Carl Jung on Sexuality and Spirituality
“Man shall differentiate himself both from spirituality and sexuality.
He shall call spirituality mother, and set her between Heaven and earth.
He shall call sexuality Phallos, and set him between himself and earth.
For the mother and the Phallos are superhuman daimons that reveal the world of the Gods.
They affect us more than the Gods since they are closely akin to our essence.
If you do not differentiate yourselves from sexuality and from spirituality, and do not regard them as an essence both above and beyond you, you are delivered over to them as qualities of the Pleroma.
Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things you possess and encompass.
Rather, they possess and encompass you, since they are powerful daimons, manifestations of the Gods, and hence reach beyond you, existing in themselves.
No man has a spirituality unto himself or a sexuality unto himself Instead, he stands under the law of spirituality and of sexuality.
Therefore no one escapes these daimons.
You shall look upon them as daimons, and as a common task and danger, a common burden that life has laid upon you. Thus life, too, is for you a common task and danger, as are the Gods, and first and foremost terrible Abraxas.” ~Carl Jung; Red Book
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
Love is not cheap—let us therefore beware of cheapening it!
All our bad qualities, our egotism, our cowardice, our worldly wisdom, our cupidity—all these would persuade us not to take love seriously.
But love will reward us only when we do.
I must even regard it as a misfortune that nowadays the sexual question is spoken of as something distinct from love.
The two questions should not be separated, for when there is a sexual problem it can be solved only by love.
Any other solution would be a harmful substitute.
Sexuality dished out as sexuality is brutish; but sexuality as an expression of love is hallowed.
Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it.
If he does it from love or in the spirit of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled.
I trust that these remarks will have made it clear to you that I pass no sort of moral judgment on sexuality as a natural phenomenon, but prefer to make its moral evaluation dependent on the way it is expressed. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234-235
Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6) (Bollingen Series XX)
“The great problems of life—sexuality, of course, among others—are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious.
These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality.
This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.” ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, 1923