Carl Jung: Consciousness is a precondition of being.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C.G. Jung)
An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence.
It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future.
It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 563
Everything that man should, and yet cannot, be or do be it in a positive or negative sense—lives on as a mythological figure and anticipation alongside his consciousness, either as a religious projection or—what is still more dangerous—as unconscious contents which then project themselves spontaneously into incongruous objects, e.g., hygienic and other “Salvationist” doctrines or practices.
All these are so many rationalized substitutes for mythology, and their unnaturalness does more harm than good. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 287
The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word.
Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light.
On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes {pmnes superfiuitates comburii) .
But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness.
There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion. ~Carl Jung CW 9i, 179
Since the differentiated consciousness of civilized man has been granted an effective instrument for the practical realization of its contents through the dynamics of his will, there is all the more danger, the more he trains his will, of his getting lost in one-sidedness and deviating further and further from the laws and roots of his being. ~Carl Jung, Basel Seminar, Para 276
When there is a marked change in the individual’s state of consciousness, the unconscious contents which are thereby constellated will also change.
And the further the conscious situation moves away from a certain point of equilibrium, the more forceful and accordingly the more dangerous become the unconscious contents that are struggling
to restore the balance.
This leads ultimately to a dissociation: on the one hand, ego-consciousness makes convulsive efforts to shake off an invisible opponent (if it does not suspect its next-door neighbour of being the devil!), while on the other hand it increasingly falls victim to the tyrannical will of an internal “Government opposition” which displays all the characteristics of a daemonic subman and superman combined.
When a few million people get into this state, it produces the sort of situation which has afforded us such an edifying object-lesson every day for the last ten years.
These contemporary events betray their psychological background by their very singularity.
The insensate destruction and devastation are a reaction against the deflection of consciousness from the point of equilibrium.
For an equilibrium does in fact exist between the psychic ego and non-ego, and that equilibrium is a religio, a “careful consideration” of ever-present unconscious forces which we neglect at our peril. 77 : 394/
Nothing is so apt to challenge our self-awareness and alertness as being at war with oneself.
One can hardly think of any other or more effective means of waking humanity out of the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of the primitive mentality and bringing it to a state of conscious
responsibility. 70:964
The hero’s main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious.
The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. “And God said, ‘Let
there be light’ ” is the projection of that immemorial experience of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 284
Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche.
Consciousness is a precondition of being.
Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being.
The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528
“But why on earth,” you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?”
This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy.
Instead of a real answer I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists.
From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world.
I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is.
The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was.
And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been.
All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man. ~Carl Jung CW 9i, Para 177