I had to follow the ineradicable foolishness which furnishes the steps to true wisdom.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
To the Earl of Sandwich
Dear Lord Sandwich, 10 August 1960
It was a great pleasure to receive your kind letter and congratulations on my 85th birthday.
It is indeed quite a number of years since our interview in 1938, when I received an Honorary Degree at Ox- ford, while lecturing there at a Congress of Psychotherapists.
It was on the eve of war and I remember the air filled with forebodings and anxious anticipations.
I remember vividly looking at the delightful buildings and lawns · of the Universitas Oxonensis as if seeing them for the first and last time.
Although Oxford has been spared barbarous destruction I had seen it for the first and last time.
I have not been there again although I always dreamt and hoped to delve more deeply into the treasures of alchemistic manuscripts at the Bodleian.
Fate has decreed otherwise.
I had to follow the ineradicable foolishness which furnishes the steps to true wisdom.
Since man’s nature is temperamentally set against wisdom, it is incumbent upon us to pay its price by what seems foolish to us.
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 ourselves.
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.
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.
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.
There are two sciences in our days which are at immediate grips with the basic problems: nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious.
There things begin to look really tough, as those who have an inkling of understanding of the one thing are singularly incapable of grasping the other thing; and here, so it looks, the great confusion of languages begins, which once already has destroyed a tower of Babel.
I am trying to hold those two worlds together as long as my machinery allows the effort, but it seems to be a condition which is desperately similar to that of the political world, the solution of which nobody yet can foresee.
It is quite possible that we look at the world from the wrong side and that we might find the right answer by changing our point of view and looking at it from the other side, i.e., not from outside, but from inside.
Thanking you once more for your kind letter,
I remain, dear Lord Sandwich,
Yours very sincerely,
C.G. Jung Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580
Carl Jung on “Wisdom” Anthology
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness. ~Carl Jung; CW 20; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 246; Para 330.
The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264.
If one could arrive at the truth by learning the words of wisdom, then the world would have been saved already in the remote times of Lao-tze. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.
At all events wisdom cannot be taught by words. It is only possible by personal contact and by immediate experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.
Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself. ~Carl Jung; Book of Job; Para. 640.
That higher and “complete” man is begotten by the “unknown” father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—”vultu metabolism albums et ater”—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness.
It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ’s “Except ye become as little children” is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158
I . . . have the feeling that this is a time full of marvels, and, if the auguries do not deceive us, it may very well be that . . . we are on the threshold of something really sensational, which I scarcely know how to describe except with the Gnostic concept of [Sophia], an Alexandrian term particularly suited to the reincarnation of ancient wisdom in the shape of ΨA. ~Carl Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters, Page 439
Nature itself speaks in such dreams. The wisdom of the child is the wisdom of nature, and it needs the utmost cunning to follow nature. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 136.
The motif of the net is the attribute of wisdom, it represents the logos and is the net of understanding in which the Mother can be caught. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 148.
No doubt the anima has a very important aspect as a giver of wisdom. She is the femme inspiratrice par excellence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 498-499.
Thus the anima is always associated with the source of wisdom and enlightenment, whose symbol is the Old Wise Man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 498-499.
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, Letters, II, 580.
Where is the wisdom of our old people, where are their precious secrets and their visions? For the most part our old people try to compete with the young. In the United States it is almost an ideal for a father to be the brother of his sons, and for the mother to be if possible the younger sister of her daughter. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, ¶788.
Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 249, Para 334.
But besides that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.
Nevertheless, I console myself with the thought that only a fool expects wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 515-516.
The spirit of God’s wisdom = the Holy Ghost. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 160.
Here is a piece of the superior wisdom of the East. The Yogin realizes that all the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Devatas with which he has filled the heavens are Maya illusion just as the world itself is Maya. All this plurality is illusion. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 74.
You are no Christian and no pagan, but a hospitable inhospitable one, a host of the Gods, a survivor, an eternal one, the father of all eternal wisdom. ~Carl Jung to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 315.
The righteous base their intentions more on the mercy of God, which in whatever they undertake they trust more than their own wisdom. ~Carl Jung citing The Imitation of Christ, Liber Novus, Page 294.
The word is the God that rises out of the waters each morning and proclaims the guiding law to the people. Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, namely my daily law, my daily wisdom. The God renews himself each night. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.
I must free my self from the God, since the God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is also the abomination, he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness, he is more than power, he is also powerlessness, he is more than omnipresence, he is also my creature. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.
Everything now depends on man; immense power of destruction is given into his hands, and the question is whether he can resist the will to use it, and can temper his will with the spirit of love and wisdom. He will hardly be able to do so on his own resources. He needs the help of an “advocate” in heaven. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 459.
In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Reflections, 76.
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.
Together the patient and I address ourselves to the 2,000,000-year-old man that is in all of us. In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. ~Carl Jung, NY Times, October 4, 1936.
Wisdom seeks the middle path and pays for this audacity by a dubious affinity with daemon and beast and so is open to moral interpretation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Page 231, Para 420
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