Background Image

...

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.

-Carl Jung

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

When We Must Deal

Carl Jung

...

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.

Views: 5

Topic

More From Carl Jung

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

What Is Not Brought To Consciousness, Comes To Us As Fate.

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.

Somewhere There Was Once A Flower, A Stone, A Crystal, A Queen, A King, A Palace, A Lover And His Beloved, And This Was Long Ago, On An Island Somewhere In The Ocean 5,000 Years Ago. . . . Such Is Love, The Mystic Flower Of The Soul. This Is The Center, The Self.

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

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

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

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

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 Psychopathology Of The Masses Is Rooted In The Psychology Of The Individual

Active Imagination Requires A State Of Reverie, Half-way Between Sleep And Waking.

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

The Wise Man Who Is Not Heeded Is Counted A Fool, And The Fool Who Proclaims The General Folly First And Loudest Passes For A Prophet And Führer, And Sometimes It Is Luckily The Other Way Round As Well, Or Else Mankind Would Long Since Have Perished Of Stupidity.

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

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.

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.

We Meet Ourselves Time And Again In A Thousand Disguises On The Path Of Life.

Law Of Attraction

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Most Important Question Anyone Can Ask Is: What Myth Am I Living?

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

Collective Unconscious

Hitler Is A Medicine Man Type Of Leader.

Even A Lie Is A Psychic Fact.

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

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.

Art Is A Kind Of Innate Drive That Seizes A Human Being And Makes Him Its Instrument.

To Make What Fate Intends For Me My Own Intention

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.

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

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.

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.

Dreaming Is A Philogenetically Older Mode Of Thought.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Our Psyche Is Set Up In Accord With The Structure Of The Universe, And What Happens In The Macrocosm Likewise Happens In The Infinitesimal And Most Subjective Reaches Of The Psyche

Here And There It Happened In My Practice That A Patient Grew Beyond Himself Because Of Unknown Potentialities, And This Became An Experience Of Prime Importance To Me. I Had Learned In The Meanwhile That The Greatest And Most Important Problems Of Life Are All In A Certain Sense Insoluble. They Must Be So Because They Express The Necessary Polarity Inherent In Every Self-regulating System. They Can Never Be Solved, But Only Outgrown.

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.

Every Human Life Contains A Potential, If That Potential Is Not Fulfilled, Then That Life Was Wasted.

The Foundation Of All Mental Illness Is The Unwillingness To Experience Legitimate Suffering.

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

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.

Conflict Exists Strictly As An Opportunity To Raise Our Consciousness.

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.

Space Flights Are Merely An Escape, A Fleeing Away From Oneself, Because It Is Easier To Go To Mars Or To The Moon Than It Is To Penetrate One's Own Being.

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.

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.

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

All Ages Before Ours Believed In Gods In Some Form Or Other. Only An Unparalleled Impoverishment In Symbolism Could Enable Us To Rediscover The Gods As Psychic Factors, Which Is To Say, As Archetypes Of The Unconscious. No Doubt This Discovery Is Hardly Credible As Yet.

We Cannot Change Anything Unless We Accept It.

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

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

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.

Securities, Certitudes And Peace Do Not Lead To Discoveries.

We Have Forgotten The Age-old Fact That God Speaks Chiefly Through Dreams And Visions.

What Happens After Death Is So Unspeakably Glorious That Our Imagination And Our Feelings Do Not Suffice To Form Even An Approximate Conception Of It. The Dissolution Of Our Time-bound Form In Eternity Brings No Loss Of Meaning.

The Most Terrifying Thing Is To Accept Oneself Completely.

Envy Does Not Allow Humanity To Sleep.

I Do Not Believe...i Know.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Summoned Or Not, The God Will Come.

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

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

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

Lunatic Asylums

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.’

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.

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

The 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Continuing, Direct Operation Of The Holy Ghost On Those Who Are Called To Be God's Children Implies, In Fact, A Broadening Process Of Incarnation. Christ, The Son Begotten By God, Is The First-born Who Is Succeeded By An Ever-increasing Number Of Younger Brothers And Sisters. There Are, However, Neither Begotten By The Holy Ghost Nor Born Of A Virgin. . . . Their Lowly Origin (possibly From The Mammals) Does Not Prevent Them From Entering Into A Close Kinship With God As Their Father And Christ As Their Brother.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Religion Is A Defense Against The Experience Of God.

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

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.

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

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 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.

Magic Is The Science Of The Jungle.

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

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

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.

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.

If You Want To Understand The Jungle, You Can't Be Content Just To Sail Back And Forth Near The Shore. You've Got To Get Into It, No Matter How Strange And Frightening It Might Seem.

To This Day God Is The Name By Which I Designate All Things Which Cross My Willful Path Violently And Recklessly, All Things Which Upset My Subjective Views, Plans And Intentions And Change The Course Of My Life For Better Or Worse.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Healing Proceeds From The Depths To The Heights.

The Years... When I Pursued The Inner Images Were The Most Important Time Of My Life. Everything Else Is To Be Derived From This. It Began At That Time, And The Later Details Hardly Matter Anymore. My Entire Life Consisted In Elaborating What Had Burst Forth From The Unconscious And Flooded Me Like An Enigmatic Stream And Threatened To Break Me. That Was The Stuff And Material For More Than Only One Life. Everything Later Was Merely The Outer Classification, The Scientific Elaboration, And The Integration Into Life. But The Numinous Beginning, Which Contained Everything Was Then.

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?

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.

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.

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

You Always Become The Thing You Fight The Most.

When You Come To Think About It, Nothing Has Any Meaning, For When There Was Nobody To Think, There Was Nobody To Interpret What Happened.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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. . . .

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

For The Alchemist The One Primarily In Need Of Redemption Is Not Man, But The Deity Who Is Lost And Sleeping In Matter.

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

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.

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.

Enlightenment Consists Not Merely In The Seeing Of Luminous Shapes And Visions, But In Making The Darkness Visible. The Latter Procedure Is More Difficult And Therefore, Unpopular.

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

To Me Dreams Are Part Of Nature, Which Harbors No Intention To Deceive But Expresses Something As Best It Can.

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.

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

We Can Keep From A Child All Knowledge Of Earlier Myths, But We Cannot Take From Him The Need For Mythology.

The Pendulum Of The Mind Alternates Between Sense And Nonsense, Not Between Right And Wrong.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

Obviously Astrology Has Much To Offer Psychology, But What The Latter Can Offer Its Elder Sister Is Less Evident. So Far As I Judge, It Would Seem To Me Advantageous For Astrology To Take The Existence Of Psychology Into Account, Above All The Psychology Of The Personality And Of The Unconscious.

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

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

Nature Is Not Matter Only. She Is Also A Spirit

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Wisdom Accepts That All Things Have Two Sides

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.

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

Someone Who Is Brave Enough To Withdraw All His Projections, [is] An Individual Who Is Conscious Of A Pretty Thick Shadow.

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.

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.

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 Are A Psychic Process Which We Do Not Control, Or Only Partly Direct. Consequently, We Cannot Have Any Final Judgment About Ourselves Or Our Lives.

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.

Shame Is A Soul Eating Emotion.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

At Times I Feel As If I Am Spread Out Over The Landscape And Inside Things, And Am Myself Living In Every Tree, In The Plashing Of The Waves, In The Clouds And The Animals That Come And Go, In The Procession Of The Seasons.

As Soon As The Dialogue Between Two People Touches On Something Fundamental, Essential, Numinous, And A Certain Rapport Is Felt, It Gives Rise To A Phenomenon Which Lévy-bruhl Fittingly Called Participation Mystique. It Is An Unconscious Identity In Which Two Individual Psychic Spheres Interpenetrate To Such A Degree That It Is Impossible To Say What Belongs To Whom.

The Healthy Man Does Not Torture Others - Generally It Is The Tortured Who Turn Into Torturers.

Whether You Call The Principle Of Existence "god," "matter," "energy," Or Anything Else You Like, You Have Created Nothing; You Have Merely Changed A Symbol. Eastern And Western Thinking, 1938

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

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.

Gnosticism Was Stamped Out Completely And Its Remnants Are So Badly Mangled That Special Study Is Needed To Get Any Insight At All Into Its Inner Meaning.

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

Creativity Is The Art That Can Give Rise To Visionary Metaphorical Relationships, As Opposed To Purely Psy-chological Ones.

Trending Author

Persis Khambatta

Martha Gellhorn

John Paul DeJoria

Category