individual Needs Revolution, Inner Division, Overthrow Of The Existing Order, And Renewal, But Not By Forcing Them Upon His Neighbors Under The Hypocritical Cloak Of Christian Love Or The Sense Of Social Responsibility Or Any Of The Other Beautiful Euphemisms For Unconscious Urges To Personal Power.

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.

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

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

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

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

The Dream Is A Little Hidden Door In The Innermost And Most Secret Recesses Of The Soul, Opening Into That Cosmic Night Which Was Psyche Long Before There Was Any Ego-consciousness, And Which Will Remain Psyche No Matter How Far Our Ego-consciousness Extends.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

How Can I Be Substantial If I Do Not Cast A Shadow? I Must Have A Dark Side Also If I Am To Be Whole

The Greater The Tension, The Greater Is The Potential.

Shame Is A Soul Eating Emotion.

Thunder Is No Longer The Voice Of An Angry God... No River Contains A Spirit... No Snake The Embodiment Of Wisdom, No Mountain Cave The Home Of A Great Demon. No Voices Now Speak To Man From Stones, Plants And Animals, Nor Does He Speak To Them Thinking They Can Hear. His Contact With Nature Has Gone, And With It Has Gone The Profound Emotional Energy That This Symbolic Connection Supplied.

The Meeting Of Two Personalities Is Like The Contact Of Two Chemical Substances: If There Is Any Reaction, Both Are Transformed.

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

Follow Your Heart

Self-reflection, Or - What Comes To The Same Thing - The Urge To Individuation, Gathers Together What Is Scattered And Multifarious And Exalts It To The Original Of The One, The Primordial Man. In This Way Our Existence As Separate Beings, Our Former Ego Nature, Is Abolished, The Circle Of Consciousness Is Widened, And Because The Paradoxes Have Been Made Conscious, The Sources Of Conflict Are Dried Up.

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.

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?

Man's Unconscious... Contains All The Patterns Of Life And Behaviour Inherited From His Ancestors, So That Every Human Child, Prior To Consciousness, Is Possessed Of A Potential System Of Adapted Psychic Functioning.

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.

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

Who Looks Outside, Dreams; Who Looks Inside, Awakes.

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

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 Artist Is Not A Person Endowed With Free Will Who Seeks His Own Ends, But One Who Allows It To Realize Its Supreme Purpose Through Him.

...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 Word 'belief' Is A Difficult Thing For Me. I Don't Believe. I Must Have A Reason For A Certain Hypothesis. Either I Know A Thing, And Then I Know It - I Don't Need To Believe It.

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

Words Are Animals, Alive With A Will Of Their Own

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

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

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.

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.

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

There Are Two Reasons Why Man Loses Contact With The Regulating Center Of His Soul. One Of Them Is That Some Single Instinctive Drive Or Emotional Image Can Carry Him Into A One-sidedness That Makes Him Lose His Balance...his One-sidedness And Consequent Loss Of Balance Are Much Dreaded By Primitives, Who Call It 'loss Of Soul.' Another Threat...circles Around Particular Complexes

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.

Error Is Just As Important A Condition Of Life's Progress As Truth

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

Your Vision Will Be Clearer Only When You Manage To See Within Your Heart.

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

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. . . .

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

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

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

For Better To Come, Good Must Stand Aside.

...anyone Who Attempts To Do Both, To Adjust To His Group And At The Same Time Pursue His Individual Goal, Becomes Neurotic.

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.

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

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.

Meaninglessnes S Inhibits Fullness Of Life And Is Therefore The Equivalent To Illness. Meaning Makes A Great Many Things Endurable--perh Aps Everything.

Fullness Of Life

A [wo]man Who Is Unconscious Of [her/]himself Acts In A Blind, Instinctive Way And Is In Addition Fooled By All The Illusions That Arise When He Sees Everything That He Is Not Conscious Of In Himself Coming To Meet Him From Outside As Projections Upon His Neighbour.

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

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

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

Many Who Know Something But Not Enough About Dreams And Their Meaning...are Liable To Succumb To The Prejudice That The Dream Actually Has A Moral Purpose, That It Warns, Rebukes, Comforts, Foretells The Future, Etc. If One Believes That The Unconscious Always Knows Best, One Can Easily Be Betrayed Into Leaving The Dreams To Take The Necessary Decisions, And Is Then Disappointed When The Dreams Become More And More Trivial And Meaningless...the Unconscious Functions Satisfactorily Only When The Conscious Mind Fufills Its Task To The Very Limit.

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

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

The 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.

As Far As We Can Discern, The Sole Purpose Of Human Existence Is To Kindle A Light In The Darkness Of Mere Being.

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

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.

Without This Playing With Fantasy No Creative Work Has Ever Yet Come To Birth. The Debt We Owe To The Play Of The Imagination Is Incalculable.

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

In All Chaos There Is A Cosmos, In All Disorder A Secret Order... We Are Caught And Entangled In Aimless Experience... Only When All Props And Crutches Are Broken, And No Cover From The Rear Offers Even The Slightest Hope Of Security, Does It Become Possible For Us To Experience An Archetype That Up Till Then Had Lain Hidden Behind The Meaningful Nonsense Played Out By The Anima. This Is The Archetype Of Meaning, Just As The Anima Is The Archetype Of Life Itself.

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 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

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.

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.

The Angels Are A Strange Genus: They Are Precisely What They Are And Cannot Be Anything Else. They Are In Themselves Soulless Beings Who Represent Nothing But The Thoughts And Intuitions Of Their Lord.

Nights Through Dreams Tell The Myths Forgotten By The Day.

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

My Own Understanding Is The Sole Treasure I Possess, And The Greatest. Though Infinitely Small And Fragile In Comparison With The Powers Of Darkness, It Is Still A Light, My Only Light.

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

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

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.

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

What We Lack Is Intensity Of Life.

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

One Must Be Able To Let Things Happen.

Creative Power Is Mightier Than Its Possessor.

Hitler's Movement Is Near To Mohammedanism.

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.

There Is No Coming To Consciousness Without Pain. People Will Do Anything, No Matter How Absurd, In Order To Avoid Facing Their Own Soul. One Does Not Become Enlightened By Imagining Figures Of Light, But By Making The Darkness Conscious.

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.

I Can Still Recall Vividly How Freud Said To Me, "my Dear Jung, Promise Me Never To Abandon The Sexual Theory. That Is The Most Essential Thing Of All. You See, We Must Make A Dogma Of It, An Unshakable Bulwark" ... In Some Astonishment I Asked Him, "a Bulwark-against What?" To Which He Replied, "against The Black Tide Of Mud"-and Here He Hesitated For A Moment, Then Added Of Occultism.

The Problem Of Synchronicity Has Puzzled Me For A Long Time, Ever Since The Middle Twenties, When I Was Investigating The Phenomena Of The Collective Unconscious And Kept On Coming Across Connections Which I Simply Could Not Explain As Chance Groupings Or "runs." What I Found Were "coincidences" Which Were Connected So Meaningfully That Their "chance" Concurrence Would Represent A Degree Of Improbability That Would Have To Be Expressed By An Astronomical Figure.

Collective Unconscious

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

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

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

It Is In The Nature Of Political Bodies Always To See The Evil In The Opposite Group, Just As The Individual Has An Ineradicable Tendency To Get Rid Of Everything He Does Not Know And Does Not Want To Know About Himself By Foisting It Off On Somebody Else. Nothing Has A More Diverse And Alienating Effect Upon Society Than This Moral Complacency And Lack Of Responsibility, And Nothing Promotes Understanding And Rapprochement More Than The Mutual Withdrawal Of Projections.

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

Who Has Fully Realized That History Is Not Contained In Thick Books But Lives In Our Very Blood?

Show Me A Sane Man And I Will Cure Him For You.

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

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

No One Can Flatter Himself That He Is Immune To The Spirit Of His Own Epoch, Or Even That He Possesses A Full Understanding Of It. Irrespective Of Our Conscious Convictions, Each One Of Us, Without Exception, Being A Particle Of The General Mass, Is Somewhere Attached To, Colored By, Or Even Undermined By The Spirit Which Goes Through The Mass. Freedom Stretches Only As Far As The Limits Of Our Consciousness.

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.

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.

Modern Man May Assert That He Can Dispense With Them, And He May Bolster His Opinion By Insisting That There Is No Scientific Evidence Of Their Truth. But Since We Are Dealing With Invisible And Unknowable Things (for God Is Beyond Human Understanding, And There Is No Mean Of Proving Immortality), Why Should We Bother With Evidence?

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.

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

In Fact, The Whole Of Mythology Could Be Taken As A Sort Of Projection Of The Collective Unconscious

Collective Unconscious

Everything Psychic Is Pregnant With The Future.

Explore Daily The Will Of God.

Enchantment Is The Oldest Form Of Medicine.

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

The Experience Of The Self Is Always A Defeat For The Ego.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

I Have Gradually Learned To Be Cautious Even In Disbelief

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.

The Primary Cause Of Unhappiness In The World Today Is... Lack Of Faith.

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

God Has Fallen Out Of Containment In Religion And Into Human Hearts—god Is Incarnating. Our Whole Unconscious Is In An Uproar From The God Who Wants To Know And To Be Known.

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

Insight That Dawns Slowly Seems To Me To Have More Lasting Effects Than A Fitful Idealism, Which Is Unlikely To Hold Out For Long.

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.

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

Religion Is A Defense Against The Experience Of God.

The Time Is A Critical One, For It Marks The Beginning Of The Second Half Of Life, When A Metanoia, A Mental Transformation, Not Infrequently Occurs. (on Being 36 Yrs Old)

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

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.

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.

For, In Order To Turn The Individual Into A Function Of The State, His Dependence On Anything Beside The State Must Be Taken From Him.

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

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

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

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

When We Assume God To Be A Guiding Principle Well, Sure Enough, A God Is Usually Characteristic Of A Certain System Of Thought Or Morality. For Instance, Take The Christian God, The Summum Bonum: God Is Love, Love Being The Highest Moral Principle; And God Is Spirit, The Spirit Being The Supreme Idea Of Meaning. All Our Christian Moral Concepts Derive From Such Assumptions, And The Supreme Essence Of All Of Them Is What We Call God.

Guiding Principles

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.

Man Needs Difficulties; They Are Necessary For Health.

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

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

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

Nothing Is Possible Without Love.

Neurosis Is Always A Substitute For Legitimate Suffering.

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.

Thinking Is Difficult, That’s Why Most People Judge.

There Is No Birth Of Consciousness Without Pain.

Collective Unconscious

About A Third Of My Cases Are Suffering From No Clinically Definable Neurosis, But From The Senselessness And Emptiness Of Their Lives.

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.

But, If You Have Nothing At All To Create, Then Perhaps You Create Yourself.

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.

It Is Only Our Deeds That Reveal Who We Are.

Famous Inspirational

The Spirit Is The Life Of The Body Seen From Within, And The Body The Outward Manifestation Of The Life Of The Spirit-the Two Being Really One.

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

The Unconscious Psyche Believes In Life After Death

To Make What Fate Intends For Me My Own Intention

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.

Securities, Certitudes And Peace Do Not Lead To Discoveries.

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.

Healing Proceeds From The Depths To The Heights.

Until You Make The Unconscious Conscious, It Will Direct Your Life And You Will Call It Fate.

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

Perhaps This Sounds Very Simple, But Simple Things Are Always The Most Difficult. 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.

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.

Everyone Can Afford To Give Away A Smile.

Solitude Is For Me A Fount Of Healing Which Makes My Life Worth Living. Talking Is Often A Torment For Me, And I Need Many Days Of Silence To Recover From The Futility Of Words.

Commendation Heals; Condemnation Destroys.

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

The Sad Truth Is That Man's Real Life Consists Of A Complex Of Inexorable Opposites - Day And Night, Birth And Death, Happiness And Misery, Good And Evil. We Are Not Even Sure That One Will Prevail Against The Other, That Good Will Overcome Evil, Or Joy Defeat Pain. Life Is A Battleground. It Always Has Been And Always Will Be; And If It Were Not So, Existence Would Come To An End.

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.

Sometimes You Have To Do Something Unforgivable Just To Be Able To Go On Living.

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.

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

Even If The Whole World Were To Fall To Pieces, The Unity Of The Psyche Would Never Be Shattered.

Please Remember, It Is What You Are That Heals, Not What You Know.

Without Freedom There Can Be No Morality.

Memories Dreams Reflections

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Trending Author

Pierre De Coubertin

Charlotte Bronte

Category