Mystic and Mysticism Anthology
Everyone who says that I am a Mystic is just and idiot. He just doesn’t understand the first word of Psychology. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with Richard L. Evans, [Houston Film]
I am essentially an empiricist and have discovered to my cost that when people do not understand me they think I have seen visions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 122
“Facts first and theories later is the keynote of Jung’s work. He is an empiricist first and last.” ~British Medical Journal (9 February 1952)
People call me a mystic, but [humans] really are chock-full of mysticism; that word covers a large area of facts which we cannot understand.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 296.
When a woman realizes her shadow the animus can be constellated. If the shadow remains in the unconscious the animus possesses her through the shadow. When she realizes her animus, mystical generation can occur. Sarah was Abraham’s legitimate wife, but Hagar, the dark one, had the procreative animus. Out of darkness the light is born. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
It is a figure comparable to Hiranyagarbha, Purusha, Atman, and the mystic Buddha. For this reason I have elected to call it the “self,” by which I understand a psychic totality and at the same time a centre, neither of which coincides with the ego but includes it, just as a larger circle encloses a smaller one. ~Carl Jung, CW 9I, 247.
Only the mystics bring religion to what is creative itself. Carl Gustav Jung [LC 540]
Everything psychic has a lower and a higher meaning, as in the profound saying of late classical mysticism: ‘Heaven above, Heaven below, stars above, stars below, all that is above also is below, know this and rejoice.’ Here we lay our finger on the secret symbolical significance of everything psychic. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; para 77.
When they [the mystics] descend into the depths of their own being they find ‘in their heart’ the image of the sun, they find their own life-force which they call the ‘sun’ for a legitimate and, I would say, a physical reason because our source of energy and life actually is sun. Our physiological life, regarded as an energy process, is entirely solar ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 176.
We can find clear proof of this fact in the history of science itself. The so-called “mystical” experience of the French philosopher Descartes involved a . . . sudden revelation in which he saw in a flash the “order of all sciences”. The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his “strong sense of man’s double being,” when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 25.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic text from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has been turned into a Nazareth Gradually from which nothing good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth – the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better. ~ Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99
Concerning your view about Hatha-Yoga I can confirm your ideas entirely. Yoga as well as other “mystical” practices imitate nature and that explains their efficacy. Yoga postures are imitations of catatonic gestures, postures and mannerisms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 497-498.
Behind Gretchen stands the Gnostic sequence: Helen-Mary-Sophia. They represent a real Platonic world of ideas (thinking and sensation on the mystic level). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 264-266.
Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but must grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper-only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 17-19.
The lotus has always had an important mystical meaning. Its roots are down in the slime and mud at the bottom of the lake and the flower unfolds on the surface of the water. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 113.
Prana conceives of the body as a sort of system of pipes, going into the limbs and connecting the centres. These centres are not mystical but psychical centres of experience. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
The mystical rose, like the lotus in India, grows for the salvation of man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.
We could say that it was owing to Al-Gazzali that Islam became a mystical religion, though we in the West know very little today of this mystical side. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10Nov1939, Page 178.
So Christian theologians became acquainted with the devotional and mystical books of the Arabs and they made a vast impression upon them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10Nov1939, Page 178.
It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11Jan1935, Pages 171.
Turned towards the world, the anima is fickle, capricious, moody, uncontrolled and emotional, sometimes gifted with daemonic intuitions, ruthless, malicious, untruthful, bitchy, double-faced, and mystical. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 222f.
A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but just grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god/ the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper-only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 18.
You seem to forget that I am first and foremost an empiricist, who was led to the question of Western and Eastern mysticism only for empirical reasons. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 195.
I was particularly satisfied with the fact that you clearly understand that I am not a mystic but an empiricist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 237.
Dr. Meier has drawn my attention to your short review of Rosenberg’s book. For anyone who knows Jewish history, and in particular Hasidism, Rosenberg’s assertion that the Jews despise mysticism is a highly regrettable error. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 238.
Behind Gretchen stands the Gnostic sequence: Helen-Mary-Sophia. They represent a real Platonic world of ideas (thinking and sensation on the mystic level ). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 265.
Owing to rather obvious reasons Protestant theologians are rather reticent and they don’t know yet whether I should be condemned as a heretic or depreciated as a mystic. As you know, mysticism and hereticism enjoy about the same bad reputation in Protestantism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 382.
You will be accused of mysticism, but the reputation you won with the Dementia will hold up for quite some time against that. ~Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung Letter May 1911.
She had very changeable looks, as so many intuitives do, and could sometimes look beautiful and sometimes quire plain. Her extraordinary brilliant eyes-mystic’s eyes-were always expressive. ~Helena Henderson on Toni Wolff, Carl, Emma, Toni Remembrances, P. 31.
I have been alternately accused of agnosticism, atheism, materialism and mysticism. ~Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 207.
The goal of Eastern religious practice is the same as that of Western mysticism: the shifting of the center of gravity from the ego to the self, from man to God. This means that the ego disappears in the self, and man in God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 958