Carl Jung: It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.
Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.12)
We do not devalue statements that originally were intended to be metaphysical when we demonstrate their psychic nature; on the contrary, we confirm their factual character.
But, by treating them as psychic phenomena, we remove them from the inaccessible realm of metaphysics, about which nothing verifiable can be said, and this disposes of the impossible question as to whether they are “true” or not.
We take our stand simply and solely on the facts, recognizing that the archetypal structure of the unconscious will produce, over and over again and irrespective of tradition, those figures which reappear in the history of all epochs and all peoples, and will endow them with the same significance and numinosity that have been theirs from the beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 558
It would be blasphemy to assert that God can manifest himself everywhere save only in the human soul.
Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship between God and the soul precludes from the start any devaluation of the latter.
It would be going perhaps too far to speak of an affinity; but at all events the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relation to God, i.e., a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 1
1 did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul is natitraliter religiosa, i.e., possesses a religious function.
I did not invent or insinuate this function, it produces itself of its own accord without being prompted thereto by any opinions or suggestions of mine.
With a truly tragic delusion theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see.
It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it.
It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.
For it is obvious that far too many people are incapable of establishing a connection between the sacred figures and their own psyche: they cannot see to what extent the equivalent images are lying dormant in their own unconscious.
In order to facilitate this inner vision we must first clear the way for the faculty of seeing.
How this is to be done without psychology, that is, without making contact with the psyche, is, frankly, beyond my comprehension. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 14
Carl Jung: You only can teach or change the heart of an individual.
To: James Gibb
Dear Mr. Gibb, 1 October 1958
Thank you for your interesting letter.
It is indeed as you say: one could speak of a pool of good and a pool of evil.
But this statement is a bit too simple, because good and evil are human opinions and therefore relative.
What is good for me can be bad for somebody else and the same with evil.
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.
The opposition good – evil is universal in our experience, but one must always ask to whom?
This is a great difficulty.
Otherwise the situation would be quite simple if you could make general statements about good and evil.
You could then clearly designate the things that are good and the things that are evil.
As this is not the case, the question is the human individual, namely, the latter is the decisive factor because it is the individual that declares something good and something evil.
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.
Thus our attention must be given to the individual that decides and not to the question of good or evil, which we cannot make out for other people.
That is the reason why you cannot tell whole nations what is good for them.
You only can encourage the individual to make ethical decisions, with the hope for general consent.
What a whole nation does is always the result of what so many individuals have done.
You also cannot educate a nation.
You only can teach or change the heart of an individual.
It is true that a nation can be converted to good or bad things, but in this case the individual is merely acting under a suggestion or under the influence of imitation and his actions are therefore without ethical value.
If the individual is not really changed, nothing is changed.
This is unwelcome news and because it is so, the helpful attitude, I do suggest, is not perceived by the ear of a nation.
Therefore one says it is not popular.
In other words: it does not agree with people.
They will do it when everybody else is doing it.
And everybody is waiting for everybody to do it.
So nobody begins.
One is either too modest or too lazy, or too irresponsible to think that one can be the first to do the right thing.
If everybody felt the same thing, there would be at least a vast majority of people thinking responsibility a good thing.
Under those circumstances the major evils of mankind would have been dealt with long ago.
I call your attention to a little book I have written not long ago,where you will find some considerations about the same subject.
It is Answer to Job.
You will find it either in Psychology and Religion (Bollingen Series, New York) or as a small volume published in England (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London).
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 461-462
Jung goes on to comment that women in the West have lost this sense of their own natural wholeness and he wonders ‘whether the growing masculinisation of the white woman is not connected with the loss of her natural wholeness (shamba, children, livestock, house of her own, hearth, fire) and whether the feminising of the white man is not a further consequence.’ ~Diana Baynes, Jung’s Apprentice, Page 175
