Carl Jung: “Collected Letters Volume II” – Quotations

Carl Jung: “Collected Letters Volume II” – Quotations

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Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol II, Page 363.

The “secret of life” is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots . All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Its life is remorselessly cut down to its essence, and the sweetness of the grape is turned into wine, dry and heady, a son of the earth who serves his blood to the multitude and causes the drunkenness which unites the divided and brings back the memory of possessing all and of the kingship, a time of loosening, and a time of peace. There is much more to follow, but it can no longer be told. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 514-515

I have appeared in the world, if that is good for me. My name enjoys an existence quasi-independent of myself. My real self is actually chopping wood in Bollingen and cooking the meals, trying to forget the trial of an eightieth birthday. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 270

I quite agree with you: it is not easy to reach utmost poverty and simplicity. But it meets you, unbidden, on the way to the end of this existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 512.

What you think of as a few days of spiritual communion would be unendurable for me with anyone, even my closest friends. The rest is silence! This realization becomes clearer every day as the need to communicate dwindles. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 363.

Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

That [Individuation] means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

As for instance the ordinary physician neither imagines nor hopes to make of his patient an ideal athlete, so the psychological doctor does not dream of being able to produce saints. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 474.

Everything essential happens in the Self and the ego functions as a receiver, spectator, and transmitter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 236.

individuation is an empirical process and not a way of initiation at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 304.

Thank you for telling me about your interesting experience. It is a case of what we would call clairvoyance. But since this is just a word that signifies nothing further, it explains nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 17.

If one views modern art prospectively, as I think one can, it plainly announces the uprush of the dissolvent forces of disorder. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 82.

I’m no artist. I only try to get things into stone of which I think it is important that they appear in hard matter and stay on for a reasonably long time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 83.

Astrology, like the collective unconscious with which psychology is concerned, consists of symbolic configurations: The “planets” are the gods, symbols of the powers of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 175.

Time in itself consists of nothing. It is only a modus cogitandi that is used to express and formulate the flux of things and events, just as space is nothing but a way of describing the existence of a body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 176.

The main difficulty with synchronicity (and also with ESP) is that one thinks of it as being produced by the subject, while I think it is rather in the nature of objective events. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 181.

Although ESP is a gift of certain individuals and seems to depend upon an emotional perception, the picture it produces is that of an objective fact. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 181.

My conceptions are empirical and not at all speculative. If you understand them from a philosophical standpoint you go completely astray, since they are not rational but mere names of groups of irrational phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 302.

Nobody has ever been entirely liberated from the opposites, because no living being could possibly attain to such a state, as nobody escapes pain and pleasure as long as he functions physiologically. He may have occasional ecstatic experiences when he gets the intuition of a complete liberation, f.i. in reaching the state of sat-chit-ananda. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 303.

The sensitiveness to noise persists. I always seek silence. I am a bundle of opposites and can only endure myself when I observe myself as an objective phenomenon. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 78.

Archetypes are not mere concepts but are entities, exactly like whole numbers, which are not merely aids to counting but possess irrational qualities that do not result from the concept of counting, as for instance the prime numbers and their behaviour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 22.

Hence the mathematician Kronecker could say: Man created mathematics, but God created whole numbers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 23.

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. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 310.

I’m no artist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 83.

I only try to get things into stone of which I think it is important that they appear in hard matter and stay on for a reasonably long time. Or I try to give form to something that seems to be in the stone and makes me restless. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 83.

You have experienced in your marriage what is an almost universal fact-that individuals are different from one another. Basically, each remains for the other an unfathomable enigma. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.

If nevertheless you are still tormented by guilt feelings, then consider for once what sins you have not committed which you would have liked to commit. This might perhaps cure you of your guilt feelings towards your wife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.

The serious illness of my wife has consumed all my spare time. She has undergone an operation so far successfully, but it has left her in a feeble state needing careful nursing for several weeks to come. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 251.

Before we strive after perfection, we ought to be able to live the ordinary man without self-mutilation. As for instance the ordinary physician neither imagines nor hopes to make of his patient an ideal athlete, so the psychological doctor does not dream of being able to produce saints. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 474.

Unfortunately I have no copy of the letter to the Prot. Theologian. But I will send you an offprint of my answer to Buber who has called me a Gnostic. He does not understand psychic reality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 61.

I would abandon the term “Gnostic” without compunction were it not a swearword in the mouths of theologians. They accuse me of the very same fault they commit themselves: presumptuous disregard of epistemological barriers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 147.

Nobody would assume that the biological pattern is a philosophical assumption like the Platonic idea or a Gnostic hypostasis. The same is true of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 152.
You overlook the facts and then think that the name is the fact, and thus you reach the nonsensical conclusion that I hypostatize ideas and am therefore a “Gnostic.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.

Considering that the light of Christ is accompanied by the “dark night of the soul” that St. John of the Cross spoke about, and by what the Gnostics of lrenaeus called the umbra Christi, which is identical with the chthonic aspect mentioned above, the life of Christ is identical in us, from the psychological point of view, with the unconscious tendency toward individuation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.

Somehow, as the Gnostics surmised, we have “collected” ourselves from out of the cosmos. That is why the idea of “gathering the seeds of light” played such an important role in their systems and in Manichaeism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.

Buber has been led astray by a poem in Gnostic style I made 44 years ago for a friend’s birthday celebration (a private print!), a poetic paraphrase of the psychology of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 571.

We can’t remind God of anything or prescribe anything for him, except when he tries to force something on us that our human limitation cannot endure. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 120.

…for if God needs us as regulators of his incarnation and his coming to consciousness, it is because in his boundlessness he exceeds all the bounds that are necessary for becoming conscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 120.

Becoming conscious means continual renunciation because it is an ever-deepening concentration. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 120.

The innermost self of every man and animal, of plants and crystals, is God, but infinitely diminished and approximated to his ultimate individual form. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 120.

Can you imagine a real prophet or saviour in our days of television and press reportage? He would perish by his own popularity within a few weeks. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 172.

Gifted children are often pushed out into the world and its neurotic turmoil much too early for their situation, and then their gift is soon exhausted. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 178.

They belong to you, and you have painted them as a support for your own individuation process. They shouldn’t be here, and nowhere else but with yourself, as they represent the approximation of the two worlds of spirit and body or of ego and self. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 179.

On Jan. 23rd I had a slight embolism followed by not too severe heart cramps. I was under house arrest for a month, forbidden all mental activity, i.e., active concentration. However, it didn’t stop me from my long planned (renewed) reading of Buddhist texts, whose content I am leaving to simmer inside me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 544.

Thanks to my isolation I have been slipping away from the world and holding converse not with the men of today but with voices long past. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 544.

The imminence of death and the vision of the world in conspectu mortis is in truth a curious experience: the sense of the present stretches out beyond today, looking back into centuries gone by, and forward into futures yet unborn. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 10.

And that’s how it would be for you too with the Russians, for they also are universal saviours who want to cure the whole world with their own disease, just as the Nazis did. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 11.

The quaternity is an empirical fact, not a doctrine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 13.

The unconscious expresses itself chiefly in quaternities, irrespective of Christian tradition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 13.

The quaternity is of Old Testament as well as Egyptian origin. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 13.

Since the incarnatio Dei conveys nothing intelligible to modern man, “became flesh” has to be translated for better of worse, e.g., “has assumed definite empirical form.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 13.

Fanaticism always means overcompensated doubt. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 30.

Becoming conscious does not in itself lead to hell by any means. It leads to this unpleasant place only if you are conscious of certain things and not of others. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 30.

In the case of both these two, Eliot and above all Sartre, the talk is always of consciousness, never of the objective psyche, the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 30.

It is quite natural that if in your consciousness you are always running round in a circle you will finally end up in hell. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 30.

Some of the main islands [of peace] are: my garden, the view of distant mountains, my country place where I withdraw from the noise of city life, my library. Also small things like books, pictures, and stones. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 40.

I forgot to tell you that I Ching 16 place 1 refers to “putting in music” the problem of priv. boni, i.e., understanding it as a feeling problem. You would get a more complete picture if you contemplate such ideas not only from an intellectual but also from a feeling standpoint. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 79.

My discussion of the privatio boni with Victor [White] was a very unsatisfactory experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 93.

Every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 432.

Until now I have smoked 1 pipe with water condensation on beginning work in the morning, a miniature cigar after lunch, equal to 1-2 cigarettes, another pipe at 4 o’clock, after supper another little cigar, and generally another pipe about 9:30. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 103.

A little tobacco helps me to concentrate and conduces to my peace of mind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 103.

Man has only very limited possibilities amongst which-so far as his consciousness extends-he can choose with practical freedom. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 102.

If causality is axiomatic, i.e., absolute, there can be no freedom. But if it is only a statistical truth, as is in fact the case, then the possibility of freedom exists. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 102.

It illuminates the evening of my days and fills me with joyful serenity that I was granted the favour of putting my best abilities at the service of a great cause. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 104.

What you write about the effect of Job on analysts accords with my own experience: the number of individuals capable of reacting is relatively very small and analysts are no exception. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 104

Today I finished a long essay on the “Philosophical Tree,” which kept me company during my illness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 104

Writing it [Philosophical Tree] was an enjoyable substitute for the fact that so few of my contemporaries can understand what is meant by the psychology of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 104

You should have seen the press reviews of Job! The naive stupidity of it all is beyond imagination.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 104

For a time I faithfully observed the rigorous rules of abstinence until my impatience drove me again to a few pipes. Of the 2 evils the pipe seems to me the lesser. Everything went very well from the moment I gave up the digitalis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 105

I know Suzuki personally. I have studied Zen not in the practical sense but only from the psychological angle. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 101.

Many paths lead to the central experience. But the nearer one gets to the centre the easier it is to understand the other paths that lead there. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 101.

The spectacle of eternal Nature gives me a painful sense of my weakness and perishability, and I find no joy in imagining an equanimity in conspectu mortis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 119.

As I once dreamt, my will to live is a glowing daimon, who makes the consciousness of my mortality hellish difficult for me at times. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 119.

But the daimon reeks nothing of that, for life, at the core, is steel on stone. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 119.

I know a case in my own experience where children who have been brought up in a too rationalistic way, that is have been deprived of a proper knowledge of the fairy world, have invented fairy tales all by themselves, obviously to fill the gap left by the stupid prejudices of the adults. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 131.

Now, this derogatory way of judging Amenophis IV got my goat and I expressed myself pretty strongly. That was the immediate cause of Freud’s accident. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 133.

Nobody ever asks me how things really were; one only gives a one-sided and twisted representation of my relation to him [Freud]. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 133.

I only can say that as far as consciousness reaches, the will is understood to be free, i.e., that the feeling of freedom accompanies your decisions no matter if they are really free or not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 139.

If unconscious contents approaching the sphere of consciousness are not analysed and integrated, then the sphere of your freedom is even diminished through the fact that such contents are activated and gain more compelling influence upon consciousness than when they were completely unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 139.

Being a scientist I prefer not to be a prophet if I can help it. I am in no position to ascertain facts of the future. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 513.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e, the true expression of your individuality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 592.

Science seeks the truth because it feels it does not possess it. The church possesses the truth and therefore does not seek it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 346.

Old age is only half as funny as one is inclined to think. It is at all events the gradual breaking down of the bodily machine, with which foolishness identifies as ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 580.

…live thoroughly and very consciously for many years in order to understand what your will is and what Its will is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 301.

As “contemporary” symbols of the opposites, the fishes have a tendency to devour each other if only they are left alone. In the end you have no alternative but to take the conflicts on yourself by ceasing to identify now with one side and now with the other. You become what happens in the middle. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 291.

You see, I have no religious or other convictions about my symbols. They can change tomorrow. They are mere allusions, they hint at something, they stammer and often they lose their way. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 291.

In America especially one blames me for my so-called mysticism. Since I don’t claim at all to be the happy proprietor of metaphysical truths, I should much prefer that you attribute to my symbols the same tentativeness which characterizes your explanatory attempt. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 291.

They [Symbols] are just no Gnosis, no metaphysical assertions. They are partly even futile or dubious attempts at pronouncing the ineffable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 291.

You can rest assured that having studied the Gospels for a life-time (I am nearly 83!) ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 346.

Surely the times of primitive Christianity were bad too, but not as bad as the world is now. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 346.

Knowing more about the soul and its mysteries you could free yourself from the fascination which makes you suffer. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 402.

In the second half of life one should begin to get acquainted with the inner world. That is a general problem. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 402.

The projection of anima and animus causes mutual fascination. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 402.

There is a little book by Frieda Fordham: Introduction to Jung’s Psychology (Pelican Books), which I recommend to you. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 402.

I am concerned with the world as it is today, namely godless and spiritually disoriented. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 346.

The coincidence of the Fibonacci numbers (or sectio aurea) with plant growth is a sort of analogy with synchronicity inasmuch as the latter consists in the coincidence of a psychic process with an external physical event of the same character or meaning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 288.

I often thought of Meister Eckhart, who was entombed for six hundred years, and asked myself time and again why there are no men in our epoch who could see at least what I was wrestling with. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 586.

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, Page 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, Page 289.

Not in my livery, but “naked and bare I must go down to the grave,” fully aware of the outrage my nakedness will provoke. But what is that compared with the arrogance I had to summon up in order to be able to insult God? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 32.

Only my intellect has anything to do with purusha-atman or Tao, but not my living thralldom. This is local, barbaric, infantile, and abysmally unscientific. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 33

I have much more sympathy with Sophia than with the demiurge but faced with the reality of both my sympathy counts for nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 33

Sophia is always ahead, the demiurge always behind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 33.

God is an ailment man has to cure. For this purpose God penetrates into man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 33.

In order to reach man, God has to show himself in his true form, or man would be everlastingly praising his goodness and justice and so deny him admission. This can be effected only by Satan, a fact which should not be taken as a justification for Satanic actions, otherwise God would not be recognized for what he really is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 34.

As for the nigredo, it is certain that no one is redeemed from a sin he not committed, and that a man who stands on a peak cannot climb it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 35.

Nobody has ever seen an archetype, and nobody has ever seen an atom either. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 54.

When I say “atom” I am talking of the model made of it; when I say “archetype” I am talking of ideas corresponding to it, but never of the thing-in itself, which in both cases is a transcendental mystery. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 54.

One must therefore assume that the effective archetypal ideas, including our model of the archetype, rest on something actual even though unknowable, just as the model of the atom rests on certain unknowable qualities of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 54.

I postulate the psyche as something real. But this hypothesis can hardly be called “gnostic” any more than the atomic theory can. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 55.

But I wonder how it comes that so many people think I am a gnostic while equally many others accuse me of being an agnostic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 55.

I therefore don’t quite understand how you can smell “gnostic” arrogance in this attitude. In strictest contrast to Gnosticism and theology, I confine myself to the psychology of anthropomorphic ideas and have never maintained that I possess the slightest trace of metaphysical knowledge. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 65.

It is evident that Buber has a bad conscience, as he publishes only his letters and does not represent me fairly, since I am a mere Gnostic, though he hasn’t the faintest idea of what the Gnostic was moved by. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 101.

There is no reason whatever to assume that all so-called psychic phenomena are illusory effects of our mental processes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 333.

I do not think that so-called personal messages from the dead can be dismissed in globo as self-deceptions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 334.

I don’t think that all reports of so-called miraculous phenomena (such as precognition, telepathy, supranormal knowledge, etc.) are doubtful. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 118.

I consider myself a Christian, but that didn’t do Savonarola or Servetus much good, and not even Christ himself escaped this fate. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 130.

I don’t do anything to God at all, how could I? I criticize merely our conceptions of God. I have no idea what God is in himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 129.

I am not a philosopher who might be able to achieve something as ambitious as that, but an empiricist who describes the progress of his experiences; thus my work has no absolute beginning and no all-encompassing end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 180.

It is like the life of an individual, which suddenly becomes visible somewhere but rests on definite though invisible foundations, so has no proper beginning and no proper end, ceasing just as suddenly and leaving questions behind which should have been answered. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 180.

As for the writings of Ouspenski and Gurdjieff, I know enough to satisfy me that I have no time for them. I seek real knowledge and therefore avoid all unverifiable speculation. I have seen enough of that as a psychiatrist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 180

I naturally agree with what you say about freedom of thought. The Communist doesn’t come into this category, since he doesn’t think; but his actions are a danger to the public. If he thought, he would have found out his deceit long ago. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 180

The question of religion is not so simple as you see it: it is not at all a matter of intellectual conviction or philosophy or even belief, but rather a matter of inner experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 183.

St. Paul for instance was not converted to Christianity by intellectual or philosophical endeavour or by a belief, but by the force of his immediate inner experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 183.

I want to thank you [Aniela Jaffe] for your efforts on behalf of my so-called “Autobiography” and to reaffirm that I do not regard this book as my undertaking ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 550.

I can answer your question about life after death just as well by letter as by word of mouth. Actually this question exceeds the capacity of the human mind, which cannot assert anything beyond itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 561.

I quite agree with you that those people in our world who have insight and good will enough should concern themselves with their own “souls” more than with preaching to the masses or trying to find out the best way for them. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 549.

Surely modern art is trying its best to make man acquainted with a world full of darkness, but alas, the artists themselves are unconscious of what they are doing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 549.

All steps forward in the improvement of the human psyche have been paid for by blood. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 549.

But alas, it is a sad truth that usually those who know nothing for themselves take to teaching others, in spite of the fact that they know the best method of education is the good example. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 549.

I may say that I know what is infinite and eternal; I may even assert that I have experienced it; but that one could actually know it is impossible because man is neither an infinite nor an eternal being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 375.

If I have a vision of Christ, this is far from proving that it was Christ, as we know only too well from our psychiatric practice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 377.

Actually after this vision Nicholas should have preached: “God is terrible.” But he believed his own interpretation instead of the immediate experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 377.

Transcendence is simply that which is unconscious to us, and it cannot be established whether this is permanently inaccessible or only at present. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 379.

Times go on and inexorably one is left behind, sometimes more, sometimes less, and one has to realize that there are things beyond our reach one shouldn’t grieve for, as such grieving is still a remnant of too youthful an ambition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 398.

Our libido certainly would go on reaching for the stars if fate didn’t make it clear beyond any reasonable doubt that we shouldn’t seek completion without, but within alas! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 178.

God is not a statistical truth, hence it is just as stupid to try to prove the existence of God as to deny him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 31.

What mankind has called “God” from time immemorial you experience every day. You only give him another, so-called “rational” name-for instance, you call him “affect.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 91.

Outer world and God are the two primordial experiences and the one is as great as the other, and both have a thousand names, which one and all do not alter the facts. The roots of both are unknown. The psyche mirrors both. It is perhaps the point where they touch. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 5.

We have blotted it out with so-called “spiritual development,” which means that we live by self-fabricated electric light and-to heighten the comedy-believe or don’t believe in the sun. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 5.

Atlantis: a mythical phantasm. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 5.

L. Frobenius: an imaginative and somewhat credulous original. Great collector of material. Less good as a thinker. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 4.
6.
God: an inner experience, not discussable as such but impressive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 4.

I think it [UFO’s] is chiefly an obstinate rumour, but the question whether there is something real behind it is not answered. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 6.

God always speaks mythologically. If he didn’t, he would reveal reason and science. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 9.

Now that the Catholic Church has taken the momentous step of the assumption, Protestantism is really and truly nailed fast to the Patriarchal line of the Old Testament and way behindhand in the matter of dogmatic development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 9.

There is physically transmitted (outer world) experience and inner (spiritual) experience. The one is as valid as the other. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 4.

Sooner or later it will grow into a question of first class importance for humanity, since we are rapidly approaching the time when the feeding of the world’s population will come up against a barrier that cannot be crossed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 15.

The term individuation ought to be reserved for the legitimate evolution of the individual entelechy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 16.

I am no particular friend of [William] Blake, whom I am always inclined to criticize. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 17.

Then thoughts come to me, as for instance that consciousness is only an organ for perceiving the fourth dimension, i .e., the all-pervasive meaning, and itself produces no real ideas. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 18.

I see with regret from your letter that you are suffering very much from your noises in the ear. The unconscious often uses symptoms of this kind in order to make psychic contents audible, i.e., the symptoms are intensified by a psychogenic afflux and only then do they acquire the proper tormenting character that forces your attention inwards, where of course it gets caught in the disturbing noises. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 20.

Astrology is not a mantic method but appears to be based on proton radiation (from the sun). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 23.

I have seen Mrs. X. and I assure you she is quite an eyeful and beyond! We had an interesting conversation and I must admit she is quite remarkable. If ever there was an anima it is she, and there is no doubt about it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 24.

It isn’t possible to kill part of your “self” unless you kill yourself first. If you ruin your conscious personality, the so-called ego-personality, you deprive the self of its real goal, namely to become real itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 25.

The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you abolish that will of the self that guides you through life to that eventual goal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 25.

An attempt at suicide doesn’t affect the intention of the self to become real, but it may arrest your personal development inasmuch as it is not explained. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 25.

But, since I appear in your dream, I cannot refrain from making the remark that I like thick walls and I like trees and green things, and I like many books. Perhaps you are in need of these three good things. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.

I’m inclined to believe that something of the human soul remains after death, since already in this conscious life we have evidence that the psyche exists in a relative space and in a relative time, that is in a relatively non-extended and eternal state. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 29.

Only through submission to detestable duties does one gain a certain feeling of liberation which induces a creative mood. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 32.

You know that one of the unfortunate qualities of introverts is that they so often cannot help putting the wrong foot forward. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 35.

You are quite right when you say that the modern world prefers living en masse and thus forgets the bond with the past which is characteristic of every culture. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 36.

Those for whom tradition means mere knowledge and book-learning will not be able to interpret the past as the living present. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 37.

It seems to me perfectly possible to teach history in the widest sense not as dry-as-dust, lifeless book-knowledge but to understand it in terms of the fully alive present. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 37.

A wider horizon benefits all of us and is also more natural to the human spirit than specialist knowledge that leads to a spiritual bottleneck. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 37.

In the long run one cannot steal creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 32.

Freud’s letters in my possession are not particularly important. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 40.

My personal recollections on the other hand are a chapter for itself. They have very much to do with Freud’s psychology, but since there is no witness except myself I prefer to refrain from unsubstantiated tales about the dead. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 41.

Moreover I know from experience that philosophers don’t understand my uncouth language. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 155.

Your view is rather confirmed, as it seems to me, by the peculiar fact that on the one hand consciousness has so exceedingly little direct information of the body from within, and that on the other hand the unconscious ( i.e., dreams and other products of the “unconscious”) refers very rarely to the body and, if it does, it is always in the most roundabout way, i.e., through highly “symbolized” images. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 44

At all events the assumption of a perceptual body postulates a corresponding perceptual space that separates the mind from physical space in the same way as the subtle body causes the gap between the mind and the physical body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 44.

I submit that the factor of time proves to be equally “elastic” as space under ESP conditions. If this is the case, we are confronted with two four-dimensional systems in a contingent contiguity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 44.

On the other hand one might ask the question whether we can as hitherto go on thinking in terms of space and time, while modern physics begins to relinquish these terms in favour of a time-space continuum, in which space is no more space and time no more time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 44.

The question is, in short: shouldn’t we give up the time-space categories altogether when we are dealing with psychic existence? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 45.

It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not as a body moving with time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 45

One might assume the psyche gradually rising from minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 45.

Energy is mass and mass is extended. At all events, a body with a speed higher than that of light vanishes from sight and one may have all sorts of doubts about what would happen to such a body otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 45.

In the light of this view the brain might be a transformer station, in which the relatively infinite tension or intensity of the psyche proper is transformed into perceptible frequencies or “extensions.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 45.

Psyche = highest intensity in the smallest space. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 45.

Terms like thought-transmission, telepathy, clairvoyance, mean nothing. How can one imagine a causal explanation for a case of precognition? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 45.

Emotions follow an instinctual pattern, i.e., an archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 46.

It looks as if the collective character of the archetypes would manifest itself also in meaningful coincidences, i.e., as if the archetype (or the collective unconscious) were not only inside the individual, but also outside, viz. in one’s environment, as if sender and percipient were in the same psychic space, or in the same time (in precognition cases). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 46.

Where an archetype prevails, we can expect synchronistic phenomena, i.e., acausal correspondences, which consist in a parallel arrangement of facts in time. The arrangement is not the effect of a cause. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 46.

Well, I am approaching my 78th year, and complaints are pointless. My next goal seems to be a thorough contemplation of the spiritual life of lizards and similar cold-blooded animals. But the world does not let me go so easily. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 51.

I am afraid I cannot conceive of any religious belief which is less than a violation of my ego-consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 51.

Divine favour and daemonic evil or danger are archetypal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 52.

The way in which opposites are reconciled or united in God we just don’t know. Nor do we understand how they are united in the self. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 52..

Excuse my bad writing. I am in the garden and there is no table but my knee. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 53.

I practice psychology in the first place as a science, in the second place as an instrument of psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 56.

The psyche for me is something objective that sends up effects into my consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 57.

The unconscious (the objective psyche) doesn’t belong to me; rightly or wrongly I belong to it. By making it conscious I separate myself from it, and by so objectivating it I can integrate it consciously. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 57.

I have treated several cases of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis for psychic disturbances and observed, coincidentally so to speak, a complete cure of the tuberculosis without specialist treatment. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 58.

When someone talks so long and so emphatically about his 100 thalers this is no proof whatever that he has them in his pocket. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 61.

I have observed the case of a man who had no dreams, but his nine-year-old son had all his father’s dreams which I could analyse for the benefit of the father. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 63.

As you know, I apply my method not only to my patients but also to all historical and contemporary products of the mind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 64.

In strictest contrast to Gnosticism and theology, I confine myself to the psychology of an thropomorphic ideas and have never maintained that I possess the slightest trace of metaphysical knowledge. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 64.

Just as the physicist regards the atom as a model, I regard archetypal ideas as sketches for the purpose of visualizing the unknown background. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 65.

I consider it unfortunate that most theologians believe they have named God when they say “God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 65.

Ideas of God are first of all myths, statements about things that are philosophically and scientifically indeterminable; that is, they are psychological objects which are amenable to discussion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 66.

I share your opinion entirely that man lives wholly when, and only when, he is related to God, to that which steps up to him and determines his destiny. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 66.

One is not just a Protestant or a Catholic but a human being with paganism still ingrained in his very bones. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 67.

If you will conscientiously reread what I have said about individuation you cannot possibly conclude that I mean Nirvana or that I overlook the Resurrection. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 67.

It would perhaps be worth the effort to make Christianity comprehensible to educated people today instead of leaving this urgent task to the psychiatrist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 68.

The Rhine forms not only a political frontier but also a psychological one. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 69.

The psychology of the witch-hunting epidemic has never been worked out properly. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 69.

The realm of the psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality. At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 71.

I do not know, for example, how God could ever be experienced apart from human experience. If I do not experience him, how can I say that he exists? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 71.

I do not feel called upon to found a religion, nor to proclaim my belief in one. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 70.

I am not engaged in philosophy, but merely in thinking within the framework of the special task that is laid upon me: to be a proper psychiatrist, a healer of the soul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 71.

I am, more specifically, simply a psychiatrist, for my essential problem, to which all my efforts are directed, is psychic disturbance: its phenomenology, aetiology, and teleology. Everything else is secondary for me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 70.

Unequivocalness makes sense only in establishing facts but not in interpreting them; for “meaning” is not a tautology but always includes more in itself than the concrete object of which it is predicated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 70.

The language I speak must be ambiguous, must have two meanings, in order to do justice to the dual aspect of our psychic nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 70.

I strive quite consciously and deliberately for ambiguity of expression, because it is superior to unequivocalness and reflects the nature of life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 70

When I say “God” the dual aspect of the ens absolutum and the hydrogen atom (or particle + wave) is already implicit in it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 70.

I live in a “perceptual world” but not in a self-subsistent one. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 70.

It seems to me a sort of all-encompassing system of relationships, in which “material” and “spiritual” are primarily designations for potentialities that transcend consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 70.

For me the psyche is an almost infinite phenomenon. I absolutely don’t know what it is in itself and know only very vaguely what it is not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 69.

Were I not old and ill I would take the trouble to explain to you personally why human ideas of God are not necessarily right. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 86.

God is something unknowable. An old German mystic has said: “God is a sigh in our souls.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 87.

No doubt the archetypes are present everywhere, but there is also a widespread resistance to this “mythology.” That is why even the gospel has to be “demythologized.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 84.

To be sure “Christ” gave the myth a new meaning for the man of antiquity. But when we still go on stressing the newness 2000 years later, we must point out what exactly is the news for us, which we haven’t yet heard and understood. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 84.

That Christ is the self of man is implicit in the gospel, but the conclusion Christ = self has never been explicitly drawn. This is an assignment of new meaning, a further stage in the incarnation or actualization of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 84.

And with it Christ becomes a formulable psychological experience: the self is a living person and has always been there. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 84.

A good example is Albert Schweitzer, who is urgently needed in Europe but prefers to be a touching saviour of savages and to hang his theology on the wall. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 85.

We have a justification for missionizing only when we have straightened ourselves out here, otherwise we are merely spreading our own disease. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 85.

One of the greatest obstacles to our psychic development, it seems to me, is the drowning out of the inner voice in the interests of some collective, conventional ideal which makes us insensitive to the damage done to our own house and givers us the right to impart good advice to our neighbours. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 86.

Your idea of my spiritual affinity or at least sympathy with Jakob Burckhardt is amazingly true. Burckhardt’s pessimistic forebodings were undoubtedly right. It doesn’t pay not to see the dark side. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 80.

I do not feel quite happy about my way of using the English language, since I seem to cause many misunderstandings. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 94.

As a matter of fact (since 1948) I have published everything sustainable which I have thought about the documentary phenomenon of Christ and its psychological reconstruction. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 94.

I am dealing with psychic phenomena and I am not at all concerned with the naive and, as a rule, unanswerable question whether a thing is historically, i.e., concretely, true or not. It is enough that it has been said and believed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 97.

I am rather certain that the sefiroth tree contains the whole symbolism of Jewish development parallel to the Christian idea. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 92.

The characteristic difference is that God’s incarnation is understood to be a historical fact in the Christian belief, while in the Jewish Gnosis it is an entirely pleromatic process symbolized by the concentration of the supreme triad of Kether, Hokhmah, and Binah in the figure of Tifereth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 92.

X. is certainly all wet when he thinks that the Jewish Gnosis contains nothing of the Christian mystery. It contains practically the whole of it, but in its unrevealed pleromatic state. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 92.

I am pretty certain that the extraordinary and venomous response of the orthodox rabbis against the Kabbalah is based upon the undeniable fact of this most remarkable Judeo-Christian parallelism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 92.

We cannot create a true picture of Hermetic philosophy in the IVth century if we dismiss half of the libelli contained in the Corpus Hermeticum. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 88.

If Jesus had indeed been nothing but a great teacher hopelessly mistaken in His messianic expectations, we should be at a complete loss in understanding His historical effect, which is so clearly visible in the New Testament. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 89.

Sure enough, we must believe in Reason. But it should not prevent us from recognizing a mystery when we meet one. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 90.

Nobody knows whether there is reincarnation, and equally one does not know that there is none. Buddha himself was convinced of reincarnation, but he himself on being asked twice by his disciples about it, left it quite open whether there is a continuity of your personality or not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 103.

My personal religious convictions are not shaken in the slightest by the fearful contradictions in the Biblical texts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 87.

I have had a number of TB patients in my time and some really excellent results with psychotherapy, but it is true that the average somatic case generally has a resistance to a psychological approach, particularly the TB patients, since TB is, in a way a “pneumatic” disease, that is, affecting the life-giving breath. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 101.

Concerning Mr. Buber, I can tell you that to my knowledge there has never been the slightest personal friction between us and I do not think that Buber has ever been impolite to me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 101.

The only trouble with him [Buber] is that he does not understand what I am talking about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 102.

I myself, quite personally, do not find a sufficient amount of meat in him [Kierkegaard]. One hears too damn much of himself, but very little of that voice which I would prefer to hear. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 102.

I have no personal opinion of Buber since I have met him only a few times and I dislike forming opinions on insufficient grounds. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 102.

Certainly we do not know where we come from, nor where we are going, or why we are here at the present time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 103.

I have observed a great many ESP cases with my patients in the course of time. The only trouble is to find suitable methods by which the state of the unconscious can be established objectively. We have begun to try out such methods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 106.

It was above all the simplicity and directness of his[Einstein] genius as a thinker that impressed me mightily and exerted a lasting influence on my own intellectual work. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 109.

It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 109.

With Einstein’s departure from Zurich my relation with him ceased, and I hardly think he has any recollection of me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 109.

I fully realize that Catholic analysts are faced with very particular problems which, on the one hand, are an aggravation of the work which is difficult in itself already, yet on the other hand, an asset, since you start within a world of thought and feeling based upon archetypal realities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 153.

As the result of a dream I completely laid off smoking five days ago. …At present I’m still in a foul mood. What would the gods do without smoke offerings? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 110.

It seems to me to be in itself an ominous symptom of the mental and moral condition of our world that such problems [Artificial Insemination] have to be discussed at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 111.

Man confuses himself with God, is identical with the demiurge and begins to usurp cosmic powers of destruction, i .e., to arrange a second Deluge. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 112.

The Church stands on two feet, Protestantism only on sola fide, therefore faith is so important to it but not to the Catholic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 112.

This is the correct definition of the self and means that just as Christ is related to all individuals, so all individuals are related to Christ. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 114.

Every self has the quality of belonging to the “self of all selves,” and the self of all selves consists of individual selves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 114.

It is really not easy to talk with theologians: they don’t listen to the other person (who is wrong from the start) but only to themselves (and call this the Word of God). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 114.

Perhaps this comes from their having to preach down from the pulpit, with nobody allowed to answer back. This attitude, which I met practically everywhere, has shooed me out of the Church like so many others. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 114.

Yet I must tell you how delighted I was by your [Henry Corbin] work. It was an extraordinary joy to me, and not only the rarest of experiences but even a unique experience, to be fully understood. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 115.

I am accustomed to living in a more or less complete intellectual vacuum, and my Answer to Job has done nothing to diminish it. On the contrary, it has released an avalanche of prejudice, misunderstanding, and, above all, atrocious stupidity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 115.

The book [Answer to Job] “came to me” during the fever of an illness. It was as if accompanied by the great music of a Bach or a Handel. I don’t belong to the auditory type. So I did not hear anything, I just had the feeling of listening to a great composition, or rather of being at a concert. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 116.

As a rule the shadow appears only in the singular. If it occasionally appears as a duality this is, so to speak, a “seeing double”: a conscious and an unconscious half, one figure above the horizon, the other below. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 117.

I can understand that South Africa has no attractions for you. A colony nowadays is about the most disagreeable thing one can imagine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 123.

…I had to think of the question recently raised by a mathematician, as to whether it was possible to produce absolute chance groupings. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 127.

If man’s psychic health and happiness depended upon the proper food and other physical conditions of living, then all wealthy people should be healthy and happy, and all poor people mentally unbalanced, physically ill, and unhappy. But the contrary is true. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 124.

The great dangers threatening the life of millions are not physical factors, but mental folly and diabolical schemes causing mental epidemics in the mentally defenseless masses. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 124.

A prize should be given to people who successfully suppress the outburst of political madness, or of panic (Churchill), or who produce great ideas enlarging the mental and spiritual horizon of man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 124.

People who know that there are such things [para-psychical] need no further confirmation, and people not wanting to know are free, as hitherto, to say that one tells them fairy tales. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 126.

I have encountered so much discouraging resistance that I am amply convinced of the stupidity of the learned guild. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 126.

I think the attempt to link up ESP with any personalistic psychology is absolutely hopeless. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 127.

The all-important aspect of ESP is that it relativizes the space as well as the time factor. This is far beyond psychology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 127.

If space and time are psychically relative, then matter is too (telekinesis!) and then causality is only Statistically true, which means that there are plenty of acausal exceptions, q.e.d. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 127.

To my terror I was forced into a pulpit, which gave me such a shock that I have never spoken in a church again. I hadn’t realized how much a sacred and hallowed precinct meant to me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 128.

The profane use Protestants make of their churches I regard as a grave error. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 128.

God may be everywhere, but this in no way absolves believers from the duty of offering him a place that is declared holy, otherwise one could just as well get together for religious purposes in the 3rd class waiting-room of a railway station. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 128.

The Protestant is not even granted a quiet, pious place where he can withdraw from the turmoil of the world. And nowhere does there exist for God a sanctified temenos which serves only one and a sacred purpose. No wonder so few people attend church. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 128.

Unfortunately I did not know at the time when the stone was made that my father was described as Dr. theol. instead of Dr. phil. He graduated as an Orientalist, in Arabic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 129.

It is a historical fact that the real devil only came into existence together with Christ. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 134.

Though Christ was God, as Man he was detached from God and he watched the devil falling out of heaven, removed from God as he (Christ) was separated from God inasmuch as he was human. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 134.

The Godhead has a double aspect, and as Master Eckhart says: God is not blissful in his mere Godhead, and that is the reason for his incarnation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 134.

But becoming Man, he becomes at the same time a definite being, which is this and not that. Thus the very first thing Christ must do is to sever himself from his shadow and call it the devil (sorry, but the Gnostics of Irenaeus already knew it!). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 135.

As a matter of fact, our society has not even begun to face its shadow or to develop those Christian virtues so badly needed in dealing with the powers of darkness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 136.

Our society cannot afford the luxury of cutting itself loose from the imitatio Christi, even if it should know that the conflict with the shadow, i.e., Christ versus Satan, is only the first step on the way to the far-away goal of the unity of the self in God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 135.

It is true however that the imitatio Christi leads you into your own very real and Christ-like conflict with darkness, and the more you are engaged in this war and in these attempts at peacemaking helped by the anima, the more you begin to look forward beyond the Christian aeon to the Oneness of the Holy Spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 135.

He is the pneumatic state the creator attains to through the phase of incarnation. He is the experience of every individual that has undergone the complete abolition of his ego through the absolute opposition expressed by the symbol Christ versus Satan. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 135

The state of the Holy Spirit means a restitution of the original oneness of the unconscious on the level of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 135.

We are actually in the state of darkness viewed from the standpoint of history. We are still within the Christian aeon and just beginning to realize the age of darkness where we shall need Christian virtues to the utmost. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 136

The adventus diabolic does not invalidate the Christian symbol of the self, on the contrary: it complements it. It is a mysterious transmutation of both. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 136

Since we are living in a society that is unconscious of this development and far from understanding the importance of the Christian symbol, we are called upon to hinder its invalidation, although some of us are granted the vision of a future development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 136.

Anybody going ahead is alone or thinks he is lonely at times, no matter whether he is in the church or in the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 137.

Moreover we are still in the Christian aeon, threatened with a complete annihilation of our world. As there are not only the many but also the few, somebody is entrusted with the task of looking ahead and talking of the things to be. That is partially my job, but I have to be very careful not to destroy the things that are. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 137

Thus I am approaching the end of the Christian aeon and I am to take up Gioacchino’s anticipation and Christ’s prediction of the coming of the Paraclete. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 138.

This archetypal drama is at the same time exquisitely psychological and historical. We are actually living in the time of the splitting of the world and of the invalidation of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 138.

As for your colleague’s dream, I have since discovered that in the Midrashim the symbol of the eagle is ascribed to the prophet Elijah, who soars like an eagle over the earth and spies out the secrets of the human heart. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 132.

The provisionalness of life is indescribable. Everything you do, whether watching a cloud or cooking soup, is done on the edge of eternity and is followed by the suffix of infinity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 126.

But let man, mindful of his hybris, be content with the lesser evil and beware of the Satanic temptation of the grand gesture, which is only intended for show and self-intoxication. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 12.

But I must confess that nihilism was never a problem for me. I had enough and more than enough reality on my own doorstep. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 144.

The dream of the horse represents the union with the animal soul, which you have missed for a long time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 145.

Our unconscious definitely prefers the Hindu interpretation of immortality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 146.

Man is the mirror which God holds up before him, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 112.

There is no loneliness, but all-ness or infinitely increasing completeness. Such dreams occur at the gateway of death. They interpret the mystery of death. They don’t predict it but they show you the right way to approach the end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 146.

Did it never occur to you that in my analysis we talked very little of “resistance,” while in the Freudian analysis it is the term that most frequently occurs? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 149.

I always try to follow the path of nature and I avoid as much as possible the application of theoretical viewpoints, and I have never regretted this principle. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 149.

I am afraid that your [American] educational system produces the same technological and scientific one-sidedness and the same social welfare idealism as Russia. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 150.

Most of your [American] psychologists, as it looks to me, are still in the XVIIIth century inasmuch as they believe that the human psyche is tabula rasa at birth, while all somewhat differentiated animals are born with specific instincts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 150.

When a theologian says “God,” then God has to be, and be just as the magician wants, without the latter feeling in any way impelled to make clear to himself and his public exactly which concept he is using. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 147.

I never look for archetypes and don’t try to find them; enough when they come all by themselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 160.

The “archetype” is practically synonymous with the biological concept of the behaviour pattern. But as the latter designates external phenomena chiefly, I have chosen the term “archetype” for “psychic pattern.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 151.

As no animal is born without its instinctual patterns, there is no reason whatever to believe that man should be born without his specific forms of physiological and psychological reactions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 152.

The Midrashim are quite aware of it, and the Christian church had to invent that awful syllogism, the privatio boni, in order to annihilate the original ambivalence of the Jewish God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 153.

But theologians suffer from the fact that when they say “God,” then that God is. But when I say “God,” I know I have expressed my image of such a being and I am honestly not quite sure whether he is just like my image or not, even if I believe in God’s existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 154.

My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern. Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 154.

I scarcely think that the Jews have to accept the Christ symbol. They need only understand its meaning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 151.

The Jew has the advantage of having long since anticipated the development of consciousness in his own spiritual history. By this I mean the Lurianic stage of the Kabbalah, the breaking of the vessels and man’s help in restoring them. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 151.

It (Bollingen Foundation) is a shining beacon in the darkness of the atomic age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 151.

Allow me to tell you that I am profoundly grateful to you for your most remarkably objective review of my uncouth attempt [Answer to Job] to disturb the obnoxious somnolence of the guardians. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 155.

The attribute “coarse” is mild in comparison to what you feel when God dislocates your hip or when he slays the firstborn. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 156.

Christ is the Anthropos that seems to be a prefiguration of what the Holy Ghost is going to bring forth in the human being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 157.

In a tract of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the remarkable idea is developed that man is destined to become God’s helper in the attempt to restore the vessels which were broken when God thought to create a world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 157.

Without necessity there is neither causality nor finality, although there are not a few people nowadays who treat the concept of causality very incautiously. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 158.

The 4 aspects of causality make possible a homogeneous causal viewpoint but not a total one. For this purpose, it seems to me, causality (in all its aspects) has to be complemented by acausality. Not simply because freedom also is guaranteed in a law-bound world, but because freedom, i .e., acausality, does in fact exist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 158.

The integration of the collective unconscious amounts roughly to taking cognizance of the world and adapting to it. This does not mean that one would have to learn to know the whole world, or that one must have lived in all climates and continents of the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 159.

I am personally convinced that our mind corresponds with the physiological life of the body, but the way in which it is connected with the body is for obvious reasons unintelligible. To speculate about such unknowable things is mere waste of time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 160.

If you want to be quite accurate, both statements, viz. that the psyche is founded upon an organic process of the body, or that the psyche is independent of the body, are unanswerable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 132.

The question of brain localization is an extremely delicate one, because when you destroy a certain part of the brain you destroy a certain function. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 160.

Yet you do not know whether you have really destroyed the function because it is quite possible that you have only destroyed the transmitter of that function, as if you have taken away the telephone apparatus which does not mean that you have killed its owner. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 160.

There is even no absolute certainty about the psyche being definitely dependent upon the brain since we know that there are facts proving that the mind can relativize space and time, as the Rhine experiments and general experience have proved sufficiently. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 160.

Also with regard to instincts, it is questionable if they continue to exist when you have destroyed their transmitter , i.e., whether they have been killed themselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 160.

I should not worry about all this localization talk. It’s practically all foolishness, and a remnant of the old brain mythology like the explanation of sleep through the contraction of the ganglia, which is by no means more intelligent than the localization of the psyche in the pituitary gland. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 161.

The [car] accident has affected only the outer shell, but evidently you and your wife were not affected physically by this broad hint. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 161.

Naturally this [car accident] may have an inner connection with what you are writing, for experience shows that accidents of this sort are very often connected with creative energy which turns against us because somehow it is not given due heed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 162.

I would be glad to welcome you here on October 10th, but you know how it is in old age: one promises something and knows that everything is only provisional. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 162.

Now the weather is beastlier than ever, so that one can only huddle behind the stove. I busy myself chiefly with cooking, eating and sleeping. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 163.

In between I am writing a long letter to Pater White. He has-thanks be to God-chosen the better course of facing his difficulties with complete honesty. I now see clearly what a fatal challenge my psychology is for a theologian but, it seems, not only for him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 163.

I am just as much in doubt about myself as before, the more so the more I try to say something definite. It is as though familiarity with oneself alienated one from oneself still further. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 163.

I often ask myself why by far the most of my “critics” are so unfriendly and unobjective? Is my style so irritating, or what is it in me that the world finds so offensive? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 162.

I have never claimed f.i. to know much about the nature of archetypes, how they originated or whether they originated at all, whether they are inherited or planted by the grace of God in every individual anew. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 185.

It is not my responsibility that alchemy is occult and mystical, and I am just as little guilty of the mystical delusions of the insane or the peculiar creeds of mankind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 186.

I shall always remember the time when Freud disturbed the peaceful slumber of the medical and philosophical faculties by his shocking discoveries, which are now taken into serious consideration. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 187 .

The latest developments of scientific thinking, especially in physics, but recently also in psychology, make it clear that “freedom” is a necessary correlate to the purely statistical nature of the concept of causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 183.

Freedom could be put in doubt only because of the one-sided and uncritical overvaluation of causality, which has been elevated into an axiom although-strictly speaking-it is nothing but a mode of thought. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 183.

The petition for “daily bread” is appropriate under all circumstances, although in Matthew 6: 11 it reads: “Panem nostrum supersubstantialis da nobis hodie” (Give us this day our super-substantial bread). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 182.

It is an astonishing fact, indeed, that the collective unconscious seems to be in contact with nearly everything. There is of course no empirical evidence for such a generalization, but plenty of it for its indefinite extension. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 164.

Concerning the omniscience it is important to know that Adam already was equipped with supernatural knowledge according to Jewish and Christian tradition, all the more so Christ. I think that the great split in those days was by no means a mistake but a very important collective fact of synchronistic correspondence with the then new aeon of Pisces. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 165

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! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 165.

It was an enormous step forward when Yahweh revealed himself as a jealous God, letting his chosen people feel that he was after them with blessings and with punishments, and that God’s goal was man. Not knowing better, they cheated him by obeying his Law literally. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 165.

The old popes and bishops succeeded in getting so much heathendom, barbarism and real evil out of the Church that it became much better than some centuries before: there were no Alexander VI, no auto-da-tes, no thumbscrews and racks anymore, so that the compensatory drastic virtues (asceticism etc.) lost their meaning to a certain extent. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 166.

When Christ withstood Satan’s temptation, that was the fatal moment when the shadow was cut off. Yet it had to be cut off in order to enable man to become morally conscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 166.

The tree brings back all that has been lost through Christ’s extreme spiritualization, namely the elements of nature. Through its branches and leaves the tree gathers the powers of light and air, and through its roots those of the earth and the water. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 166.

The symbolic history of the Christ’s life shows, as the essential teleological tendency, the crucifixion, viz. the union of Christ with the symbol of the tree. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 167.

But it is possible that the Christian symbolism expresses man’s mental condition in the aeon of Pisces, as the ram and the bull gods do for the ages of Aries and Taurus. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 167.

In this case the post-mortal solution would be symbolic of an entirely new psychological status, viz. that of Aquarius, which is certainly a oneness, presumably that of the Anthropos, the realization of Christ’s allusion: “Dii estis.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 167.

This is a formidable secret and difficult to understand, because it means that man will be essentially God and God man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 167.

The signs pointing in this direction consist in the fact that the cosmic power of self-destruction is given into the hands of man and that man inherits the dual nature of the Father. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 167.

He [Man] will [mis] understand it and he will be tempted to ruin the universal life of the earth by radioactivity. Materialism and atheism, the negation of God, are indirect means to attain this goal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 168

There is need of people knowing about their shadow, because there must be somebody who does not project. They ought to be in a visible position where they would be expected to project and unexpectedly they do not project! They can thus set a visible example which would not be seen if they were invisible. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 168.

Since you cannot overthrow a whole world because it harbours also some evil, it will be a more individual or “local” fight with what you rightly call avidya. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 168.

The introverted thinker is very much in need of a developed feeling, i .e., of a less autoerotic, sentimental, melodramatic and emotional relatedness to people and things. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 168.

We should recognize that life is a transitus. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 168.

All old truths want a new interpretation, so that they can live on in a new form. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 169.

If you try to be literal about the doctrine, you are putting yourself aside until there is nobody left that would represent it but corpse. If, on the other hand, you truly assimilate the doctrine, you will alter it creatively by your individual understanding and thus give life to it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 169.

That is one of the reasons why the Church attracts quite a number of intelligent and responsible men in the secret (or unconscious?) hope that they will be strong enough to carry its meaning and not its words into the future. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 170.

The old trick of law obedience is still going strong, but the original Christian teaching is a reminder. The man who allows the institution to swallow him is not a good servant. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 170

It is quite understandable that the ecclesiastical authorities must protect the Church against subversive influences. But it would be sabotage if this principle were carried to the extreme, because it would kill the attempts at improvement also. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 170.

Since the world is largely sub principatu diaboli, it is unavoidable that there is just as much evil in the Church as everywhere else, and as everywhere else you have got to be careful. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 170.

Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components of a complete life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 171.

A “complete” life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal tissue in which one finds oneself embedded, and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a cosmos from the chaotic mess into which one is born. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 171.

We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 173.

The winter, though very cold, has dealt leniently with me. Both my wife and myself are tired, though still active, but in a very restricted way. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 174.

Even if the ego should be (as I think) the supreme point of the self, a mountain infinitely higher than Mt. Everest, It would be nothing but a little grain of rock or ice, never the whole mountain. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 195.

If the self could be wholly experienced, it would be a limited experience whereas in reality its experience is unlimited and endless. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 195.

The ego receives the light from the self. Though we know of the self, yet it is not known. The ego is contained in the self as it is contained in the universe of which we know only the tiniest section. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 194.

Although we receive the light of consciousness from the self and although we know it to be the source of our illumination, we do not know whether it possesses anything we would call consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 194.

You should not mix up your own enlightenment with the self-revelation of the self. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 195.

When you recognize yourself, you have not necessarily recognized the self but perhaps only an infinitesimal Part of it, though the self has given you the light. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 195.

You all seem to be interested in how to get back to the self, instead of looking for what the self wants you to do in the world, where-for the time being at least-we are located, presumably for a certain purpose. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 195.

Nobody can be more convinced of the importance of the self than me. But as a young man does not stay in his father’s house but goes out into the world, so I don’t look back to the self but collect it out of manifold experiences and put it together again. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 195.

Although the self is my origin, it is also the goal of my quest. When it was my origin, I did not know myself, and when I did learn about myself, I did not know the self. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 196.

That is one of the reasons why I must study symbolism, otherwise I risk not recognizing my own father and mother when I meet them again after the many years of my absence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 196.

Hence all advice that begins with “you ought” usually proves to be completely ineffective. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 190.

Even a million noughts do not add up to one. I therefore espouse the unpopular view that a better understanding in the world can come only from the individual and be promoted only by him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 190.

We should have schools for adults, where one could inculcate into them at least the elements of self-knowledge and knowledge of human nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 190.

Unfortunately the so-called religions have never proved to be vehicles of general human understanding, since with few exceptions they suffer from totalitarian claims and in this respect at least hardly differ from any other -ism, and actually disrupt human relationships at the critical point. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 191.

If one is in the position of a doctor, as I am, to become intimately acquainted with very many educated people, one is continually amazed at the terrifying unconsciousness of modern civilized man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 191.

Mythological motifs are facts; they never change; only theories change. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 192.

Your succour comes at a time when it is badly needed; soon a little book of mine will be published in England which my publishers in USA did not dare to print. Its title is: Answer to Job. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 192.

The German edition [Answer to Job] over here has already upset the representatives of three religions, not because it is irreligious but because it takes their statements and premises seriously. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 193.

A person carries the torch only a stretch of the way and must then lay it down, not because he has reached a goal but because his strength is at an end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 194.

An interesting conversation never disturbs my sleep. Only an arduous talk to no purpose disturbs it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 197.

I do not write for believers who already possess the whole truth, rather for unbelieving but intelligent people who want to understand something. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 197.

Every religion makes use of two feet: faith on one side and ritual on the other. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 208.

In the two Christian churches, the importance and the psychological significance of rites are not generally appreciated; to some people they are acts of faith or of habit; to others, acts of magic. But in reality there is a third aspect: the aspect of the rite as a symbolic act, giving expression to the archetypal expectation of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 208.

What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 208-209.

Rites give satisfaction to the collective and numinous aspects of the moment, beyond their purely personal significance. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 209.

The proper kind of rite is not magically but psychologically efficacious. That is why a well-conducted Mass produces a powerful effect, particularly when the meaning of the ceremony can be followed. But once lost, lost forever! That is the tragedy of Protestantism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 209.

If there was ever a truly apocalyptic era, it is ours. God has put the means for a universal holocaust into the hands of men. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 209.

People hate the human soul, it is nothing but “psychological.” They don’t understand that it has needs, and they throw its treasures into the street without understanding them. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 209.

Already Philip Toynbee has reviewed it [Answer to Job] in an “abysmally stupid” way as R.F.C. Hull, the translator, rightly says (in a letter to me). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 213.

I have been up against the wall of stupidity for 50 years. That is just so and nothing can be done about it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 213.

My last work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, is now with the printer, and I have no ideas any more-thank Heavens. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 214.

If we want to maintain the spiritual contents of 2000 years of Christian tradition, we must understand what it is all about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 214.

As religious assertions never make sense when understood concretely, they needs must be comprehended as a symbolic psychic phenomenon. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 214.

I am now in my 80th and I must say I am grateful to whomever administers my fate that I have met in you [Upton Sinclair] a kindred spirit interested in and talking of things that seem to be vital to you. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 215.

An American pupil of mine, Dr. Progoff (New York), has tried to adapt and to explain synchronicity to the average reader but he landed his ship on the rocks because he could not free his mind from the deep-rooted belief in the Sanctissima Trinitas of the axiomata time, space, and causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 215.

But wherever a philosophy based upon the sciences prevails (as in the USA), the individual man loses his foothold and becomes “vermasst,” turned into a mass particle, because as an “exception” he is valueless, not very different from the Russian. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 216.

I am obliged to you for your [R.F.C. Hull] courageous answer. There are damned few who have the guts to stand up for me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 217.

It is true however that it is the asses that make public opinion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 217.

People have wondered belatedly about the psychology of the German Army-no wonder! Every single soldier and officer was just a particle in the mass, swayed by suggestion and stripped of moral responsibility. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 218.

A group of inferior people is never better than any one of them; it is just as inferior as they, and a State composed of nothing but sheep is never anything else but a herd of sheep, even though it is led by a shepherd with a vicious dog. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 220.

But in view of the notorious tendency of people to lean on others and cling to various -isms instead of finding security and independence within themselves, which is the prime requisite, there is a danger that the individual will equate the group with father and mother and so remain just as dependent, insecure, and infantile as before. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 220.

Sure, if society consisted of valuable individuals only, adaptation would be worthwhile; but in reality it is composed mainly of nincompoops and moral weaklings, and its level is far below that of its better representatives, in addition to which the mass as such stifles all individual values. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 220.

Admittedly there has been scientific and technological progress, but no one has yet heard that people in general have become more intelligent let alone morally better. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 220.

…it is now about 50 years since I first pointed out the psychology of the illness that was then still known as Dementia praecox. Sometimes I seem an anachronism to myself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 233.

There are damned few who have the guts to stand up for me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 217.

In other words: the essence of Christian tradition is by no means the simple man Jesus whom we seek in vain in the Gospels, but the lore of the God-man and his cosmic drama. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 206.

Natural “laws” are in the main mere abstractions (being statistical averages) instead of reality, and they abolish individual existence as being merely exceptional. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 207.

What we need is the development of the inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in man’s unconscious psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 207.

Theologians call their creed a symbolum but they refuse to call their truth “symbolic.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 207.

I am amazed at the fact that you [Upton Sinclair] should have difficulties in finding a publisher. What is America coming to, when her most capable authors cannot reach their public anymore? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 208.

I give the adaptation of the individual to society its full due. But I still stand up for the inalienable rights of the individual since alone is the carrier of life and is gravely threatened by the social levelling process today. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 221.

I am no preacher of “splendid isolation” and have the greatest difficulty in shielding myself from the crushing demands of people and human relationships. Without values of one’s own even social relationships lack significance. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 221.

Speaking with tongues (glossolalia) is observed in cases of ekstasis (= abaissement du niveau mental, predominance of the unconscious) It is probable that the strangeness of the unconscious contents not yet integrated in consciousness demands an equally strange language. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 227.

The healing function is not necessarily a characteristic of individuation; it is a thing in itself. It also doesn’t work exclusively through transference; that is a Freudian prejudice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 228.

If you discuss religious problems and you bring in a psychological point of view, you instantly collide with the concretism of religious belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 228.

I am very glad that Time has brought out a decent article; I was afraid they would make a caricature of it as is usually the case. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 228.

Another aspect of this concretism is the rigidity of scholastic philosophy, through which Father “White” is wriggling as well as he can. He is at bottom an honest and sincere man who cannot but admit the importance of psychology, but the trouble is that he gets into an awful stew about it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 228.

It is so because these inventions-the uranium and hydrogen bomb-are produced by the human mind, instigated by the great genocide the unconscious is planning in order to compensate the incessant and inevitable increase of populations, which must eventually lead to gigantic catastrophes if miraculous and unforeseen inventions do not intervene. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 230.

But fortunately enough, to judge from the satisfactory sale of my books, the public does not heed such inadequate criticism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 231.

Alcoholism is a terrible threat to a nation. Look at France! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 231.

My Answer to Job was left by the Bollingen Press to the English publishers, since they were apparently afraid of something like “Unamerican activities” and the loss of prestige presumably. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 231.

The ruler of my birth, old Saturnus, slowed down my maturation process to such an extent that I became aware of my own ideas only at the beginning of the second half of my life, i.e., exactly with 36 years. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 232.

“Astrology” is another of those “random phenomena” wiped off the desk by the idol of the average, which everybody believes to be reality itself while it is a mere abstract. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 232.

Soon a little book of mine which I have published with the physicist Prof. W. Pauli will come out in English. It is even more shocking than Job, but this time to the scientist, not the theologian. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 232.

The way in which the scientific world reacts reminds me strongly of those remote times when I stood up all alone for Freud against a world blindfolded by prejudice, and ever since I have been the subject of calumny, irritation, and contempt, although I have harvested a good deal of appreciation paradoxically enough just from universities (among them Oxford and Harvard). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 232.

Although I have never taken the drug [Mescalin] myself nor given it to another individual, I have at least devoted 40 years of my life to the study of that psychic sphere which is disclosed by the said drug; that is the sphere of numinous experiences. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 222.

Mescalin is a short cut and therefore yields as a result only a perhaps awe-inspiring aesthetic impression, which remains an isolated, unintegrated experience contributing very little to the development of human personality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 223.

But I never could accept mescalin as a means to convince people of the possibility of spiritual experience over against their materialism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 224.

It is on the contrary an excellent demonstration of Marxist materialism: mescalin is the drug by which you can manipulate the brain so that it produces even so-called “spiritual” experiences. That is the ideal case for Bolshevik philosophy and its “brave new world.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 224.

My thoughts about “this world” were not-and are not-enjoyable. The drive of the unconscious towards mass murder on a global scale is not exactly a cheering prospect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 229

Transitions between the aeons always seem to have been melancholy and despairing times, as for instance the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (“The Dialogue of a World; Weary Man with His Soul”) between Taurus and Aries, or the melancholy of the Augustinian age between Aries and Pisces. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 229.

And now we are moving into Aquarius, of which the Sibylline Books say: Luciferi vires accendit Aquarius acres (Aquarius inflames the savage forces of Lucifer). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 229.

Already I am a great-grandfather twice over and see those distant generations growing up who long after we are gone will spend their lives in that darkness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 229

I would accuse myself of senile pessimism did I not know that the H-bomb is lying ready to hand-a fact that unfortunately can no longer be doubted. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 230.

The vernal equinox is moving out of the sign of Pisces into the sign of Aquarius, just as it did out of Taurus (the old bull gods) into Aries (the ram-horned gods) and then out of Aries (the sacrificed lamb) into Pisces. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 229.

1500 years ago St. Benedict could pour the new wine into new bottles; or rather, the seeds of a new culture germinating in the decay were bedded in the new spirit of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 225.

Our apocalyptic epoch likewise contains the seeds of a different, unprecedented, and still inconceivable future which could be bedded in the Christian spirit if only this would renew itself, as happened with the seeds that sprouted from the decay of classical culture. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 225.

The coming new age will be as vastly different from ours as the world of the 19th century was from that of the 20th with its atomic physics and its psychology of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 225.

The dignitas humani generis has swollen into a truly diabolical grandeur. What answer will the genius of mankind give? Or what will God do about it? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 225.

Presumably you are thinking of my psychology which, though born of the Christian spirit, seeks to give adequate answers to the spirit of this age: the voice of a doctor struggling to heal the psychic confusion of his time and thus compelled to use a language very different from yours. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 226.

Analytical psychology unfortunately just touches the vulnerable spot of the church, viz. the untenable concretism of its beliefs, and the syllogistic character of Thomistic philosophy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 228

You are quite right; with the dogma of the Assumptio the unconscious “wells into the Church,” since Woman is its (the unconscious) representative on earth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 231.

For most people my Christian standpoint remains hidden, and because of the strangeness of my language and the incomprehensibility of my interests I am given a wide berth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 226.

Now once again we are in a time of decay and transition, as around 2000 B.C, when the Old Kingdom of Egypt collapsed, and at the beginning of the Christian era, when the New Kingdom finally came to an end and with it classical Greece. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 225.

The idea that mescalin could produce a transcendental experience is shocking. The drug merely uncovers the normally unconscious functional layer of perceptional and emotional variants, which are only psychologically transcendent but by no means “transcendental,” i.e., metaphysical. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 223.

On the way back through the history of mankind we integrate much that belongs to us and, deep down, also something of brother animal, who is actually holier than us since he cannot deviate from the divine will implanted in him because his dark consciousness shows him no other paths. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 235.

I find that all my thoughts circle round God like the planets round the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by him. I would feel it the most heinous sin were I to offer any resistance to this compelling force. I feel it is God’s will that I should exercise the gift of thinking that has been vouchsafed me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 236.

Man’s understanding and will are challenged and can help, but they can never pretend to have plumbed the depths of the spirit and to have quenched the fire raging within it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 237.

Even the Redeemer on the Cross uttered no joyful cry despite his having been credited with completely overcoming the world and himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 237.

An “object” (as you put it), i.e., a human being who does not know that he has enkindled love in you does not feel loved but humiliated because he is simply subjected or exposed to your own psychic state in which he himself has no part. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 237.

Much as I can go along with you in the process of “becoming whole and holy,” or individuation, I cannot subscribe to your statements about the “ego in complete possession of itself” and unrelated universal love, although they bring you perilously close to the ideal of Yoga: nirdvandva (free from the opposites). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 238.

I know these moments of liberation come flashing out of the process, but I shun them because I always feel at such a moment that I have thrown off the burden of being human and that it will fall back on me with redoubled weight. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 238.

As we have not yet reached the state of eternal bliss, we are still suspended on the Cross between ascent and descent, not only for our own but for God’s sake and mankind’s. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 238.

My special interest besides my psychiatric work is research in the field of comparative psychology of religious symbolism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 244.

As long as you [Victor White] do not identify yourself with the avenging angel, I can feel your humanity and I can tell you that I am really sorry for my misdeeds and sore about God’s ways with the poor anthropoids that were meant to have a brain enabling them to think critically. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 239.

Man must know that he is man’s worst enemy just as much as God had to learn from Job about His own antithetical nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 239.

The apostles and the early Fathers of the Church had no easy life and moreover no Christian is meant to go to sleep in a safe pew. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 239.

I know, it is the mistake of Libra people: they are afraid of anything disturbing the balance. But they can maintain it only by “studying what troubles them.” ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 241.

There is no comfort and no consolation anywhere except in the submission to and the Acceptance of the self, or you may call it the God that suffers in His own creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 241.

I have discovered in my private life that a true Christian is not bedded upon roses and he is not meant for peace and tranquility of mind but for war. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 242.

And again I am realizing profoundly that not everybody’s nature is as bellicose as mine, although I have attained Deo concedente-a certain state of peace within, paid for by a rather uncomfortable state of war without. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 242.

If turmoil and torment become too great, there is still the oneness of the self, the divine spark within its inviolable precincts, offering its extramundane peace. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 242.

You overlook the facts and then think that the name is the fact, and thus you reach the nonsensical conclusion that I hypostatize ideas and am therefore a “Gnostic.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.

It is your theological standpoint that is a gnosis, not my empiricism, of which you obviously haven’t the faintest inkling. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.

Faust II has been my companion all my life but it was only 20 years ago that certain things began to dawn on me, especially when I read Christian Rosencreutz’s Chymical Wedding, which Goethe also knew but, interestingly enough, did not mention among the alchemical literature of his Leipzig days. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 246.

So far as we know, Goethe used only the relatively late alchemical literature, and it was the study of the classical and early medieval texts which first convinced me that Faust I and II is an opus alchymicum in the best sense. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 246.

If a man’s life consists half of happiness and half of unhappiness, this is probably the optimum that can be reached, and it remains forever an unresolved question whether suffering is educative or demoralizing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 248.

It seems to me that transcendental judgments of the intellect are absolutely impossible and therefore vacuous. But in spite of Kant and epistemology they crop up again and again and can evidently not be suppressed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 249.

What is more, medical experience shows that it is advisable to take numinous experiences seriously, as they have a great deal to do with the fate of the individual. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 250.

Even the saints cast a shadow. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 253.

Becoming conscious reconciles the opposites and thus creates a higher third. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 254.

It seems to me one more proof of the overweening gnostic tendency in philosophical thinking to ascribe to God qualities which are the product of our own anthropomorphic formulations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 254.

If we describe God as “evolving,” we must bear in mind at the same time that perhaps he is so vast that the process of cognition only moves along his contours, as it were, so that the attribute “evolving” applies more to it than to him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 254.

I hold the contrary view that there are certain experiences (of the most varied kinds) which we characterize by the attribute “divine” without being able to offer the slightest proof that they are caused by a Being with any definite qualities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 254.

For me “God” is on the one hand a mystery that cannot be unveiled, and to which I must attribute only one quality: that it exists in the form of a particular psychic event which I feel to be numinous and cannot trace back to any sufficient cause lying within my field of experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 255.

On the other hand “God” is a verbal image, a predicate or mythologem founded on archetypal premises which underlie the structure of the psyche as images of the instincts (“instinctual patterns”). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 260.

“God” in this sense is a biological, instinctual and elemental “model,” an archetypal “arrangement” of individual, contemporary and historical contents, which, despite its numinosity, is and must be exposed to intellectual and moral criticism, just like the image of the “evolving” God or of Yahweh or the Summum Bonum or the Trinity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 255.

Mythology as a vital psychic phenomenon is as necessary as it is unavoidable. In this discussion, it seems to me, the gnostic danger of ousting the unknowable and incomprehensible and unutterable God by philosophems and mythologems must be clearly recognized, so that nothing is shoved in between human consciousness and the primordial numinous experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 256.

As a young man I drew the conclusion that you must obviously fulfill your destiny in order to get to the point where a donum gratiae might happen along. But I was far from certain, and always kept the possibility in mind that on this road I might end up in a black hole. I have remained true to this attitude all my life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 257.

It was the tragedy of my youth to see my father cracking up before my eyes on the problem of his faith and dying an early death. This was the objective outer event that opened my eyes to the importance of religion. Subjective inner experiences prevented me from drawing negative conclusions about religion from my father’s fate, much as I was tempted to do so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 257.

From this you can easily see the origin of my psychology: only by going my own way, integrating my capacities headlong (like Paul), and thus creating a foundation for myself, could something be vouchsafed to me or built upon it, no matter where it came from, and of which I could be reasonably sure that it was not merely one of my own neglected capacities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 258.

I don’t know whether the archetype is “true” or not. I only know that it lives and that I have not made it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 258.

With increasing approximation to the centre there is a corresponding depotentiation of the ego in favour of the influence of the “empty” centre, which is certainly not identical with the archetype but is the thing the archetype points to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 258.

As the Chinese would say, the archetype is only the name of Tao, not Tao itself. Just as the Jesuits translated Tao as “God,” so we can describe the “emptiness” of the centre as “God.” Emptiness in this sense doesn’t mean “absence” or “vacancy,” but something unknowable which is endowed with the highest intensity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 258.

If I call this unknowable the “self,” all that has happened is that the effects of the unknowable have been given an aggregate name, but its contents are not affected in any way. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 258.

The ego has to acknowledge many gods before it attains the centre where no god helps it any longer against another god. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 259.

The up surging archetypal material is the stuff of which mental illnesses are made. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 260.

All statements about and beyond the “ultimate” are anthropomorphisms and, if anyone should think that when he says “God” he has also predicated God, he is endowing his words with magical power. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 260.

I have in all conscience never supposed that in discussing the psychic structure of the God-image I have taken God himself in hand. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 260.

I am not a word-magician or word-fetishist who thinks he can posit or call up a metaphysical reality with his incantations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 260.

People still believe that they can posit or replace reality by words, or that something has happened when a thing is given a different name. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 261.

They [Archetypes] guide but they also mislead; how much I reserve my criticism for them you can see in Answer to Job, where I subject archetypal statements to what you call “blasphemous” criticism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 261.

If theologians think that whenever they say “God” then God is, they are deifying anthropomorphisms, psychic structures and myths. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 261.

It is not God who is insulted by the worm but the theologian, who can’t or won’t admit that his concept is anthropomorphic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 254.

If God were to reveal himself to us we have nothing except our psychic organs to register his revelation and could not express it except in the images of our everyday speech. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 262.

The reason why mythic statements invariably lead to word-magic is that the archetype possesses a numinous autonomy and has a psychic life of its own. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 264.

Tantra Yoga gives the classic localizations of thought: anahata, thinking (or localization of consciousness) in the chest region (phrenes); visuddha (localized in the larynx), verbal thinking; and ajna, vision, symbolized by an eye in the forehead, which is attained only when verbal image and object are no longer identical, i.e., when their participation mystique is abolished. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 264.

Individuation is ultimately a religious process which requires a corresponding religious attitude = the ego-will submits to God’s will. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 265.

Analytical psychology only helps us to find the way to the religious experience that makes us whole. It is not this experience itself, nor does it bring it about. But we do know that analytical psychology teaches us that attitude which meets a transcendent reality halfway. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 265.

If you know anything of my anima theory, [James] Joyce and his daughter are a classic example of it. She was definitely his femme inspiratrice, which explains his obstinate reluctance to have her certified. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 266.

His [James Joyce] own anima, i.e., unconscious psyche, was so solidly identified with her that to have her certified would have been as much as an admission that he himself had a latent psychosis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 266.

His “psychological” style is definitely schizophrenic, with the difference, however, that the ordinary patient cannot help talking and thinking in such a way, while [James] Joyce willed it and moreover developed it with all his creative forces. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 266.

I cannot prove the identity of an historical personage with a psychological archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 267.

Inasmuch as we attribute to the Holy Spirit the faculty of procreating in matter, we must unavoidably grant it a nature capable of contact with material existence, i.e., a chthonic aspect, as the alchemists did; otherwise it could not influence Physis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 267.

Without error and sin there is no experience of grace, that is, no union of God and man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.

A complete life, unconditionally lived, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It leads us into all dangers and defeats, and into the light of knowledge, which is to say, into maximal consciousness. This is the aim of the incarnation as well as the Creation, which wants each being to attain its perfection. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 268.

My education offered me nothing but arguments against religion on the one hand, and on the other the charisma of faith was denied me. I was thrown back on experience alone. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 257.

The archetype is not just the formal condition for mythological statements but an overwhelming force comparable to nothing I know. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 260.

I have in fact seen cases where the carcinoma broke out under the conditions you envisage, when a person comes to a halt at some essential point in his individuation or cannot get over an obstacle. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 297.

Just as carcinoma can develop for psychic reasons, it can also disappear for psychic reasons. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 297.

He answered that f.i. I used the term hierosgamos, which is a very usual term in comparative religion, and there is nothing esoteric about it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 297.

No matter whether it was a Jewish or a Christian or any other belief, he [Freud] was unable to admit anything beyond the horizon of his scientific materialism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 295.

Naturally he [Freud] assumed that my more positive ideas about religion and its importance for our psychological life were nothing but an outcrop of my unrealized resistances against my clergyman father, whereas in reality my problem and my personal prejudice were never centred in my father but most emphatically in my mother. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 296.

I have always wondered how it comes that just the theologians are often so particularly fond of the Freudian theory, as one could hardly find anything more hostile to their alleged beliefs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 296.

I do not theorize about how neuroses originate, I describe what you find in neuroses. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 296.

I have resigned myself to being posthumous. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 299.

I don’t use free association at all since it is in any case an unreliable method of getting at the real dream material. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 293.

That is to say, by means of “free” association you will always get at your complexes, but this does not mean at all that they are the material dreamt about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 294.

The individuation process is the experience of a natural law and may or may not be perceived by consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 294.

I am glad at last that I have been able (though not through my merit ) to spare my wife what follows on the loss of a lifelong partner-the silence that has no answer. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 293.

But if you are now in the dumps and up to your ears in the mire, you must tell yourself that you were obviously flying too high and that a dose of undiluted hellish blackness was indicated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 298.

You should regard your present situation as a mud bath from which after a while a small morning sun will burst forth again. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 298.

The devil can best be beaten with patience, having none himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 298.

The question of colours or rather absence of colours in dreams, depends on the relations between consciousness and the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 299.

In a situation where an approximation of the unconscious to consciousness is desirable, or vice versa, the unconscious acquires a special tone, which can express itself in the colourfulness of its images (dreams, visions, etc.) or in other impressive qualities (beauty, depth, intensity). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 299.

When Huxley says that a symbol is uncoloured, this is an error. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 300.

The psychological criterion of the “Will of God” is forever the dynamic superiority. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 301

You have to live thoroughly and very consciously for many years in order to understand what your will is and what Its will is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 301.

So try to live as consciously, as conscientiously, and as completely as possible and learn who you are and who or what it is that ultimately decides. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 301.

Whole numbers may well be the discovery of God’s “primal thoughts,” as for instance the significant number four, which has distinctive qualities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 302.

After all, man cannot dissect God’s primal thoughts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 302.

Your dream seems to me a genuine revelation: God and Number as the principle of order belong together. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 302.

Number, like Meaning, inheres in the nature of all things as an expression of God’s dissolution in the world of appearances. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 302.

Christ is not an archetype but a personification of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 304.

Purusha as creator sacrifices himself in order to bring the world into being: God dissolves in his own creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 304.

The Incarnation results from Christ “emptying himself of divinity” and taking the form of a slave. Thus he is in bondage to man as the demiurge is in bondage to the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 305.

The spiritual (as contrasted with the worldly) Messiah, Christ, Mithras, Osiris, Dionysos, Buddha are all visualizations or personifications of the irrepresentable archetype which, borrowing from Ezekiel and Daniel, I call the Anthropos. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 313.

Our fantasies are always hovering on the point of our insufficiency where a defect ought to be compensated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 306.

It is only within the last decade that his psychology was really taken notice of by academic minds and has penetrated the mental tenebrosities of the greater public. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 307.

I cannot force people to take my work seriously and I cannot persuade them to study it really. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 307.

How can I popularize things so difficult, and demanding such an unusual amount of specific knowledge, to a public that does not or cannot take the trouble to settle down to a careful study of the facts collected in many volumes? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 308.

Both disciplines [physics/psychology] have, for all their diametrical opposition, one most important point in common, namely the fact that they both approach the hitherto “transcendental” region of the Invisible and Intangible, the world of merely analogous thought. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 308.

The problem nearest to Freud’s heart was unquestionably the psychology of the unconscious, but none of his immediate followers has done anything about it. I happen to be the only one of his heirs that has carried out some further research along the lines he intuitively foresaw. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 309.

An exclusively causal view is permissible only in the realm of physical or inorganic processes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 310.

With no human consciousness to reflect themselves in, good and evil simply happen, or rather, there is no good and evil, but only a sequence of neutral events, or what the Buddhists call the Nidhanachain, the uninterrupted causal concatenation leading to suffering, old age, sickness, and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 311.

Buddha’s insight and the Incarnation in Christ break the chain through the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness, which thereby acquires a metaphysical and cosmic significance. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 311.

The boon of increased self-awareness is the sufficient answer even to life’s suffering, otherwise it would be meaningless and unendurable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 311.

Though the suffering of the Creation which God left imperfect cannot be done away with by the revelation of the good God’s will to man, yet it can be mitigated and made meaningful. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 311.

Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God the Creator. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 314.

We ought to remember that the Fathers of the Church have insisted upon the fact that God has given Himself to man’s death on the Cross so that we may become gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 315.

The Deity has taken its abode in man with the obvious intention of realizing Its Good in man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 315.

Christianity has envisaged the religious problem as a sequence of dramatic events, whereas the East holds a thoroughly static view, i.e., a cyclic view. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 315.

The significance of man is enhanced by the incarnation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 315.

We have become participants of the divine life and we have to assume a new responsibility, viz. the continuation of the divine self-realization, which expresses itself in the task of our individuation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

Mama’s [Emma Jung] death has left a gap for me that cannot be filled. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 317.

Causality as a statistical truth presupposes the existence of a acausality, otherwise it cannot be a statistical truth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 318.

The archetype itself (nota bene not the archetypal representation!) is psychoid, i.e., transcendental and thus relatively beyond the categories of number, space, and time. That means, it approximates to oneness and immutability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 326.

It should be added that the religions, so long as they are alive, have never ceased to foster the relation to the unconscious in one form or another. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 320.

I hope you will find time to commit your plant counterparts to the earth and tend their growth, for the earth always wants children-houses, trees, flowers-to grow out of her and celebrate the marriage of the human psyche with the Great Mother, the best counter-magic against rootless extraversion! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 320

The choice of your wives was characteristic. They were temporary incarnations of what I call your anima…..In practice it means that the woman of your choice represents your own task you did not understand. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 321.

The Middle Ages already knew about this peculiar psychic fact [Anima] and said: omnis vir feminam suam secum portat. [“Each man carries his woman with him.”] ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 321.

How psychic energy can transform itself into physically sound phenomena is a problem in itself. I don’t know how it is done. We only know that it is done. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 322

Now as ever I am of the opinion that Protestant theologians would have every reason to take my views seriously, for otherwise the same thing could happen here as has already happened in China and will happen in India: that the traditional religious ideas die of literal-mindedness, or are spewed out en masse because of their indigestibility. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 322.

In China, for instance, a philosopher like Hu Shih is ashamed to know anything of the I Ching, the profound significance of Tao has got lost, and instead people worship locomotives and aeroplanes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 322.

The mind is like a tree bringing forth its characteristic blossom and fruit; it is just so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 252.

God is an immediate experience of a very primordial nature, one of the most natural products of our mental life, as the birds sing, as the wind whistles, like the thunder of the surf. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 253.

People who think that they know the reasons for everything are unaware of the obvious fact that the existence of the universe itself is one big unfathomable secret, and so is our human existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 284.

It is true that one cannot fully realize something that is not yet there, for one does not know what the pattern is which a still living person fills out. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 317.

The essential dream-image: the Man, the Tree, the Stone, looks quite inaccessible, but only to our modern consciousness which is, as a rule, unconscious of its historical roots. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 325.

The fact is that the numbers pre-existing in nature are presumably the most fundamental archetypes, being the very matrix of all others. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 327.

Our psychic foundations are shrouded in such great and inchoate darkness that, as soon as you peer into it, it is instantly compensated by mythic forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 328.

It is a mathematical structure, which first made me hit on the idea that the unconscious somehow avails itself of the properties of whole numbers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 328 .

From this it appears that whole numbers are individuals, and that they Possess properties which cannot be explained on the assumption that they are multiple units. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 328.

The idea that numbers were invented for counting is obviously untenable, since they are not only pre-existent to judgment but possess properties which were discovered only in the course of the centuries, and presumably possess a number of others which will be brought to light only by the future development of mathematics. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 328.

Like all the inner foundations of judgment, numbers are archetypal by nature and consequently partake of the psychic qualities of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 328-329.

It would be a worthy task for a mathematician to collect all the known properties of numbers and also all their “inescapable” statements which should be quite possible up to 10-and in this way project a biological picture of whole numbers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 329.

It should be noted that music is a primitive means of putting people into a state of frenzy; one has only to think of the drumming at the dances of shamans and medicine-men, or of the flute-playing at the Dionysian orgies. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 331.

The rat-catching Pied Piper himself must have been possessed by the spirit of Wotan, which swept all those who were liable to such transports-in this case children-into a state of collective frenzy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 331.

Wotan was banished by Christianity to the realm of the devil, or identified with him, and the devil is the Lord of rats and flies. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 332.

I don’t know where you picked up this rather childish yarn about directors of world affairs located in Tibetan lamaseries… At all events I can tell you that I am not a member of such a wholly fantastical organization. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 332.

The idea that I convert people, as it were, to the new denomination Jungianism” or better “Jungian Church” is sheer defamation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 334.

I am definitely inside Christianity and, as far as I am capable of judging about myself, on the direct line of historical development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 334.

If the Reformation is a heresy, I am certainly a heretic too. It is of course a thorn in the flesh of the churches that I do not belong to any of the recognized sects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 335.

But Number is a factor pre-existent to man, with unforeseen qualities yet to be discovered by him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 327.

In these terrible days when evil is once again inundating the world in every conceivable form, I want you to know that I am thinking of you and of your family in Hungary, and hope with you that the avenging angel will pass by their door. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 336.

The fate of Hungary cries to heaven, and in the West stupidity and delusion have reached a fatal climax. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 336.

Mediterranean culture is founded on a three- to four-thousand-year-old rule of order, both political and religious, which had long outgrown the locally conditioned, semi-barbarian forms of society. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 337.

As far as my knowledge goes we are aware in dreams of our other life that consists in the first place of all the things we have not yet lived or experienced in the flesh. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 341

All the things which are not yet realized in our daylight experience are in a peculiar state, namely in the condition of living and autonomous figures, sometimes as if spirits of the dead, sometimes as if former incarnations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 341

We cannot speak of “God” but only of a God-image which appears to us or which we make. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

If, for instance, we were to create a myth, we would say that “God” has two aspects, spiritual and chthonic, or rather: material. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

He [God] appears to us as the world-moving spirit (= wind) and as the material of the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

We can only project a conception of him that corresponds to our own constitution: a body perceived by the senses and a spirit (= psyche) directly conscious of itself. After this model we build our God-image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

Coming now to cosmogony, we can assert nothing except that the body of the world and its psyche are a reflection of the God we imagine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

Rather, we have every reason to suppose that there is only one world, where matter and psyche are the same thing, which we discriminate for the purpose of cognition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

As regards the Incarnation, the idea of God’s descent into human nature is a true mythologem. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

What we can experience empirically as underlying this image is the individuation process, which gives us clear intimations of a greater “Man” than our ego. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

The unconscious itself characterizes this “Man” with the same symbols it applies to God, from which we can conclude that this figure corresponds to the Anthropos, in other words God’s son, or God represented in the form of a man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

The self becomes only a determining factor, and it is not bounded by its apparent entry into consciousness; in spite of this it remains an ideal, i.e., purely imagined, entity dwelling essentially in the background, just as we also imagine God existing in his original boundless totality in spite of the Creation and Incarnation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

So far as the integration of personality components are concerned, it must be borne in mind that the ego-personality as such does not include the archetypes but is only influenced by them; for the archetypes are universal and belong to the collective psyche over which the ego has no control. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

Thus animus and anima are images representing archetypal figures which mediate between consciousness and the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 342.

At the same time the psyche, or rather consciousness, introduces the prerequisites for cognition into the picture-the discrimination of particulars or qualities which are not necessarily separated in the self-subsistent world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 343.

We distinguish an organic and an inorganic world, for example. The one is alive, the other is dead; the one has psyche, the other not. But who can guarantee that the same vital principle which is at work in the organic body is not active in the crystal? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 343.

The experience you had with the I Ching, calling you to order when trying to tempt it a second time also happened to me in 1920 when I first experimented with it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 344.

This aspect is certainly most important from the psychological angle, but I must say that I am equally interested, at times even more so, in the metaphysical aspect of the phenomena, and in the question: how does it come that even inanimate objects are capable of behaving as if they were acquainted with my thoughts? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 344.

By these deeper levels I mean the determining archetypes which are supraordinate to, or underlie, individual development and presumably are responsible for the supreme meaning of individual life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 345.

The archetypes have a life of their own which extends through the centuries and gives the aeons their peculiar stamp. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 345.

Perhaps I may draw your attention to my historical contribution in Aion, where I have attempted to outline the evolutionary history of the Anthropos, which begins with the earliest Egyptian records. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 345.

Dali’s genius translates the spiritual background of the concrete symbol of transmutation into visibility. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 338

My typology is based exclusively on psychological premises which can hardly coincide with physiological or somatic qualities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 346-347

Somatic characteristics are permanent and virtually unalterable facts, whereas psychological ones are subject to various alterations in the course of personality development and also to neurotic disturbances. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 347

Even though assignment to a particular type may in certain cases have lifelong validity, in other very frequent cases it is so dependent on so many external and internal factors that the diagnosis is valid only for certain periods of time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 347.

In observing a neurotic, one does not know at first whether one is observing the conscious or the unconscious character. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 347.

His [Freud’s] irresponsible manner of observation is demonstrated by the fact, for instance, that not one of his cases of “traumatic” hysteria was verified. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 347.

When I analysed Freud a bit further in 1909 on account of a neurotic symptom, I discovered traces which led me to infer a marked injury to his feeling life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 347.

Freud, when one got to know him better, was distinguished by a markedly differentiated feeling function. His “sense of values” showed itself in his love of precious stones, jade, malachite, etc. He also had considerable intuition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 348.

People always assume anyway that my critical set-to with Freud was the result of a merely personal animosity on my part. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 349.

It should also be noted that my characterization of Adler and Freud as, respectively, introverted and extraverted does not refer to them personally but only to their outward demeanour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 350.

Adler’s character, on the contrary, was introverted in so far as he gave paramount importance to the power of the ego. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 350.

What does in fact exist seems to be an objective psychic background, the unconscious, which predates consciousness and exists independently alongside it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 350.

Your ideas go back, in modern form, to the familiar world of Plato’s Timaeus, which was a sacrosanct authority for medieval science-and rightly so! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 352.

From the fact that matter has a mainly quantitative aspect and at the same time a qualitative one, even though this appears to be secondary, you draw the weighty conclusion, which I heartily applaud, that, besides its obviously qualitative nature, the psyche has an as yet hidden quantitative aspect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 352.

Matter and psyche are thus the terminal points of a polarity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 352.

I have got stuck, on the one hand, in the acausality (or “synchronicity”) of certain phenomena of unconscious provenance and, on the other hand, in the qualitative statements of numbers, for here I set foot on territories where I cannot advance without the help and understanding of the other disciplines. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 352.

Noise protects us from painful reflection, it scatters our anxious dreams, it assures us that we are all in the same boat and creating such a racket that nobody will dare to attack us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 389.

Noise is so insistent, so overwhelmingly real, that everything else becomes a pale phantom. It relieves us of the effort to say or do anything, for the very air reverberates with the invincible power of our modernity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 389.

Most people are afraid of silence; hence, whenever the everlasting chit-chat at a party suddenly stops, they are impelled to say something, do something, and start fidgeting, whistling, humming, coughing, whispering. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 390.

As experience shows, the figure one sees is not necessarily identical with the person one identifies with it, just as the picture by an artist is not identical with the original; but it is obvious that the vision of Christ was a most important religious experience to St. Paul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 380.

Concentration is necessary whenever there is the possibility or threat of psychic chaos, i.e., when there is no central control by a strong ego or dominant idea. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 387.

There are beautiful examples of this in the Arabian art which went hand in hand with the psychic reorientation of a primitive society under the influence of Islam. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 387.

In Buddhist art, as in the Celtic illuminated manuscripts and sculptures, the complicated designs and intricate rhythms of the border pattern serve to coax the frightening, pullulating chaos of a disorganized psyche into harmonious forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 387.

Equally, the complicated ornamentation of ritual mandalas in Buddhism could be regarded as a sort of psychic “tranquillizer,” though this way of looking at it is admittedly one-sided. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 388.

We may think of the Irish monk as a man who still has one foot in the animistic world of nature-demons with its intense passions, and the other in the new Christian order symbolized by the Cross, which condenses the primordial chaos into the unity of the personality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 388.

It cannot be done by extinguishing the ego, and anyone who reflects at all constantly finds himself in the difficult position of having to safeguard his ego and at the same time lend an ear to the non-ego. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 392.

I am glad you have taken up The Secret of the Golden Flower again. The East often knows the answer to questions which appear insoluble to us Christians. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 392.

Just as some alchemists had to admit that they never succeeded in producing the gold or the Stone, I cannot confess to have solved the riddle of the coniunctio mystery. On the contrary I am darkly aware of things lurking in the background of the problem-things too big for our horizons. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 393.

The younger an individual is, the nearer he is to the primordial unconscious with its collective contents. This becomes particularly impressive when one studies those dreams of earliest childhood that are still remembered in adult age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 394.

To deal with the coniunctio in human words is a disconcerting task, since you are forced to express and formulate a process taking place “in Mercurio” and not on the level of human thought and human language, i.e., not within the sphere of discriminating consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 394.

On this side of the epistemological barrier we have to separate the opposites in order to produce comprehensible speech. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 394.

Yet in the archetypal unimaginable event that forms the basis of conscious apperception, a is b, stench is perfume, sex is amor Dei, as inevitably as the conclusion that God is the complexio oppositorum. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 394.

Instead of creating light, we conceal in darkness, instead of lifting up, we expose the treasure to ridicule and contempt. Instead of opening a way, we barricade it by an inextricable snarl of paradoxes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 395.

“In Mercurio” spirit and matter are one. This is a mystery nobody is ever going to solve. It is real, but we are unable to express its reality. It is neti-neti in other words: beyond our grasp, although it is a definite experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 395.

It is said of the Stone: habet mille nomina [has a thousand names] which means that there is not one name expressing the Mystery. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 395.

There is not God alone but also His creation, i.e., the will of God in Christian terminology. Homo sapiens has to envisage both. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 396.

The works I completed this year [1957] have cost me energy and time enough, and I hope I may now be granted a longish spell of leisure without any new questions forcing me to new answers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 396.

Improbable as this may sound, it is only the individual who is qualified to fight against the threat today of international mass-mindedness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 396.

This, too,[UFO’s] is an expression of something that has always claimed my deepest interest and my greatest attention: the manifestation of archetypes, or archetypal forms, in all the phenomena of life: in biology, physics, history, folklore, and art, in theology and mythology, in parapsychology, as well as in the symptoms of insane patients and neurotics, and finally in the dreams and life of every individual man and woman. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 397.

The intimation of forms hovering in a background not in itself knowable gives life the depth which, it seems to me, makes it worth living. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 397.

However, Einstein’s relativity theory shows that they are not necessarily Identical with our idea of them, f.i. that space may be curved and that time necessarily depends upon the stand-point and the speed of the observer. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 398.

We conclude therefore that we have to expect a factor in the psyche that is not subject to the laws of time and space, as it is on the contrary capable of suppressing them to a certain extent. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 398.

It is a structural element of the psyche we find everywhere and at all times; and it is that in which all individual psyches are identical with each other, and where they function as if they were the one undivided psyche the ancients called anima mundi or the psyche tou kosmou. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 399

Our intellectual means reach only as far as archetypal experiences, but within that sphere we are not the motors, we are the moved objects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 399.

I think you are correct in assuming that synchronicity, though in practice a relatively rare phenomenon, is an all-pervading factor or principle in the universe, i.e., in the Unus Mundus, where there is no incommensurability between so-called matter and so-called psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 400.

I do not believe and do not disbelieve in the existence of UFOS. I simply do not know what to think about their alleged physical existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 403

As it is questionable in how far UFOS are physical facts, it is indubitable that they are psychological facts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 403.

It has taken me too long to discover the greatest thing, i.e., Man and what he means and why. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 404.

To discover Man is a great adventure. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 404.

To the former [Mathematician], number is a means of counting; to the latter [Psychology], it is a discovered entity capable of making individual statements if it is given a chance. In other words: in the former case number is a servant, in the latter case an autonomous being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 405.

In my later years (I am now in my 83rd) I became doubtful, since I have received so much love and consideration that I have no reason to grumble. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 405.

I am now in my 83rd year and my creative work has come to an end. I am watching the setting sun. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 405.

There are far more people than one supposes who are not disturbed by noise, for they have nothing in them that could be disturbed; on the contrary, noise gives them something to live for. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 390.

I soon understood that parapsychological facts are interwoven with psychic conditions and cannot be really understood without psychology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 375.

The very existence of alchemistic philosophy proves that the spiritualization process within Christian psychology did not yield satisfactory results. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 401.

While I am writing this I observe a little demon trying to abscond my words and even my thoughts and turning them over into the rapidly flowing river of images, surging from the mists of the past, portraits of a little boy, bewildered and wondering at an incomprehensibly beautiful and hideously profane and deceitful world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

Thus on New Year’s Eve I had a great dream about my wife, which I will tell you sometime. It seems that individuation is a ruthlessly important task to which everything else should take second place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

Hoyle’s book has arrived and I’ve finished it already. It is extraordinarily interesting to see how an astronomer collides with the unconscious and especially with the Ufo problem. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

Hoyle has the rotundum, the doctrine of the Anthropos, the cosmic wisdom of matter, which he naturally confuses with consciousness, and so fails to do justice to the problem of suffering. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

The anima is a representative of the unconscious and hence a mediatrix, just as the Beata Virgo is called “mediatrix” in the dogma of the Assumption. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 423.

On the one hand the anima is an allurement to an intensification of life, but on the other she opens our eyes to its religious aspect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 423.

The primordial experience is not concerned with the historical bases of Christianity but consists in an immediate experience of God (as was had by Moses, Job, Hosea, Ezekiel among others) which “convinces” because it is “overpowering.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

One can only say that somehow one has to reach the rim of the world or get to the end of one’s tether in order to partake of the terror or grace of such an experience at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

I think I understand ecclesiastical Christianity but the theologians do not understand me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

Wherever our need for knowledge may turn we stumble upon opposites, which ultimately determine the structure of existence. The centre is the indivisible monad of the self, the unity and wholeness of the experiencing subject. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

Our Christian theology is obviously not based “on the total religious experience.” It does not even consider the ambivalent experience of the Old Testament God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 422.

On the other hand it is just the Trinity dogma, as it stands, that is the classical example of an artificial structure and an intellectual product, so much so that no theologian has yet recognized or admitted its origin in Egyptian theology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 423.

Everything that can be repeated experimentally is necessarily causal, for the whole concept of causality is based on this statistical result. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 420.

The experimental activation of an archetypal situation has to be explained causally, since there is no possibility of explaining it otherwise and no reason to do so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 420.

How it comes about that space and time are reduced by these meaningful chance occurrences cannot be understood in terms of causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 420.

With regard to the horoscope I have serious doubts whether it can be understood as a purely synchronistic phenomenon, for there are unquestionable causal connections between the planetary aspects and the powerful effects of proton radiation, though we are still very much in the dark as to what its physiological effects might be. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 421.

Even the earlier name “Helvetii” did not sit with them naturally. No other people could live here as they would then have the wrong ancestral spirits, who dwell in the earth and are authentic Swiss. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 419.

Sitting in the central mussel-shell, we are the “sons of the mother.” Hence the old astrological tradition says that our zodiacal sign is Virgo. However, there is no unanimity on this score, since the other version says that our sign is Taurus. It is a virile, creative sign, but earthly like Virgo. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 419.

This ancient psychological insight expresses the fact that what is enclosed in the mother is a germinating seed that will one day burst through, as you have shown with other words and convincing examples. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 419.

As psychologists we are not concerned with the question of truth, with whether something is historically correct, but with living forces, living opinions which determine human behaviour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 417

If you give the “synchronistic arrangement” the smallest possible play, the play of chance is obviously restricted and the synchronistic “effect” thereby hindered. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 415.

Chance is an event, too, and if it didn’t exist causality would be axiomatic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 416.

Leibniz as well as Schopenhauer had inklings of it [meaningful coincidences], but they gave a false answer because they started with an axiomatic causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 416.

For me every book is a kind of fate, and for this reason I cannot say with any certainty where the boundary line will set itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 414.

At my age, unfortunately, everything goes rather slowly, and I always have to wait for a favourable moment amid the flux of my intensive work in order to collect the thoughts that come to me after my reading. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 411.

The Trinitarian archetype seems to characterize all man’s conscious constructs, in strange contrast to the fact that this archetype is really a quaternity which historically is very often represented as 3+1, three equal elements being conjoined with an unequal Fourth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 412.

I have often found that synchronistic experiences were interpreted by schizophrenics as delusions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 409.

The schizophrenic’s interpretation [of Synchronicity] is morbidly narrow because it is mostly restricted to the intentions of other people and to his own ego-importance. The normal interpretation, so far as this is possible at all, is based on the philosophic premise of the sympathy of all things, or something of that kind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 409.

Your patient is obviously someone who would need either to pay his tribute to Nature or to make some correspondingly meaningful sacrifice. What this might be is provisionally indicated by the dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 409.

Thus the erotic relationship, no matter how unconventional it may be, would have to be understood as an opus divinum, and the perhaps necessary sacrifice of this relationship as a thysia, a “ritual slaughter.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 410.

We are not sure how far the relativity can go, so we do not know whether there is a level or a world on or in which space and time are absolutely abolished; but we remain within the limits of human experience when we accept the fact that it is the psyche which is able to relativize the apparent objectivity of time and space. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 399.

In reply to your letter of March 18th I can only tell you that though Prof. Pauli has informed me of his collaboration with Heisenberg he did not-for understandable reasons-give me the details of this collaboration. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 425.

I deduce the fact that acausal phenomena must exist from the purely statistical nature of causality, since statistics are only possible anyway if there are also exceptions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 426.

The underlying scheme, the quaternio, i.e., the psychological equation of primordial dynamis (prima causa) with gods and their mythology, time and space, is a psychological problem of the first order. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 427.

You set your watch by the clock, and this amounts to a causal dependence, just as in Leibniz’s monadology all the monadic watches were originally wound up by the same creator. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428.

Although we cannot conceive of a causal law and hence necessary connection between an event and its determination in time (horoscope) , it nevertheless looks as though such a connection did exist; for on it is based the traditional interpretation of the horoscope, which presupposes and establishes a certain regularity of events. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 429.

The fact, however, is that our whole astrological determination of time does not correspond to any actual constellation in the heavens because the vernal equinox has long since moved out of Aries into Pisces and from the time of Hipparchus has been artificially set at 0° Aries. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 429.

From such discussions we see what awaits me once I have become posthumous. Then everything that was once fire and wind will be bottled in spirit and reduced to dead nostrums. Thus are the gods interred in gold and marble and ordinary mortals like me in paper. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 469.

There are, for instance, spring births and autumn births, which play an especially important role in the animal world. Then, besides the seasonal influences there are also the fluctuations of proton radiation, which have been proved to exert a considerable influence on human life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 487.

We shall probably have to resort to a mixed explanation, for nature does not give a fig for the sanitary neatness of the intellectual categories of thought. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 430.

Just as a person refuses to recognize his own shadow side, so, but all the more strongly, he hates recognizing the shadow side of the nation behind which he is so fond of concealing himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 430.

As a Swiss, my situation is such that by nature my heart is divided into four and because of the smallness of our country I can count on coming into contact at least with the four surrounding nations or cultural complexes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 430.

The Indians, if influenced by Buddhism, habitually depotentiate their emotions by reciting a mantra. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 431.

I feel rather like old Moses, who was permitted to cast but a fleeting glance into the land of ethno-psychological problems. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 433.

There is no psychology worthy of this name in East Asia, but instead a philosophy consisting entirely of what we would call psychology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 438.

Therefore-and this explains the tremendous upheaval going on in the East-he has a profound need for mastery over the concrete, with the result that America’s gadget-mania works on him like a devastating bacillus. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 438.

It has happened to me more than once that educated East Asians rediscovered the meaning of their philosophy or religion only through reading my books. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 438

Perhaps the profoundest insights into the peculiarities of the East Asian mind come from Zen, which tries to solve the Eastern problem on the level of our Scholasticism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 439.

Although I have never been to Lourdes I cast no doubts on them. So far as they are medically verifiable I do not consider them “projections” in any sense. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 443.

I appreciate it all the more that for once one of my pupils has broken a lance for me, and moreover in such a venomous affair. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 443.

Whatever else we can produce as spirit voices are those of mediums, and there the great trouble is to establish whether the communicated contents derive from ghosts or from unconscious fantasies of the medium or of any other member of the circle. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 444.

Consequently the correlations with the planetary houses are purely fictitious, and this rules out the possibility of a causal connection with the actual positions of the stars, so that the astrological determination of time is purely symbolic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 429.

This whole question of so-called “occult phenomena” is nothing one could be naive about. It is an awful challenge for the human mind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 444.

If I don’t know it, it looks to me like an usurpation to say “I believe it,” or the contrary. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445

The only scientific approach to the question of survival is the recognition of the fact that the psyche is capable of extrasensory perceptions, namely of telepathy and of precognition, particularly the latter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445

But for those people not possessing the gift of belief it may be helpful to remember that science itself points to the possibility of survival. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445

I can also say, therefore, that in itself the archetype is an irrepresentable configuration whose existence can be established empirically in a multitude of forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 446.

At the same time the archetype is always of an objective nature since it is an a priori ideational pattern which is everywhere identical with itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 446.

The archetype, then, is a modality that represents visual forms, and synchronicity is another modality representing events. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 446.

The empiricist only speaks of data that can be determined with sufficient certainty, and from these data he tries to crystallize out characteristics of the as yet unknown. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 447.

With regard to the dynamic processes of the unconscious, he can also determine that the further characteristic of synchronicity exists; in other words, that archetypes have something to do with synchronicity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 447.

In so far as both modalities, archetype and synchronicity, belong primarily to the realm of the psychic, we are justified in concluding that they are psychic phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 447.

This can be expressed in other words by saying that there is a relativity of the psychic and physical categories-a relativity of being and of the seemingly axiomatic existence of time and space. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 447.

So your question concerning the “freedom” of the unconscious is easily answered: the freedom appears in the non-predictability of synchronistic phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 447.

It is unthinkable that a world could have existed before time and space, for whatever world we can imagine is always bound to time and space and hence to causality. The most we can imagine is that there are statistical exceptions to such a world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 448.

Synchronicity is not a name that characterizes an “organizing principle,” but, like the word “archetype,” it characterizes a modality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 448.

It [Synchronicity] is not meant as anything substantive, for what the psyche is, or what matter is, eludes our understanding. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 448.

I therefore stop speculating when I have no more possibilities of ideas and wait on events, no matter of what kind, for instance dreams in which possibilities of ideas are presented to me but do not come this time from my biased peculation but rather from the unfathomable law of nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 448.

Concerning archetypes, migration and verbal transmission are self-evident, except in those cases where individuals reproduce archetypal forms outside of all possible external influences (good examples in childhood dreams!). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 450.

Since archetypes are instinctual forms, they follow a universal pattern, as do the functions of the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 450.

Why should the psyche be the only living thing that is outside laws of determination? We follow archetypal patterns as the weaver-bird does. This assumption is far more probable than the mystical idea of absolute freedom. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 450.

The assumption, therefore, that the (psychoid) archetypes are inherited is for many reasons far more probable than that they are handed down by tradition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 451.

The childish prejudice against inherited archetypes is mostly due to the fact that one thinks archetypes are representations; but in reality they are preferences or “penchants,” likes and dislikes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 451

How do you explain f.i. the fact of a little child dreaming that God is partitioned into four? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 451.

As for my meeting with William James, you must remember that I saw him only twice and talked with him for a little over an hour, but there was no correspondence between us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 452.

Aside from Theodore Flournoy he [William James] was the only outstanding mind with whom I could conduct an uncomplicated conversation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 452.

I know there are people who live in their own biography during their lifetime and act as though they were already in a book. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 452.

For me life was something that had to be lived and not talked about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 452.

Also, my interest was always riveted only by a few but important things which I couldn’t speak of anyway, or had to carry around with me for a long time until they were ripe for the speaking. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 453.

In addition I have been so consistently misunderstood that I have lost all desire to recall “significant conversations.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 453.

In Europe, as far as I can make out, Meister Eckhart is about the first where the self begins to play a noticeable role. After him some of the great German alchemists took up the idea and handed it down to Jacob Boehme and Angelus Silesius and kindred spirits. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 453.

Goethe’s Faust almost reached the goal of classical alchemy, but unfortunately the ultimate coniunctio did not come off, so that Faust and Mephistopheles could not attain their oneness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 453.

The second attempt, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, remained a meteor that never reached the earth, as the coniunctio oppositorum had not and could not have taken place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 453.

For about 1900 years we have been admonished and taught to project the self into Christ, and in this very simple way it was removed from empirical man, much to the relief of the latter, since he was thus spared the experience of the self, namely the unio oppositorum. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 454.

Everything that is necessary can be lived if only you will stand by yourself and endure things as they are without grumbling. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.

As a rule I am all for walking in two worlds at once since we are gifted with two legs, remembering that spirit is pneuma which means “moving air.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 459.

It is good therefore, as a rule, to keep at least one foot upon terra firma. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 460.

We are still in the body and thus under the rule of heavy matter. Also it is equally true that matter not moved by the spirit is dead and empty. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 460.

The spirit is no merit in itself and it has a peculiarly irrealizing effect if not counter-balanced by its material opposite. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 460.

As you know I have stipulated that my correspondence with Freud ought not to be published before 30 years have elapsed after my death, but lately I have been asked from different sides to permit inasmuch as I am competent-an earlier publication of the whole correspondence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 458.

My letters [To Freud] were never written with any thought that they might become broadcast. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 459.

For him [Freud] conscience is a human acquisition. I, on the contrary, maintain that even animals have a conscience-dogs, for instance-and empirically there is much to be said for this, since instinctual conflicts are not altogether unknown on the animal level. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 457.

The inheritance of instincts is a known fact, whereas the inheritance of acquired characteristics is controversial. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 457.

Freud’s view that conscious experiences are inherited flies in the face of common knowledge and also contradicts his own hypothesis that conscience is made up of ancestral experiences. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 458.

What is healing medicine for the one is poison for the other. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 455.

Astrology differs very much from alchemy, as its historical literature consists merely of different methods of casting a horoscope and of interpretation, and not of philosophical texts as is the case in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 464.

Therefore Elihu in spite of his fundamental truth belongs to those foolish Jungians, who, as you suggest, avoid the shadow and make for the archetypes, i.e., the “divine equivalents,” which by the way are nothing but escape camouflage according to the personalistic theory. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 545.

It is not for you or for anybody else to judge, it is only the individual in question that decides whether something is good for him or bad. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 461.

A transference in the clinical sense does not always need a personal relationship as a bridge, but can take place via a book, a piece of hearsay, or a legend. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 504

Yet I think of myself as a Christian, since I am entirely based upon Christian concepts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 524.

Meaningfulness always appears to be unconscious at first, and can therefore only be discovered post hoc; hence there is always the danger that meaning will be read into things where actually there is nothing of the sort. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 495.

Since a creation without the reflecting consciousness of man has no discernible meaning, the hypothesis of a latent meaning endows man with a cosmogonic significance, a true raison d’ etre. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 495.

After thinking all this over I have come to the conclusion that being “made in the likeness” applies not only to man but also to the Creator: he resembles man or is his likeness, which is to say that he is just as unconscious as man or even more unconscious, since according to the myth of the incarnatio he actually felt obliged to become man and offer himself to man as a sacrifice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 496.

This is the average man, and he is right in his anxiousness, because it is a matter of the fathers and mothers of all the terrors he is bringing to this world in the form of Communism and H-bombs, and last but not least by his fertility and the inevitable overpopulation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 496.

He still thinks in terms of mass-hygiene and has nightmares about mass killing. Why should he learn about the unconscious, the mother of the future?! Man still hopes, in a primitive way, that not knowing, not naming, not seeing a danger would remove it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 496.

I would guess that a high percentage of so-called miracle cures are due to psychic associations which have nothing miraculous about them for us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 498.

I have seen several cases where some psychic event, or psychological treatment, caused not only proliferating metastases to vanish but the primary tumour as well. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 498.

In some cases of psychotherapeutic treatment, contact with the sphere of the archetypes can produce the kind of constellation that underlies synchronicity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 499.

Others, again, have reversed their homesickness and labour under the delusion that things will be much better in the future than they are in the present. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 503.

But all of them share the same illusion that the goal is somewhere to be found in outward things and conditions, without realizing that psychologically they already carry it within them and always have. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 504.

I have often asked myself where my books go and how they are received. The only thing I know definitely is that they have a tolerable sale, if compared to others treating similarly difficult subjects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 497.

I cannot complain, though, about academic honours bestowed upon me in Europe, America and even in remote India, but I am more than doubtful about the effect my books had upon those who were responsible for the bestowal of such honours. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 497.

I suppose that my books expect a human understanding of which the intellectual world or the world of intellect is afraid, although I can easily understand why that is so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 497.

Without the reflecting consciousness of man the world is a gigantic meaningless machine, for in our experience man is the only creature who is capable of ascertaining any meaning at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 494.

But we do know that warm-bloodedness and a differentiated brain were necessary for the inception of consciousness, and thus also for the revelation of meaning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 494.

It staggers the mind even to begin to imagine the accidents and hazards that, over millions of years, transformed a lemurlike tree-dweller into a man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 494.

In this chaos of chance, synchronistic phenomena were probably at work, operating both with and against the known laws of nature to produce, in archetypal moments, syntheses which appear to us miraculous. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 495.

Since the laws of probability give no ground for assuming that higher syntheses such as the psyche could arise by chance alone, there is nothing for it but to postulate a latent meaning in order to explain not only the synchronistic phenomena but also the higher syntheses. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 495.

The soul is father and mother of all the apparently unanswerable difficulties that are building themselves up into the heavens before our eyes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 498.

There is no psychological exposition of astrology yet, on account of the fact that the empirical foundation in the sense of a science has not yet been laid. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 464.

Undoubtedly astrology today is flourishing as never before in the past, but it is still most unsatisfactorily explored despite very frequent use. It is an apt tool only when used intelligently. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 464.

The reason why the unconscious appears to us in such a disagreeable form is because we are afraid of it, and we revile it because we hope that by this method we can free ourselves from its attractions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 465.

I own the first English edition of Bohme’s 40 Questions Concerning the Soul, 1647. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 465.

A good many will admit that self-knowledge and reflection are needed, but very few indeed will consider such necessities binding upon themselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 465.

This used to be the preserve of the Germans, but today Germany regards herself as an American colony and there is little hope in this respect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 466.

In my old age the three-dimensional world is slipping away from me, and I perceive only from afar what in the year 1958 is being said and done in this one of the possible worlds. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 466.

It is the tradition that a satori experience is imageless and they therefore say it was imageless. That it cannot possibly have been imageless is proved by the fact that they remember something definite. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 466.

I fully agree with it, only I would ask you to state explicitly that in my psychology the ” mythological” aspect means “religious attitude.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 468

You will surely have noticed in reading my writings that I do not mince my words and clearly and expressly point out that the regard for mythological parallels is conducive to a religious attitude. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 468

It was the Enlightenment which destroyed this bulwark by reducing the unitary view to nothing but mythology. In its modern usage mythology simply means “it is nothing,” since myths are unrealistic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 468

My whole endeavour has been to show that myth is something very real because it connects us with the instinctive bases of our existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 468

One has to be extremely careful in using the word “mythology” as it brings you into head-on collision with the all-pervading infantile arguments of the Enlightenment. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 468

The real situation cannot, however, be clarified by mere concepts but only by the inner experience that corresponds to them. With concepts you invariably miss the mark because they are not philosophical ideas but merely names for experiences. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 469.

It is equally obvious that every insight into what I have called the “shadow” is a step along the road of individuation without one’s being obliged to call this an individuation process. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 483.

To the psychologist it is a most noteworthy fact that the religious emphasis has shifted from the triune pater panton [Father of Everything] to the Son and Soter [Savior] and historical man, who was originally one third of the Godhead and is now the central and almost unique feature of the Protestant’s religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 472

Owing to His human nature, Christ is the accessible part of the Godhead, and His empirical essence expresses the aforesaid experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 472.

Good as a rule is not followed by better but by worse. There is no chance to get out of sin. Where is the world after 2000 years of Christianity?” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 473.

It even looks as if there were a secret liaison between sin and grace and as if each sin had also the aspect of a felix culpa. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 473.

Yahweh gives life and death. Christ gives life, even eternal life and no death. He is a definite improvement on Yahweh. He owes this to the fact that He is suffering man as well as God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 473.

Christ appears as a guarantee of God’s benevolence. He is our advocate in Heaven, Job’s “God against God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 473.

And this is the problem that is raised in our days: where do we land if we believe in the almightiness of our will and in the absolute freedom of our choice? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 473.

These divine gifts are apt to get us too far away from our earthly bondage and from our inexorable reality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 473.

God is light and darkness, the auctor rerum is love and wrath. We still pray: “Lead us not into temptation.” (The French Catholic version of the Vulgate has: “Let us not fall into temptation.”!) ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 473.

Since self-knowledge is one of the more difficult arts, it is scarcely to be hoped that many men will take the trouble to search their conscience and consider how much their decision depends on their subjective relations with women. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 475.

The bird signifies the aerial, volatile spirit (in the chemical sense “spirit” is volatile, but it also designates the Spiritus Sanctus), whose physical and spiritual meanings are united in the alchemical spiritus Mercurialis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 476.

I myself recently dreamed that a UFO came speeding towards me which turned out to be the lens of a magic lantern whose projected image was myself; this suggested to me that I was the figure, himself deep in meditation, who is produced by a meditating yogi. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 477.

These [UFO] symbolisms, which are cropping up everywhere nowadays, paint a picture of the end of time with its eschatological conceptions: destruction of the world, coming of the Kingdom of Heaven or of the world redeemer. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 477.

At all times there have been wise and shrewd women to whom even clever men have gone for advice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 478.

There are countless women who succeed in public life without losing their femininity. On the contrary, they succeeded precisely because of it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 478.

The unpleasant power-complex of the female animus is encountered only when a woman does not allow her feeling to express itself naturally or handles it in an inferior way. But this, as said, can happen in all situations of life and has nothing whatever to do with the right to vote. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 478.

It [Individuation] does indeed, as you say, make considerable demands on our constitution. It goes to the very limit, but no further. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 479.

Most people cannot reach their destinies anyway without a streak of craziness, and so long as they haven’t it is better not to exorcize their demons. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 479.

I myself am deeply convinced of the basic analogy between physical and psychological discoveries. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 470.

I have often discussed this problem with the late Prof. Pauli, who was also fascinated by what he called the mirror-reflection, causing the existence of two worlds which are really united in the speculum, the mirror, that is lying in the middle. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 470

Without his emphasis on the dark side of man and the chaos of his chthonic desires, I could not have found access to the “Mysterium Coniunctionis.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 470.

Above all you cannot hope to “collaborate” in some way, for where in our time and our society would you find a person who knew how to express what your uniqueness alone can express? This is the jewel that must not get lost. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 480.

Recognizing the shadow is what I call the apprentice piece, but making out with the anima is the masterpiece which not many can bring off. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 481

The difference between the two kinds of thinking struck me a long time ago, and for my domestic use I have described the first kind as two-dimensional and the second kind as three-dimensional. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 481.

Paradoxically, as you rightly point out, this centre has to be created although it has always been there. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 481.

Thank you for telling me about Ringbom’s book. [Graltempel und paradies, 1951] For several years now it has been in my wife’s library; she was engaged in a study of the Grail up to her death in 1955. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 481.

I must call your attention to the fact that I cannot possibly tell you what a man who has enjoyed complete self-realization looks like, and what becomes of him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 474.

Before we strive after perfection, we ought to be able to live the ordinary man without self-mutilation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 474.

If anybody should find himself after his humble completion still left with a sufficient amount of energy, then he may begin his career as a saint. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 475.

I distinguish between “religion” and “creed”; the one is generic, the other specific. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 482.

The distance between God and man is so great that Yahweh sees himself obliged to set up an embassy among men-the ambassador is his own son-and to deliver a missive to them (the gospel). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 483.

The Jewish conception of the religious relationship with God as a legal contract (covenant!) gives way in the Christian conception to a love relationship, which is equally an aspect of the marriage with God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 483.

As a contrast to this Judaeo-Christian conception we have the totally alien views current in pagan antiquity: the gods are exalted men and embodiments of ever-present powers whose will and whose moods must be complied with. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 483.

By “religion,” then, I mean a kind of attitude which takes careful and conscientious account of certain numinous feelings, ideas, and events and reflects upon them; and by “belief” or “creed” I mean an organized community which collectively professes a specific belief or a specific ethos and mode of behaviour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 484.

But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without “myth.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 484.

Materia is in the end simply a chthonic mother goddess, and the late Pope seems to have had an inkling of this. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 485.

Clearly the anti-mythological trend is due to the difficulties we have in clinging on to our previous mythological tenets of belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 485.

“Reason” is, notoriously, not necessarily ethical any more than intelligence is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 485.

It [Myth] gives the ultimately unimaginable religious experience an image, a form in which to express itself, and thus makes community life possible, whereas a merely subjective religious experience lacking the traditional mythic imagery remains inarticulate and asocial, and, if it does anything at all, it fosters a spiritually anchoritic life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 486.

If his individual experience is a living thing, it will share the quality of all life, which does not stagnate but, being in continual flux, brings ever new aspects to light. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 486.

His [Hegel’s] impossible language, which he shares with his blood-brother Heidegger, denotes that his philosophy is a highly rationalized and lavishly decorated confession of his unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 501.

The fact that I use the term “dialectical procedure” or something of this sort exposes me to the misunderstanding that I envisage an intellectual procedure, which is not the case, but in truth a practical method of dealing with the very concrete propositions the unconscious presents us with. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 501.

Moreover the science of all moving as well as living bodies is based upon the concept of energy. Energy itself is a tension between opposites. Our psychology is no exception to the principle that embraces about the whole of natural science. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 501.

In the intellectual world in which I grew up, Hegelian thought played no role at all; on the contrary, it was Kant and his epistemology on the one hand, and on the other straight materialism, which I never shared, knowing too much about its ridiculous mythology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 501

The old myth, which always holds within it something yet older and more aboriginal, remains the same, this being an essential quality of all forms of religion; it only undergoes a new interpretation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 486.

Thus the Reformation was no more a repristination of the early Church than the Renaissance was a mere revival of antiquity, but a new exposition which could not throw off its own historical evolution. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 486.

Nowadays one very often hears people asserting that something or other is “only” psychic, as though there were anything that is not psychic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 487.

Outside psychology only modern physics has had to acknowledge that no science can be carried on without the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 487.

For more than a hundred years the world has been confronted with the concept of an unconscious, and for more than fifty years with the empirical investigation of it, but only a very few people have drawn the necessary conclusions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 487.

Nobody seems to have noticed that without a reflecting psyche the world might as well not exist, and that, in consequence, consciousness is a second world-creator, and also that the cosmogonic myths do not describe the absolute beginning of the world but rather the dawning of consciousness as the second Creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 487.

Now whether these archetypes, as I have called these pre-existent and pre-forming psychic factors, are regarded as “mere” instincts or as daemons and gods makes no difference at all to their dynamic effect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 488.

But it often makes a mighty difference whether they [Archetypes] are undervalued as “mere” instincts or overvalued as gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 488.

At the age of 84 I am somewhat tired, but I am concerned about our culture, which would be in danger of losing its roots if the continuity of tradition were broken. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 488.

The philosophical influence that has prevailed in my education dates from Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Ed. v. Hartmann and Nietzsche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 500.

Aristotle’s point of view had never particularly appealed to me; nor Hegel, who in my very incompetent opinion is not even a proper philosopher but a misfired psychologist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 501.

Another common misunderstanding is that I derive my idea of “archetypes” from Philo or Dionysius Areopagita, or St. Augustine. It is based solely upon empirical data, viz . upon the astonishing fact that products of the unconscious in modern individuals can almost literally coincide with symbols occurring in all peoples and all times, beyond the possibility of tradition or migration, for which I have given numerous proofs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 501.

That is what the child reacts to-to the quiddity of the father, without knowing that this quiddity once exemplified itself in an act. Nothing is in us that was not there before, and nothing that has once been can vanish. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 502

Words have become much too cheap. Being is more difficult and is therefore fondly replaced by verbalizing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 503.

Who or what is hindering man from living peacefully on this earth? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 506

In dealing with a definitely historical text it is absolutely essential to know the language and the whole available tradition of the milieu in question and not to adduce amplifications from a later cultural milieu. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 507.

The other dream points to the coming shock, a complete shattering of your view of the world, as a result of which you and your anima fall into the depths-the catacombs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 508.

Intuition is a dangerous gift, tempting us over and over again into groundless speculation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 508.

An intuition needs an uncommonly large dose of sobering criticism, otherwise it exposes us only too easily to the kind of catastrophic experience that has befallen you. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 508.

Everything could be said much more simply, but this simplicity is just what we ourselves and others lack, with the result that it is more trouble for us to speak really simply than to speak in a rather complicated and roundabout way. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 509.

The simplest is the most difficult of all, because, in the process of reaching consciousness, it breaks up into many individual aspects in which the mind gets entangled and cannot find a suitably simple expression. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 509.

Only numinous experiences retain their original simplicity or oneness which still gives us intimations of the Unus Mundus. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 509.

According to my view, one should rather say that the term “God” should only be applied in case of numinous inconceivability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 512.

Her masculine aspect is expressed very clearly in the anima figure in the Song of Songs: “terrible as an army with banners.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 509.

These opposites are in reality united in the irrepresentable because transcendent self, which in the process of becoming conscious divides into opposites again through progressive dichotomy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 509.

In dealing with space man has produced-since time immemorial -the circle and the square, which are connected with the idea of shelter and protection, place of the hearth, concentration of the family and small animals, and on a higher level the symbol of the quadratura circuli, as the dwelling place of the “inner man,” the abode of the gods, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 508-509.

The androgyny of the anima may appear in the anima herself at a certain stage, but it derives at a higher level from unity of the self. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 509.

Any development that leads further away from the round and the square becomes increasingly neurotic and unsatisfactory, particularly so when the elements of the building, i.e., the rooms, lose their approximation to the round or the square. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 509.

A certain interplay of round and square seems to be indispensable. This is about all I can tell you about “architectural archetypes.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 510.

It is rather conspicuous that the creators of modern art are unconscious about the meaning of their creations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 511.

Your general conclusion that contemporary Western artists unconsciously depict God’s image is questionable, as it is by no means certain that any inconceivability could be called “God,” unless one calls everything “God,” as everything ends in inconceivability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 511.

I have chosen the title Aion because the contents of the German edition are chiefly connected with the psychological changes characteristic of the transition from one historical aeon, i.e., era, or segment of historical time, to another. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 510.

It is evident, of course, that history takes on a new aspect when considered not only from the standpoint of our conscious reason, but also from that of the phenomena due to unconscious processes which never fail to accompany the peripeteia of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 510.

As we are profoundly influenced in our practical life by our historical Christian education, we are also exposed to secular changes in the basic Christian dominants, e.g., the schism of the Christian Church and the development of anti-Christian traits. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 511.

I do not need to tell you how much I would appreciate that a balanced mind should write a review about this book [Aion], which has chiefly aroused subjective emotions but hardly any objective evaluation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 511.

I don’t believe that man, as he is today, is capable of evading the vicious circle in which he moves, as long as he is as immature as he actually is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 512.

The only thing I can do is to try at least to be as reasonable as possible in my own life and to help a few others to be also reasonable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 512.

Even if the great disaster should overtake us, there may survive a few who have learned to be reasonable and who were helped by the serious attempt to get a bit more conscious than their somnambulistic entourage. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 513.

I think it is even better to make ready for the great catastrophe than to hope that it will not take place and that we are allowed to continue the dream-state of our immaturity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 513.

The lack of dreams has different reasons: the ordinary reason is that one is not interested in the mental life within and one does not pay attention to anything of this kind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 514

Another reason [for lack of dreams] is that one has not dealt enough with one’s conscious problem and waits for dreams so that the unconscious would do something about it; and the third reason is that the dreams have-as it were-emigrated into a person in our surroundings, who then is dreaming in an inordinate way. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 514

A light sleep is certainly a favourable condition for the remembrance of dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 514

If you don’t feel self-sufficient, give yourself the chance to take yourself as self-sufficient even if you don’t believe it, but make an effort to allow such kindness to yourself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 515.

You cannot apply kindness and understanding to others if you have not applied it to yourself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 515

Whatever I have acquired serves a purpose I have not foreseen. Everything has to be shed and nothing remains my own. I quite agree with you: it is not easy to reach utmost poverty and simplicity. But it meets you, unbidden, on the way to the end of this existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.

We are, unfortunately, always only parts of a whole, although glimmerings of it are possible. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 517.

You can easily find out from my books what I think about religion (e.g., “Psychology and Religion”). I profess no “belief.” I know that there are experiences one must pay “religious” attention to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 517.

If God is only good, everything is good. There is not a shadow anywhere. Evil just would not exist, even man would be good and could not produce anything evil. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516

However, there is one thing I do not underestimate, and that is the-to me-amazing and unexpected intuition of the American public, of which I was given an impressive sample on the occasion of my lectures at Yale University. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 520

I am very old and there are too many people who want to see me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516

I call them archetypes, i.e., instinctual forms of mental functioning. They are not inherited ideas, but mentally expressed instincts, forms and not contents. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 521.

Thus when we try to form an image of the fact one calls “God” we depend largely upon innate, pre-existent ways of perceiving, all the more so as it is a perception from within, unaided by the observation of physical facts which might lend their visible forms to our God-image (though there are plenty cases of the sort). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 522.

“God” therefore is in the first place a mental image equipped with instinctual “numinosity,” i.e., an emotional value bestowing the characteristic autonomy of the affect on the image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 522.

The mind is neither the world in itself nor does it reproduce its accurate image. The fact that we have an image of the world does not mean that there is only an image and no world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 522.

The God-image is the expression of an underlying experience of something which I cannot attain to by intellectual means, i.e., by scientific cognition, unless I commit an unwarrantable transgression. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 522.

When I say that I don’t need to believe in God because I “know,” I mean I know of the existence of God-images in general and in particular. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 522.

But why should you call this something “God”? I would ask: “Why not?” It has always been called “God.” An excellent and very suitable name indeed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 523.

I thank you for the unasked-for kindness of your letter. There is so much evil and bitterness in this world that one cannot be too grateful for the one good thing which happens from time to time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516

Also, I have never discovered, either in the literature or in conversation with an Oriental, any cognition that could be said to be a cognition of the whole. It is merely said to be so, just as we Christians say that we are redeemed of our sins by Christ. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 524.

The Christian idea proves its vitality by a continuous evolution, just like Buddhism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 524.

Mind you, I didn’t say “there is a God.” I said: “I don’t need to believe in God, I know.” Which does not mean: I do know a certain God (Zeus, Yahweh, Allah, the Trinitarian God, etc.) but rather: I do know that I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call “God” in consensu omnium (quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditur). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 525.

Who could say in earnest that his fate and life have been the result of his conscious planning alone? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 523.

Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 523.

Yet I should consider it an intellectual immorality to indulge in the belief that my view of a God is the universal, metaphysical Being of the confessions or “philosophies.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 526.

I commit the impertinence neither of a hypostasis nor of an arrogant qualification such as: “God can only be good.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 526.

Only my experience can be good or evil, but I know that the superior will is based upon a foundation which transcends human imagination. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 526.

Man always uses that knowledge he finds in himself to characterize his metaphysical figures. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 526.

Thus God’s omniscience means really a perfect presence of mind, and then only it becomes a blatant contradiction that He does not consult it or seems to be unaware of it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 526.

This is the point which is regularly misunderstood: people assume that I am talking about God himself. In reality I am talking about human representations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 527.

The past decade dealt me heavy blows-the death of dear friends and the even more painful loss of my wife, the end of my scientific activity and the burdens of old age, but also all sorts of honours and above all your friendship, which I value the more highly because it appears that men cannot stand me in the long run. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 529.

Being well-known not to say “famous” means little when one realizes that those who mouth my name have fundamentally no idea of what it’s all about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 530.

The gratification of knowing that one is essentially posthumous is short-lived. That is why your friendship is all the dearer to me in my grey old age, since it gives me living proof that I have not dropped out of the human setting into the shadowy realm of historical curiosities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 530.

In the turmoil of Kusnacht I can seldom or never turn my thoughts upon myself, much less express them in writing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 530.

The archetypality of Communism is on the one hand the common ownership of goods, as in primitive societies, and on the other hand the unlimited power of the tribal chieftain. Ostensibly all goods belong to all. Everybody has his share. But since all are represented by one man, the chieftain, only one man has control of everything. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 513

As you know, I have reopened the discussion about alchemical philosophy, i.e., I have at least shown a way which allows a new interpretation of its essential thoughts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 535.

Nobody except the very few have paid attention yet to the problems raised by my Mysterium Coniunctionis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 535.

As far as my knowledge goes, some advanced physicists, like the late Professor Pauli and through him Professor Heisenberg, have become acquainted with the parallel developments in the psychic field. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 535.

The physical side of the problem is a well-known matter, whereas the psychological and Hermetic side of this problem is accessible only to a very few, on account of the fact that the subject of unconscious phenomena is studied only by a very few and the study of alchemy is-if possible-still more unknown. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 535.

On the side of physics it was Pauli alone who appreciated alchemical thought very highly. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 535.

My shadow is indeed so huge that I could not possibly overlook it in the plan of my life; in fact I had to see it as an essential part of my personality and accept the consequences of this realization, and take responsibility for them. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 277.

I don’t believe in the tiger who was finally converted to vegetarianism and ate only apples. My solace was always Paul, who did not deem it beneath his dignity to admit he bore a thorn in the flesh. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 277.

If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless machine and Man’s existence a useless freak. My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says ‘No’ to it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 172.

It is most unfortunate that Pauli died so early, as he was a physicist who had the ear of his time, more so than a psychologist like myself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 535.

Very early on, at the time of my association experiments, I became interested in tuberculosis as a possible psychic disease having observed that reactions due to complexes frequently cause a long-lasting reduction in the volume of breathing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 533.

I also observed that a large number of my neurotic patients who were tubercular were “freed” from their complexes under psychotherapeutic treatment, learnt to breathe properly again and in the end were cured. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 533.

I am therefore entirely of your opinion that a salutary dose of psychology should be administered not only to tubercular patients but to many others as well, and also to so-called normal people. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 533.

By and large the universities are against it and they don’t encourage young people to acquire any psychological knowledge since the professors have none themselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 533.

Holding lectures, giving instruction, pumping in knowledge, all these current university procedures are no use at all here. The only thing that really helps is self-knowledge and the change of mental and moral attitude it brings about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 534.

What people would like best is the pursuit of science without man, completely oblivious of the fact that the individual psyche is the source of all science. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 534.

Let us hope that by the Grace of God and the aid of a human physician the ordeal of his passing away will be mitigated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 536.

As there are so few men capable of understanding the deeper Implications of our psychology, I had nursed the apparently vain hope that Father Victor would carry on the opus magnum. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 536.

But it is the curious fact that most of the intelligent men I became acquainted with and who began to develop an uncommon understanding have come to an unexpected, early end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 536.

It looks as if only those who are relatively close to death are serious or mature enough to grasp some of the essentials in our psychology, as a man who wants to get over an obstacle grasps a handy ladder. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 536.

My grandfather’s fervid relationship with her [Sophie Ziegler] is a complete contra-indication of schizophrenia. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 528.

It may be a prejudice to think that the world of human ideas is conditioned by archetypes, but it is also a means of grasping something of the psychology of another organism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 504.

“Teachings” are tools not truths; points of view that are laid aside once they have served their purpose. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 504.

Thus the environment delivers us from the power of the archetypes, and the archetypes deliver us from the crushing influence of the environment. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 504-505.

For me the archetype means: an image of a probable sequence of events, an habitual current of psychic energy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 505.

If you isolate any way of looking at things, even one that has proved in practice to be the best, and then extend it to infinity you will end up with nonsense. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 505.

Withdrawal of projections is obviously a truth whose validity is only of limited application. It is pretty certain that they can be withdrawn only to the extent that one is conscious. How far a man can become conscious nobody knows. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 505

We have as a matter of fact been able to correct a number of projections. Whether this amounts to much or little, and whether it is a real advance or only an apparent one, is known only to the angels. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 505.

As to what absolute consciousness might be, this is something we cannot imagine even in our wildest dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 505.

We don’t attain any “ultimate truths” at all, but on the way to them we discover a whole lot of astonishing partial truths. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 506.

One cannot avoid the shadow unless one remains neurotic, and as long as one is neurotic one has omitted the shadow. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 545.

The shadow is the block which separates us most effectively from the divine voice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 545.

Therefore Elihu in spite of his fundamental truth belongs to those foolish Jungians, who, as you suggest, avoid the shadow and make for the archetypes, i.e., the “divine equivalents,” which by the way are nothing but escape camouflage according to the personalistic theory. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 545

When Johannes Hus bound to the stake saw a little old woman adding her last bundle of sticks to the pile, he said: 0 sancta simplicitas! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 546.

My concepts are merely meant to serve as a means of communication through colloquial language. As principles however I should say that they are in themselves immensely Complicated structures which can hardly fulfil the role of scientific principles. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 552.

According to the experience and knowledge of medical science the verdict seems to be absolute, yet, in order to do justice to your faith, I must say that I know (and have seen myself) of certain similar cases where an apparently miraculous recovery took place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 547.

I would share your standpoint of undaunted faith if I were not disturbed by the thought that this earthly life is not supreme, but subject to the decrees of a superior economy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 547.

I try to accept life and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 547.

Where I find myself unwilling to accept the one or the other [Life or Death] I should question myself as to my personal motives. . . . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 547.

Is it the divine will? Or is it the wish of the human heart which shrinks from the Void of death? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 547.

We should not only have a more or less complete understanding of ourselves but also of the way in which we are related to our fellow beings and of their nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 551.

In ultimate situations of life and death complete understanding and insight are of paramount importance, as it is indispensable for our decision to go or to stay and let go or to let stay. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 547.

As with every author, one does not live from air and bread alone but now and then needs a bit of moral encouragement. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 547.

I have never read Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” in the original, but shall hasten to make good this omission at your behest. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 548.

What I have heard from the theological side has readied me for a special compartment in hell. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 548.

As Prof. Fierz in his speech at Pauli’s funeral has mentioned: Speculation comes from speculum. Thus “speculation,” a very typical form of consciousness, becomes the real centre of the world, the basis of the Unus Mundus. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 470.

The joyous Christian tells us how things ought to be, but he is careful not to touch things as they are. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 556.

Our moral freedom reaches as far as our consciousness, and thus our liberation from compulsion and captivity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 547.

Your aggressive critique has got me in the rear. That’s all. Don’t worry! I think of you [Victor White] in everlasting friendship. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 546.

The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their “supracelestial place” into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 559.

The Platonic “Idea” is in this case no longer intellectual but a psychic, instinctual pattern. Instinctual patterns can be found in human beings too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 537.

But at least he [Socrates] has shown us the one precious thing: “To hell with the Ego-world! Listen to the voice of your daimonion. It has a say now, not you.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 532.

The living mystery of life is always hidden between Two, and it is the true mystery which cannot be betrayed by words and depleted by arguments. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 581

I am sick of talking to people who do not even know the psychological ABC. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 574.

What Buber misunderstands as Gnosticism is psychiatric observation, of which he obviously knows nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 570.

My ambitions are not soaring to theological heights. I am merely concerned with the practical and theoretical problem of how-do-complexes-behave? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 571.

Mental possessions are just as good as ghosts, demons, and gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 571.

I am afraid it is sheer prejudice against science which hinders theologians from understanding my empirical standpoint. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 572.

I am concerned with phenomenal religion, with its observable facts, to which I try to add a few psychological observations about basic events in the collective unconscious, the existence of which I can prove. Beyond this I know nothing and I have never made any assertions about it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 572.

I have spent a lifetime of work on psychological and psychopathological investigations. Buber criticizes me in a field in which he is incompetent and which he does not even understand. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 573.

It was actually through my therapeutic work that I began to understand the essence of the Christian faith. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 575.

I assure you it was precisely through my analytic work that I arrived at an understanding not only of the Christian religion but, I may say, of all religions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 575.

The Freudian idea that religion is nothing more than a system of prohibitions is very limited and out of touch with what is known about different religions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 575.

To be exact, I must say that, although I profess myself a Christian, I am at the same time convinced that the chaotic contemporary situation shows that present-day Christianity is not the final truth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 575.

They [ESP] were puzzling to me inasmuch as archetypal constellations are usually more or less momentary and don’t extend over longer periods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 576.

I should not wonder at all if synchronistic phenomena would manifest in the form of physiological effects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 576.

A man’s lifework is like a ship he has built and equipped himself, launched down the ramp and entrusted to the sea, steered towards a distant goal and then left like a passenger, in order to sit on the shore and gaze after it till it is out of sight. ~C.G. Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 577.

Like all three-dimensional things it [A man’s lifework] gradually sinks below the horizon. C.G. Jung ~Letters Vol. II, Page 577

I have not been there [Oxford] again although I always dreamt and hoped to delve more deeply into the treasures of alchemistic manuscripts at the Bodleian. Fate has decreed otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 580.

I had to follow the ineradicable foolishness which furnishes the steps to true wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 581.

Since man’s nature is temperamentally set against wisdom, it is incumbent upon us to pay its price by what seems foolish to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 580.

It is indeed a major effort-the magnum opus in fact-to escape in time from the narrowness of its embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 580.

In spite of the enormity of our scientific cognition we are yet hardly at the bottom of the ladder, but we are at least so far that we are able to recognize the smallness of our knowledge. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 580.

The older I grow the more impressed I am by the frailty and uncertainty of our understanding, and all the more I take recourse to the simplicity of immediate experience so as not to lose contact with the essentials, namely the dominants which rule human existence throughout the millenniums. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 580.

As you have found out for yourself, the I Ching consists of readable archetypes, and it very often presents not only a picture of the actual situation but also of the future, exactly like dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 584.

One could even define the I Ching oracle as an experimental dream, just as one can define a dream as an experiment of a four-dimensional nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 584.

It had to remain hidden because it could not have survived the brutalities of the outside world. But now I am grown so old that I can let go my grip on the world, and its raucous cries fade in the distance. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 585

By the way: I must call your attention to the fact that I have no theory that God is a Quaternity. The whole question of quaternity is not a theory at all. It is a phenomenon. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 584.

Although you may not know it, I find it very difficult, both as a psychologist and a human being, to establish any relationship with modern abstract art. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 586.

Since one’s feelings seem to be a highly unsuitable organ for judging this kind of art [Modern], one is forced to appeal to the intellect or to intuition in order to gain any access to it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 586.

When I say “Psyche” I mean something unknown, to which I give the name “Psyche.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 583.

If I could not stand criticism I would have been dead long ago, since I have had nothing but criticism for 6o years. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 583.

As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 592.

He is a top animal exiled on a tiny speck of planet in the Milky Way. That is the reason why he does not know himself; he is cosmically isolated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 592.

The science fiction about travelling to the moon or to Venus and Mars and the lore about Flying Saucers are effects of our dimly felt but none the less intense need to reach a new physical as well as spiritual basis beyond our actual conscious world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 593.

Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 594.

We are sorely in need of a Truth or a self-understanding similar to that of Ancient Egypt, which I have found still living with the Taos Pueblos. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 596.

It [Old Age] is at all events the gradual breaking down of the bodily machine, with which foolishness identifies ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 580.

I asked myself time and again why there are no men in our epoch who could see at least what I was wrestling with. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 586.

I have given a good deal of attention to two great initiators: Joyce and Picasso. Both are masters of the fragmentation of aesthetic contents and accumulators of ingenious shards. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 589.

In Ulysses a world comes down in an almost endless, breathless stream of debris, a “catholic” world, i.e., a universe with moanings and outcries unheard and tears unshed, because suffering had extinguished itself, and an immense field of shards began to reveal its aesthetic “values.'” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 589.

We have no dominants any more, they are in the future. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 590.

Our values are shifting, everything loses its certainty, even sanctissima causalitas has descended from the throne of the axioma and has become a mere field of probability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 590.

The negative aspects of modern art show the intensity of our prejudice against the future, which we obstinately want to be as we expect it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 591.

Our present state of civilization becomes more and more unable to understand what a religion means. Europe has already lost half of its population to a mental state worse than ancient paganism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 597.

Religions are like plants which belong to a particular soil and a particular climate. Outside of their vital conditions their existence can be maintained only artificially. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 598.

Despite their powers of imagination, children often observe things much more accurately than grown-ups. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 598-599

They [Children] are naturally and instinctively adapted to reality; their next task is to find their way about in it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 599.

Grown-ups, on the other hand, especially those approaching middle life, get around to feeling that there is still a psychic reality about which our culture knows much too little and cares less. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 599.

People would rather hang on to the old dogmas than let experience speak. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 599.

I won’t go into details, but would only point out that a collective vision is a phenomenon of the time, depicting the great problem of our day in individual form. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 599.

Rationality is only one aspect of the world and does not cover the whole field of experience. Psychic events are not caused merely from without and mental contents are not mere derivatives of sense-perceptions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 600.

But just as Buddhism in its many differentiations overlaid the original spiritual adventure, so Christian rationalism has overlaid medieval alchemistic philosophy, which has been forgotten for about 200 years. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 600.

Even a genuine and original inner life has a tendency to succumb again and again to the sensualism and rationalism of consciousness, i.e., to literal-mindedness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 601.

We in our Western ignorance do not see, or have forgotten, that man has or is visited by subjective inner experiences of an irrational nature which cannot be successfully dealt with by rational argument, scientific evidence, and depreciative diagnosis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 602.

At the end of this cosmic age Vishnu will change into a white horse and create a new world. This refers to Pegasus, who ushers in the Aquarian Age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 607.

The jungle is in us, in our unconscious, and we have succeeded in projecting it into the outside world, where now the saurians are lustily playing about again in the form of cars, airplanes, and rockets. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 609.

My experience has impressed the tenacity and toughness of the female nature, which nothing has changed for thousands of years, far too deeply upon me for me to suppose that the right to vote could bring such a wonder to pass. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 478.

I quite agree with you: without relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 609

It is always important to have something to bring into a relationship, and solitude is often the means by which you acquire it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 610.

You call up again Tertullian’s Christian anima of the first Roman centuries, which claimed to be the light that shineth in the darkness. What about the anima of our benighted days? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 610

The fact, too, that the subject of these visions is very old and in confinio mortis suggests that a glance has been cast beyond the border, or that something from the other side has seeped through into our three-dimensional world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 612.

Writing is a difficult question, since it is not only a blessing but also a bad temptation because it tickles the devil of self-importance. If you want to write something, you have to be quite sure that the whole of your being wants this kind of expression. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 612.

Milk, as lac virginis, virgin’s milk, is a synonym for the aqua doctrinae one of the aspects of Mercurius, who had already bedeviled the Bollingen stones in the form of the trickster. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 615.

Your equation of certain archetypal ideas with fundamental physiological processes has my undivided applause. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 619.

I am not in the least surprised when you say that the alchemical pairs of opposites can be correlated with the endophylactictrophotropic and the ergotrop-dynamic systems. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 619
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Abstract thinking can lead us no further than to intellectual sophistries, which are invariably used as shields and subterfuges and are calculated to prevent the realization of the whole. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 620

I would like to emphasize that it very often does not depend upon the use one makes of an image, but rather upon the use the archetypes make of ourselves, which decides the question whether it will be artistic creation or a change of religious attitude. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 626.

I see that many of my pupils indulge in a superstitious belief in our so-called ” free will” and pay little attention to the fact that the archetypes are, as a rule, autonomous entities, and not only material subject to our choice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 626.

In reply to your question about levitation I myself have never observed the levitation of a living body. But apparently such things do happen. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 627.

Although I have been studying the UFO phenomenon for about 12 years now and have read practically all the relevant literature, I a m still unable to form a satisfactory picture of it or to assert that anything adequate is known about the nature of Ufos. I cannot even say whether they exist or not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 628.

The theologian, the only person besides the psychotherapist to declare himself responsible for the cura animarum, is afraid of having to think psychologically about the objects of his belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 629.

His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 624.

You see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 625.

All in all Nietzsche was to me the only man of that time who gave some adequate answers to certain urgent questions which then were more felt than thought. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 622.

This gives me great satisfaction, because what alone has always mattered to me was to find out whether my way of looking at things is in accord with life or not. ~Carl Jung, Collected Letters Vol. II, Page 543

If there’s one thing that terrified me, it was dead conceptualism. ~Carl Jung, Collected Letters Vol. II, Page 543

In dealing with darkness you have got to cling to the Good, otherwise the devil devours you. You need every bit of your goodness in dealing with Evil and just there. To keep the light alive in the darkness, that’s the point, and only there your candle makes sense. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 135.

In a very generalizing way we can therefore define them [Archetypes] as attributes of the creator. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 606.

The essential thing about these [Synchronistic] phenomena is that an objective event coincides meaningfully with a psychic process; that is to say, a physical event and an endopsychic one have a common meaning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.

If you have committed a mistake at all, it consisted in your having striven too hard to understand your wife completely and not reckoning with the fact that in the end people don’t want to know what secrets are slumbering in their souls. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.

If nevertheless you are still tormented by guilt feelings, then consider for once what sins you have not committed which you would have liked to commit. This might perhaps cure you of your guilt feelings toward your wife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.

There can be no doubt that the unconscious comes to the surface in modern art and with its dynamism destroys the orderliness that is characteristic of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 81

All the riches I seem to possess are also my poverty, my lonesomeness in the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.

The more I seem to possess, the more I stand to lose, when I get ready to approach the dark gate. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.

I did not seek my life with its failures and accomplishments. It came on me with a power not my own. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.

I don’t believe [in a personal God], but I do know of a power of a very personal nature and an irresistible influence. I call it “God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 274

From the psychological standpoint religion is a psychic phenomenon which irrationally exists, like the fact of our physiology or anatomy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 271

If this [Religious] function is lacking, man as an individual lacks balance, because religious experience is an expression of the existence and function of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 271

This psychological definition of God has nothing to do with Christian dogma, but it does describe the experience of the Other, often a very uncanny opponent, which coincides in the most impressive way with the historical “experiences of God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 272.

The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality, and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 624.

I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by a real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 624.

An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above, and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 624.

One can only say that somehow one has to reach the rim of the world or get to the end of one’s tether in order to partake of the terror or grace of such an [Primordial] experience at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

Its nature is such that it is really understandable why the Church is actually a place of refuge or protection for those who cannot endure the fire of the divine presence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

I profess no “belief.” I know that there are experiences one must pay “religious” attention to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 517

The word religio comes from religere, according to the ancient view, and not from the patristic religare. The former means “to consider or observe carefully.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 517

This derivation gives religio the right empirical basis, namely, the religious conduct of life, as distinct from mere credulity and imitation, which are either religion at second hand or substitutes for religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 517

Deviation from the numen seems to be universally understood as being the worst and the most original sin. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol, II, Page 370.

Since neurosis is an attitudinal problem, and the attitude depends on, or is grounded in, certain “dominants,” i.e., the ultimate and highest ideas and principles, the problem of attitude can fairly be characterized as a religious one. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 56.

They [Archetypes] are primordial psychic experiences which very often give patients access again to blocked religious truths. I have also had this experience myself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 57.

Religious ideas and convictions from the beginning of history have the aspect of the mental pharmakon [pharmacy]. They represent the world of wholeness in which fragments can be gathered and put together again. Such a cure cannot be effected by pills and injections. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 625.

Therefore I speak of the beatipossidentes [those blessed with being able to believe] of belief, and this is what I reproach them with: that they exalt themselves above our human stature and our human limitation and won’t admit to pluming themselves on a possession which distinguishes them from the ordinary mortal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 376.

I confess with the confession of not knowing and not being able to know; believers start with the assertion of knowing and being able to know. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 376.

Although the divine incarnation is a cosmic and absolute event, it only manifests empirically in those relatively few individuals capable of enough consciousness to make ethical decisions, that is, to decide for the Good. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 314.

His [God’s] moral quality depends upon individuals. That is why He incarnates. Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God the Creator. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 314.

Instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child’s prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship and commerce with God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

Man has already received so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

Let us hope that God’s good spirit will guide him in his decisions, because it will depend upon man’s decision whether God’s creation will continue. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

But nobody has ever heard that the devil departed this life afterwards; on the contrary, the authentic New Testament view is that after the thousand year reign of Christ he shall be loosed again on earth in all his youthful freshness, in the form of Antichrist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 253.

Hence the optimistic assumption of psychotherapy that conscious realization accentuates the good more than the overshadowing evil. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 254.

Becoming conscious reconciles the opposites and thus creates a higher third. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 254.

The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you abolish that will of the self that guides you through life to that eventual goal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 25.

I observe myself in the stillness of Bollingen and with all my experience of nearly eight decades must admit that I have found no rounded answer to myself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 163.

Have your congregation understood that they must close their ears to the traditional teachings and go through the darknesses of their own souls and set aside everything in order to become that which every individual bears in himself as his individual task, and that no one can take this burden from him? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 76.

We grow up, we blossom and we wilt, and death is ultimate quietude—or so it seems. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 596.

Man is the mirror which God holds up to himself, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 112

It is therefore better not to “understand” people who might be heroes, because the same fate might befall oneself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 31.

The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which is snuffed out when it is “grasped.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 31.

We must understand the divinity within us, but not the other, so far as he is able to go by himself and understand himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 32.

Since man’s nature is temperamentally set against wisdom, it is incumbent upon us to pay its price by what seems foolish to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 580.

This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy….In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 608

Or in other words: there is no outside to the collective psyche. In our ordinary mind we are in the worlds of time and space and within the separate individual psyche. In the state of the archetype we are in the collective psyche, in a world-system whose space-time categories are relatively or absolutely abolished. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400

A scientific education does not by any means go hand in hand with higher intelligence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 409-410.

But in reality we seem rather to be the dream of somebody or something independent of our conscious ego, at least in all fateful moments. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 426-427

May I give you some advice? Don’t get caught by words, only by facts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 475

An historical example of this kind is the reputed coincidence of Christ’s birth with the triple royal conjunction in Pisces in the year 7 B.C. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.

I would not go so far as to deny the possibility that a medium can transmit a ghostly communication, but I don’t know in which way one can prove it, as such a proof is outside of our human possibility. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 444.

On the other hand, it is obvious to me that synchronicity is the indispensable counterpart to causality and to that extent could be considered compensatory. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 425-426

This means that the two elements of time and space, indispensable for change, are relatively without importance for the psyche. In other words: the psyche is up to a certain point not subject to corruptibility. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445

I have always vowed I would never write an autobiography and in this case have only wetted my feet a little; it is rather Frau Jaffe who is writing a biography to which I have made a few contributions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 531

Although the assertion of immortality is in itself a fact, it is no more proof of immortality than are any other mythological statements. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 457-458

It is legitimate to ask yourself what it is that carries the qualities of the archetypal and synchronistic, and to pose the question, for instance, of the intrinsic nature of the psyche or of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449

In spite of the fact that good and evil are relative and therefore not generally valid, the contrast exists and they are a pair of opposites basic to the structure of our mind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 461-462

The opposition good – evil is universal in our experience, but one must always ask to whom? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 461-462

You also cannot educate a nation. You only can teach or change the heart of an individual. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 461-462

Mature youth begins, as one says, at seventy and it is in certain respects not so nice and in others more beautiful than childhood. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 462-463

If power symptoms creep into the work that is done round you, then diminish your own power and let others have more responsibility. It will teach you a very sound lesson. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 463.

One should not assert one’s power as long as the situation is not so dangerous that it needs violence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 463.

Power that is constantly asserted works against itself, and it is asserted when one is afraid of losing it. One should not be afraid of losing it. One gains more peace through losing power. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 463.

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. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The experiment [Astrology] is most suggestive to a versatile mind, unreliable in the hands of the unimaginative, and dangerous in the hands of a fool, as those intuitive methods always are. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

Astrological “truths” as statistical results are questionable or even unlikely. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The [astrological] superstitious use (prediction of the future or statement of facts beyond psychological possibilities) is false. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

Some psychological truths can be established by scientific methods, others not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 457-458

Everything that will or must be comes without your doing, and you have only to hold your own in order to come through the darknesses of human existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.

Too strong a dependence on the outside and too dynamic a view of the inside stem essentially from your desire, intention, and will, which you should push into the background a little for the sake of what really concerns you: holding your own in the chaos of this world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.

Man is a very paradoxical structure with two main trends, namely the biological and animal instincts of propagation and the cultural instinct of psychic development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 454-456

The experience of wholeness is, quite to the contrary, an extremely simple matter of feeling yourself in harmony with the world within and without. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.

I am glad to hear of your activity on the radio. Nowadays this is the way to get at the public. I personally am opposed to it, but then I belong increasingly to the past and can no longer adapt to the restlessness and superficiality of modern life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520

Being well-known not to say “famous” means little when one realizes that those who mouth my name have fundamentally no idea of what it’s all about. The gratification of knowing that one is essentially posthumous is short-lived. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.

In so far, however, as synchronistic events include not only psychic but also physical forms of manifestation, the conclusion is justified that both modalities transcend the realm of the psychic and somehow also belong to the physical realm. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449

There are women who are not meant to bear physical children, but they are those that give rebirth to a man in a spiritual sense, which is a highly important function. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 454-456

Healthy and complete life is not to be attained by general principles and regulations, because it is always the individual who carries it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 454-456

When you say that an experience of wholeness is the same as a “dynamic irruption of the collective unconscious,” this is an indubitable error. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.

Myth is pre-eminently a social phenomenon: it is told by the many and heard by the many. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

When one has looked and laboured for a long time, one knows oneself and has grown old. – The “secret of life” is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots. All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 514-515

This is the burden everybody has to carry: to live the life we have got to live. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 515-516
I am very grateful for the spiritual help you extend to me. I am in need of it with this gigantic misunderstanding which surrounds me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516

When one considers that for over 50 years there has been a definite conception of the unconscious which is supported by empirically demonstrable facts, it is little short of amazing that philosophers still haven’t found the time to do anything but pooh-pooh it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560

I was often sorry to be a petra scandali. It is my fate however, not my choice, and I had to fulfill this unbecoming role. Things had to be moved in the great crisis of our time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 554-555

Under these circumstances I do make the claim of being “scientific” because I do exactly what you describe as the “scientific method.” I observe, I classify, I establish relations and sequences between the observed data, and I even show the possibility of prediction. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567

If I speak of the collective unconscious I don’t assume it as a principle,
I only give a name to the totality of observable facts, i.e., archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567

But in these days we live by our brains alone and ignore the very definite laws of our body and the instinctive world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567

I don’t see where you get the impression that I might be discouraged in this respect, since I was the first to emphasize the enormous role religion plays particularly in the individuation process, as I was the first to raise the question of the relation between psychotherapy and religion in its practical aspects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 566

The question ought to be formulated: what is physical, biological, psychological, legal, and philosophical evidence? By which principle could one show that physical evidence is superior to any other evidence? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 565-566

Moreover there are not a few introverts who are so painfully aware of the shortcomings of their attitude that they have learned to imitate the extraverts and behave accordingly, and vice versa there are extraverts who like to give themselves the air of the introvert because they think they are then more interesting. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 564-565

Although I have never made a statistique of this kind I have always been impressed by the fact that pipe-smokers are usually introverted. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 564-565

The typical extravert is too much of a busybody to bother and fuss with the pipe which demands infinitely more nursing than a cigarette that can be lighted or thrown away in a second. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages, 564-565

That does not prevent me from having found heavy cigarette-smokers among my introverts and not a few pipe-smokers among the extraverts, but normally with empty pipes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 564-565

I cannot omit to remark that the diagnosis is not rarely hampered by the fact that it is chiefly extraverts who resent being called extraverts, as if it were a derogatory designation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 564-565

Your question as to who invented the legends of the stars naturally cannot be answered. All sources are lacking. But from time immemorial, that is to say from the time of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, the stars and constellations have had their names. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.

From what we know of genuine primitives today, the stars play an astonishingly small role in their lives, a fact which may justify the assumption that the projection of the constellations and their interpretation coincided with the beginnings of a reflecting consciousness, i.e., with the first steps in civilization. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.

We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.

Somehow, as the Gnostics surmised, we have “collected” ourselves from out of the cosmos. That is why the idea of “gathering the seeds of light played such an important role in their systems and in Manichaeism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.

With the feeling, however, that it would not be granted me to pierce through to his [Victor White] understanding. It was then that I sinned against my better insight, but at least it served as a pretext for my asking his forgiveness and offering him a touch of human feeling in the hope that this would afford him some small relief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563

As I have so earnestly shared in his [Victor White] life and inner development, his death has become another tragic experience for me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563

It was always my fear that he would have to spend his last days in the professional chill of a hospital or in the atmosphere of a monastery cell. Thank God that was spared him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563

Helas-he [Socretes] lived at a time when the wobbly polis still needed the homosexual glue. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 531-533

Socrates’ “naivete” is his greatness, still greater than ours. His humbleness is the ideal we have not reached yet. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 531-533

With existentialism our words come to an end in complete meaninglessness and our art in total inexpressivity, and our world has acquired the means to blast us into cosmic dust. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 531-533

We still consider his [Socrates] daimonion as an individual peculiarity if not worse. Such people, says Buddha, “after their death reach the wrong way, the bad track, down to the depth, into an infernal world.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 531-533

Just like the animal, man too is caught up in the conflict between archetypal drives and environmental conditions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506

Your attempts to formulate it are not vain or futile; on the contrary, our labours are witnesses to the living Mystery, honest attempts to find words for the Ineffable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396

The “way” is not an upward-going straight line, f.i. from earth to heaven or from matter to spirit, but rather a circumabulatio of and an approximation to the Centrum. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396

We are not liberated by leaving something behind but only by fulfilling our task as mixta composita i.e., human beings between the opposites. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396

My memory [at age 82] has the most astonishing holes in it, so that I often catch myself forgetting not only what I have done but more especially what I have not done. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 351.

Freud, when one got to know him better, was distinguished by a markedly differentiated feeling function. His “sense of values” showed itself in his love of precious stones, jade, malachite, etc. He also had considerable intuition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 346-348

So long as we are conscious of ourselves, we are supported by the psyche and its structures and at the same time imprisoned in them with no possibility of getting outside ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

We would not feel and be aware of ourselves at all were we not always confronted with the unknown power. Without this we would not be conscious of our separateness, just as there is no consciousness without an object. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

Despite the blatant misjudgment I have suffered at Freud’s hands, I cannot fail to recognize, even in the teeth of my resentment, his significance as a cultural critic and psychological pioneer. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 358-359.

All the grapes of the same site produce about the same wine. This is the truth stated by astrology and experience since time immemorial. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 353-355.

Compensatory contents rise up from the unconscious precisely because they possess healing power and are necessary to consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 355.

There is no reason why whole numbers possess certain meanings or qualities, and no reason why elephants or men should exist. These arrangements are simply there as given facts, like the crystalline systems or the discontinuities of physics, even as the whole of creation is a “just-so story.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 355.

I cannot regret that a false rumour has led you to write your long and painstaking letter, for it has brought back many old memories of that seminal time and also of our enjoyable collaboration. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 355-357.

It would indeed be desirable if my ideas could be expressed in a simple form everyone could understand. In conversation with certain individuals I can do this easily enough, but then it depends on the individual. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 357-358.

Since my language is a reflection of my thinking and feeling, I cannot, when faced with a wider public, express myself otherwise than as I am, and I am anything but uncomplicated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 357-358.

I could never have published what I have discovered without a highly differentiated language, which I had to polish endlessly for this purpose, so much so that finally, when I try to express my ideas, I can no longer speak in any other way-unless, as I have said, it be to a particular individual with whom I can enter into an empathetic relationship. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 357-358.

The Mediterranean man, to whom the Jews also belong, is not exclusively characterized and moulded by Christianity and the Kabbalah, but still carries within him a living heritage of paganism which could not be stamped out by the Christian Reformation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 358-359.

Altogether, you are practising on me an extremely beneficial Psychotherapy of a special kind, giving me the valuable experience of what I can only call “meaningful collaboration,” a working together in spirit and in deed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 360.

Whenever and wherever you turn to some extent towards the unconscious it seldom or never answers as one would expect; it is rather as if nature itself were answering. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 360-361.

Its [the Unconscious] answer does not necessarily refer to that piece of reality you have in mind, it is reacting to the whole man and brings into sight what the whole man should know, in other words, it compensates for an insight lacking in consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 360-361.

Apparently you are not yet in such a state of simplicity that you could accept the helpful intentions of those knowing less than you. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 361

One has no authority when one cannot risk it, and you will be quite astonished how very helpful people we might consider inferior can be. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 361

If you are all alone then it is because you isolate yourself; if you are humble enough you are never alone. Nothing isolates us more than power and prestige. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 361

Not being able to get the necessary help from above, I need to fetch it from below, and what I was able to do you might do also. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 361

As at least 90% of our sins are those of omission, I am no exception! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 362-363.

Our Christianity with its Summum Bonum conception has entirely forgotten that one of the main aspects of real religion is fear. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 362-363.

No charity in all the world can take away the divine terror. It could not even do away with the H-Bomb! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 362-363.

Naturally I should be glad to see you one afternoon for about 2 hours, preferably in Kusnacht, my door to the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 364

Perhaps you also will one day understand that it is only the man who is really capable of being alone, and without bitterness, who attracts other people. Then he doesn’t need to seek them anymore, they come all by themselves, among them the very ones whom he himself needs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 366-367

A lexicon of dream symbols is a nightmare to me, as I see this task from the standpoint of responsible science and I know its enormous difficulties. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 123.

One can say of all metaphysical statements that their factuality Consists in the fact of their being asserted, but none of them can be proved to be true or untrue. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

It does not come within the scope of a science like psychology to ascertain the truth or untruth of metaphysical assertions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

Since no human need is without a reason, we may also expect that the need for metaphysical assertions is based on a corresponding reason, even if we are not conscious of this reason. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

Nothing is thereby asserted, nothing denied, and this is just what Buber doesn’t understand; for he is a theologian who naively thinks that what he believes must necessarily be so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

Everyone insists on his standpoint and imagines he possesses the sole truth; therefore I counsel modesty, or rather the willingness to suppose that God can express himself in different languages. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

The relation with transcendence is certainly a necessity for us, but gives us no power over it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

After I had accomplished the task of writing the paper that was expected from me, I indulged in the vain hope that having fed the world of men by my paper, my own unconscious would spare me as it has done for about three years, spare me, namely, new ideas. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 362-363.

I am dependent on God’s verdict, not he on mine. God presents me with facts I have to get along with. If he doesn’t reject them, I cannot. I can only modify them the tiniest bit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 379-380

If somebody has a vision it doesn’t mean that he is necessarily insane. Perfectly normal people can have visions in certain moments. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 380.

St. Paul was definitely not insane nor was his vision extraordinary. I know quite a number of cases of visions of Christ or auditions of a voice from within. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 380.

Since the archetypes are the instinctual forms of mental behaviour it is quite certain that, inasmuch as animals possess a “mind,” their mind also follows archetypal patterns, and presumably the same that are operative in the human mind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373

As we do not know the actual status of an archetype in the unconscious and only know it in that form in which it becomes conscious, it is impossible to describe the human archetype and to compare it to an animal archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373

If I say that we do not know “the ultimate derivation of the archetype,” I mean that we are unable to observe and describe the archetype in its unconscious condition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373

No matter how lonely you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you. ~Carl Jung, citing an Alchemist, Letters Vol. II, Page 595.

If there is anything like the spirit seizing one by the scruff of the neck, it was the way this book [Answer to Job] came into being. . . . It came upon me suddenly and unexpectedly during a feverish illness. . . . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 20.

The question is, of course, what do you feel to be your task? Where the fear, there is your task! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Letters, I, 306.

It is of course, as you say, an absurdity to isolate the human mind from nature in general. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373

I dislike as a rule interpreting dreams of people whom I don’t know personally; one can easily be led astray. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 187-188.

There is no difference in principle between the animal and the human psyche. The kinship of the two is too obvious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373

I am a psychologist and empiricist, and for me the meaning of life does not lie in annulling it for the sake of an alleged “possibility of transcendental existence” which nobody knows how to envisage. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381.

We are men and not gods. The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life is rich enough in marvels and not in detachment from this world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381.

How can I fulfil the meaning of my life if the goal I set myself is the disappearance of individual consciousness”? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381.

What am I without this individual consciousness of mine? Even what I have called the “self” functions only by virtue of an ego which hears the voice of that greater being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381.

Your argument and the beautiful quotations make it very clear that Rilke drew from the same deep springs as I did-the collective unconscious. He as a poet or visionary, I as a psychologist and empiricist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 381-382.

I cannot escape the feeling that for all his high poetic gifts and intuition Rilke was never quite a contemporary. Of course poets are timeless phenomena, and the lack of modernity in Rilke is a badge of genuine poetry-craft. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 381-382.

Often he [Rilke] reminds me of a medieval man: half troubadour, half monk. His language and the form he gave his images have something transparent about them, like the windows of Gothic cathedrals. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 381-382.

But he [Rilke] doesn’t have what it takes to make a man complete: body, weight, shadow. His high ethos, his capacity for abnegation, and perhaps also his physical frailty naturally led him towards a goal of completeness, but not of perfection. Perfection, it seems to me, would have broken him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 381-382.

You are naturally reaching back to Yoga in the proper understanding that it has once been the right way which should still be the right way for our time. But the world has become wrong and nobody listens to the old ways any more, in spite of the fact that the underlying truth is still true. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 385-386.

The same is the case in the West, where one makes futile attempts to give life to our Christian tenets; but they have gone to sleep. Yet in Buddhism as well as in Christianity there is at the basis of both a valid truth, but its modern application has not been understood yet. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 385-386.

“Tathagata” literally translated means the “thus going-one.” This passage describes the effect we shall undergo in order to be liberated from our illusions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 385-386.

The trouble with parapsychology is that the very framework of our understanding and explanation, namely time, space, and causality, becomes questionable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 373-375

The principle of synchronicity represents the essential particularity of a non-statistical world, where facts are not measured by numbers but by their psychological significance. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 373-375

It has been my endeavour to complement the obvious insufficiency of statistical truth through a description of improbable facts and their nature, within the confines of psychology at least. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 373-375

As far as I can see, there are only two ways of approach to parapsychology: the one is the experimental way without psychology, and the other the psychological approach without hope of a statistical method. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 373-375

The fact is that real poets create out of an inner vision which, being timeless, also unveils the future, if not in actualities at least symbolically. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 386-387

As in Goethe’s Faust, here too it is the feminine element (Eve) that knows about the secret which can work against the total destruction of mankind, or man’s despair in the face of such a development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 386-387

Perhaps someday there will appear a poet courageous enough to give expression to the voices of the “mothers.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 386-387

I personally detest noise and flee it whenever and wherever possible, because it not only disturbs the concentration needed for my work but forces me to make the additional psychic effort of shutting it out. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-392.

Noise is certainly only one of the evils of our time, though perhaps the most obtrusive. The others are the gramophone, the radio, and now the blight of television. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-392.

The alarming pollution of our water supplies, the steady increase of radioactivity, and the sombre threat of overpopulation with its genocidal tendencies have already led to a widespread though not generally conscious fear which loves noise because it stops the fear from being heard. Noise is welcome because it drowns the inner instinctive warning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-392.

I have had a number of TB patients in my time and some really excellent results with psychotherapy, but it is true that the average somatic case generally has a resistance to a psychological approach, particularly the TB patients, since TB is, in a way a “pneumatic” disease, that is, affecting the life-giving breath. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 100-101

Eastern philosophy fills a psychic lacuna in us but without answering the problem posed by Christianity. Since I am neither an Indian nor a Chinese, I shall probably have to rest content with my European presuppositions, otherwise I would be in danger of losing my roots for a second time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 238.

I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to, and since I have reached my highest point I can’t transcend any more, I am guarding my light and my treasure, convinced that nobody would gain and I myself would be badly, even hopelessly injured, if I should lose it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 597.

The past decade dealt me heavy blows – the death of dear friends and the even more painful loss of my wife, the end of my scientific activity and the burdens of old age, but also all sorts of honors and above all your friendship, which I value the more highly because it appears that men cannot stand me in the long run. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.

Your understanding and your interest have done much to restore my self-confidence, severely shaken by my incessant struggle with difficult contemporaries. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.

No Christian is meant to sleep in a safe pew. . . . I have discovered in my private life that a true Christian is not bedded upon roses and he is not meant for peace and tranquility of mind but for war. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 242.

People speak of belief when they have lost knowledge. Belief and disbelief in God are mere surrogates. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 4.

The naïve primitive doesn’t believe in God, he knows, because the inner experience rightly means as much to him as the outer. He still has no theology and hasn’t yet let himself be befuddled by booby trap concepts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 4.

We imitate Christ and hope he will deliver us from our own fate. Like little Iambs we follow the shepherd, naturally to good pastures. No talk at all of uniting our Above and Below! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 76-77.

To put oneself under somebody else’s cross, which has already been carried by him, is certainly easier than to carry your own cross amid the mockery and contempt of the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 76-77.

Whoever imitates Christ and has the cheek to want to take Christ’s cross on himself when he can’t even carry his own has in my view not yet learnt the ABC of the Christian message. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 76-77.

We continually pray that “this cup may pass from us” and not harm us. Even Christ did so, but without success. . . . We might. . . discover, among other things, that in every feature Christ’s life is a prototype of individuation and hence cannot be imitated: one can only live one’s own life totally in the same way with all the consequences this entails. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 76-77.

We are still looking back to the Pentecostal events in a dazed way instead of looking forward to the goal the spirit is leading us to. Therefore mankind is wholly unprepared for the things to come. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 436.

His [Christ’s] religious leaders and teachers are still hypnotized by the beginning of a then-new aeon of consciousness instead of understanding them and their implications. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 436.

What was once called the “Holy Ghost” is an impelling force, creating wider consciousness and responsibility and thus enriched cognition. The real history of the world seems to be the progressive incarnation of the deity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 436.

And again I am realizing profoundly that not everybody’s nature is as bellicose as mine, although I have attained – Deo concedente – a certain state of peace within, paid for by a rather uncomfortable state of war without. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 242.

No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you. ~Carl Jung citing an Alchemist, Letters Vol II, Page 595.

As a rule it so happens that what passes for the profoundest knowledge and the ultimate truth on the first level is understood and derided as ridiculous ignorance on the next, and it is thought that now at last we have arrived at the right insights. With science you really do get somewhere, even if you don’t attain the ultimate philosophical insights. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 506.

The dream of X. means chiefly that it would be advisable to you to give yourself that kind of loving attention as well as whatever X. means for you in yourself. In other words: worry about yourself more than about others; see and understand what you do more than what you assume other people do. Otherwise you will be accused of a meddling power drive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 515.

I am a psychologist and empiricist, and for me the meaning of life does not lie in annulling it for the sake of an alleged “possibility of transcendental existence” which nobody knows how to envisage. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381

We are men and not gods. The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life. It is rich enough in marvels. And not in detachment from this world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381

How can I fulfil the meaning of my life if the goal I set myself is the “disappearance of individual consciousness”? What am I without this individual consciousness of mine? Even what I have called the “self” functions only by virtue of an ego which hears the voice of that greater being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381

Of course one can guess what the religion of the future might be, but it’s hardly worthwhile guessing.

Surely the Christians of 80 A.D. guessed too, but they never would have guessed the splendours of the Vatican and Alexander VI on St. Peter’s throne and the popes of Avignon and 10,000 Christian heretics burnt in Spain, etc.

So one never can tell how the future religion will look or what it will be based on. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 158

 

The old popes and bishops succeeded in getting so much heathendom, barbarism and real evil out of the Church that it became much better than some centuries before: there were no Alexander VI, no auto-da-fes, no thumbscrews and racks any more, so that the compensatory drastic virtues (asceticism etc.) lost their meaning to a certain extent.

The great split, having been a merely spiritual fact for a long time, has at last got into the world, as a rule in its coarsest and least recognizable form, viz. as the iron curtain, the completion of the second Fish. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 166

If the Pope has humour, or if Albert Schweitzer knows that he ran away from the European problem, or Winston Churchill is aware of what an insupportable bully he can be, they are thus far individuated.  ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 324

One has no authority when one cannot risk it, and you will be quite astonished how very helpful people we might consider inferior can be.

Even the Pope has a Father Confessor who is a simple priest and by no means one of the Cardinals.  ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 361

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