Carl Jung on “Karma” Anthology
The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 524-525, Para 856.
I do not know whether Karma creates the ego or the ego creates Karma. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 43.
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. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
As we have already seen that Karma is the sum-total of what we bring over from former lives, our debit and credit account, merits and losses. Sangskara is the sum-total of the mind that we have created in former existences. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Pages 55-56.
I am trying to get nearer to the remarkable psychology of the Buddha himself, or at least of that which his contemporaries assumed him to be. It is chiefly the question of karma and rebirth which has renewed my interest in Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 548.
I was particularly interested in the dream which, in mid-August 1955, anticipated the death of my wife. It probably expresses the idea of life’s perfection: the epitome of all fruits, rounded into a bullet, struck her like karma. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 310.
Inasmuch as karma means either a personal or at least an individual inherited determinant of character and fate, it represents the individually differentiated manifestation of the instinctual behaviour pattern, i.e., the general archetypal disposition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 287-289.
I avoid the term of karma because it includes metaphysical assumptions for which I have no evidence, f.i. that karma is a fate I have acquired in a previous existence or that it is the result of an individual life left over and by chance becoming my own. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 287-289.