Freedom is conditional.
I: “The thought went too far for me, and I shun far-fetched ideas. They are dangerous, since I am a man, and you know how much men are accustomed to seeing thoughts as their very own, so that they eventually confuse them with themselves.”
Elijah: “Will you therefore confuse yourself with a tree or animal, because you look at them and because you exist with them in one and the same world? Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body.” (Footnote 188) ~Carl Jung, The Red Book.
Footnote 188: Jung mentioned this conversation in the 1925 seminar and commented:
“Only then I learned psychological objectivity Only then could I say to a patient, ‘Be quiet, something is happening.’ There are such things as mice in a house. You cannot say you are wrong when you have a thought. For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena” (Analytical Psychology, p. 95).
My thoughts are not my self but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead.(Footnote 199)
Just as I am not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too I am not damaged if I live in my partly chaotic thought world.
Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize.(Footnote 200)
Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals.
Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a forest and a forest animal.
Just as I have freedom in the world, I also have freedom in my thoughts.
Freedom is conditional. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book
