To understand metaphysically is impossible; it can only be done psychologically.
Psychology and Religion: West and East (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11)
To understand metaphysically is impossible; it can only be done psychologically I therefore strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology.
In this way, I can at least get something comprehensible out of them, and can avail myself of it.
Moreover, I learn psychological conditions and processes which before were veiled in symbols and out of reach of my understanding.
In doing this I am also enabled to follow a path similar to the alleged metaphysical one, and can have similar experiences.
Finally, if there should still lurk something metaphysical that cannot be formulated, it would then have the best opportunity of showing itself.
To be specific in this matter, I can say that my admiration for the great Eastern philosophers is as great and as indubitable as my attitude toward their metaphysics is irreverent.
I suspect them of being symbolical psychologists, to whom no greater wrong could be done than to be taken literally.
If it were really metaphysics that they mean, it would be useless to try to understand them.
But if it is psychology, we can not only understand them, but we can profit greatly by them, for then the so-called “metaphysical” comes within the range of experience.
If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold.
I do not affect him, nor does he affect me.
But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a mighty activity in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him; he can then become even unpleasantly important, and in practical ways too, which sounds horribly banal, like everything appearing in the sphere of reality. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower.
Metaphysical assertions are statements of the psyche
Metaphysical assertions are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological.
To the Western mind, which compensates its well-known feelings of resentment by a slavish regard for “rational” explanations, this obvious truth seems all too obvious, or else it is seen as an inadmissible negation of metaphysical “truth.”
Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.”
For him the “soul” is something pitifully small, unworthy, personal, subjective, and a lot more besides.
He therefore prefers to use the word “mind” instead, though he likes to pretend at the same time that a statement which may in fact be very subjective indeed is made by the “mind,” naturally by the “Universal Mind,” or even—at a pinch—by the “Absolute” itself.
This rather ridiculous presumption is probably a compensation for the regrettable smallness of the soul.
It almost seems as if Anatole France had uttered a truth which were valid for the whole Western world when, in his Penguin Island, Catherine d’Alexandrie offers this advice to God: “Donnezleur une ame, mais une petite!” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 835
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
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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