Carl Jung on Bottom – Anthology
Carl Jung on “Bottom” – Anthology
It seems to me that at the bottom of all these problems lies the development of science and technology, which has destroyed man’s metaphysical foundation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 534-537.
This book [I Ching] lies just under the threshold of Chinese consciousness, it is rationally despised under European influence, but every Chinese believes in it at bottom and is perfectly right to do so, for it is an extraordinarily intelligent book. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 109.
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.
This shallow breathing can have very serious results and can start tubercular trouble for people with many complexes get into the habit of not breathing to the bottom of their lungs. ~Carl Jung, Lecture VIII 15June1934, Page 121.
Certainly seeing the top and the bottom is an introverted attitude, but that is just the place the introvert fills. He has distance between himself and the object and so is sensitive to types—he can separate and discriminate. He does not want too many facts and ideas about. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 94
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. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580
If you carefully sterilize everything that you do you make an extract the impurity and leave it at the bottom, and once the water of life is poisoned, it doesn’t need much to make everything wrong. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1058
The creation of a symbol is not a rational process, for a rational process could never produce an image that representsa content which is at bottom incomprehensible. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 171, CW 6, Para 425
Even the man whom we think we know best and who assures us himself that we understand him through and through is at bottom a stranger to us. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 363.
When you can give up the crazy will to live and when you seemingly fall into a bottomless mist, then the truly real life begins with everything which you were meant to be and never reached. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 357-358
The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence “at bottom” the psyche is simply “world.”
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness.
The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima; hence the “child” is such an apt formula for the symbol.
The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality, it can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness.
The deeper “layers” of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness.
“Lower down,” that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e., in chemical substances.
The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence “at bottom” the psyche is simply “world.”
In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking.
The more archaic and “deeper,” that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more “material” it is.
The more abstract, differentiated, and specific it is, and the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its universal character.
Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of attempts at rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 291
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