A man’s lifework is like a ship he has built and equipped himself
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
To B. von Fischer 11 July 160
Please accept my most cordial thanks for your kind birthday letter, which it was both an honour and a plea- sure to receive.
I am particularly sensible of the appreciative words you have written on my life’s work, for they are a melody which one does not often hear in our dear Fatherland.
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.
Like all three-dimensional things it gradually sinks below the horizon. What remains is what has been.
I am, Sir,
respectfully and gratefully yours,
C.G. Jung Letters Vol. II, Page 577
It is as if our consciousness were a continent, an island or even a ship on the great sea of the unconscious.
It was the anticipatory quality in dreams that was first valued by antiquity and the played an important role in the ritual of many religions.
It is impossible to put the conscious before the unconscious, for the latter exists before and after consciousness.
In childhood we are still contained in it and our consciousness slowly emerges from it as islands which gradually join together and form a continent.
It is as if our consciousness were a continent, an island or even a ship on the great sea of the unconscious.
The subject of the unconscious has been occupying philosophers for some time back and there are thousands of examples on every side which show how consciousness is fed from the unconscious; we are only able to speak if ideas flow to us from the unconscious p art of the psyche, which is the mother of consciousness.
So we cannot judge dreams from the conscious point of view, but can only think of them as complementary to consciousness.
Dreams answer the questions of our conscious.
It is a primeval belief that questions can be put to the Gods and answered by dreams.
We are not far from the truth, in fact we are very near to primeval truth, when we think of our dreams as answers to questions, which we have asked and which we have not asked. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 156-157
So we founded the monastery-near the Nile, from where we could see the passing ships.
M. [Anchorite/Monk]: “I would prefer not to tell you.
But it does not appear to be a dispensation of God that one can escape.
So know then that you, evil spirit, have done me a terrible deed.
You seduced me with your accursed curiosity, desirously stretching my hand after the divine mysteries, since you made me conscious at that time that I really knew nothing about them.
Your remark that I probably needed the closeness of men to arrive at the higher mysteries stunned me like infernal poison.
Soon thereafter I called the brothers of the valley together and announced to them that a messenger of God had appeared to me-so terribly had you blinded me-and commanded me to form a monastery with the brothers.
When Brother Philetus raised an objection, I refuted him with reference to the passage in the holy scriptures where it is said that it is not good for man to be alone.
So we founded the monastery-near the Nile, from where we could see the passing ships.
We cultivated fat fields and there was so much to do that the holy studies fell into oblivion.
We became voluptuous, and one day I was filled with such terrible longing to see Alexandria again.
I wanted to visit the bishop there.
But the first I was intoxicated so much by life on the ship, and then by the milling crowds on the streets of Alexandria, that I became completely lost.
As in a dream I climbed onto one of the large ships bound for Italy; I felt an insatiable greed to see the world, I drank wine, wallowed in pleasure and wholly turned into an animal.
When I climbed ashore in Naples, the Red One stood there, and I knew that I had fallen into the hands of evil-[‘] ~The Black Books, Vol. III, Pages117-118
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