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Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
The spirit may legitimately claim the patria potestas over the soul; not so the earth-born intellect, which is man’s sword or hammer, and not a creator of spiritual worlds, a father of the soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 32
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 43.
Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason-in the realm of dogma he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where you make the mistake, for then you can do something about it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 424
The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 123.
Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention man would have been lost. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114
Psychology is an empirical science and deals with realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para . 98
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii. Para 17
Man knows only a small part of his psyche, just as he has only a very limited knowledge of the physiology of his body. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 253
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 429
Yahweh and Allah are unreflected God-images, whereas in the Clementine Homilies there is a psychological and reflective spirit at work. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 54n.
We need to find our way back to the original, living spirit which, because of its ambivalence, is also a mediator and uniter of opposites, an idea that preoccupied the alchemists for many centuries. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 141
For alchemy is the mother of the essential substance as well as the concreteness of modern scientific thinking, and not scholasticism, which was responsible in the main only for the discipline and training of the intellect. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 266.
The splitting of the Original Man into husband and wife expresses an act of nascent consciousness; it gives birth to the pair of opposites, thereby making consciousness possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 320
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 43.
We can act differently, if we want to. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114.
Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, par. 15.
The anima also has affinities with animals, which symbolize her characteristics. Thus she can appear as a snake or a tiger or a bird. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 358.
Animals generally signify the instinctive forces of the unconscious, which are brought into unity within the mandala. This integration of the instincts is a prerequisite for individuation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 660.
The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 191-192.
This primary substance [the chaos] is round (massa globosa, rotundum), like the world and the world-soul; it is in fact the world-soul and the world-substance in one. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 376
[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as ‘chaos’ or ‘nigredo’). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, §304.
Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one . . . [is] singularly incapable of moral judgment. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii, par. 15.
This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 21
Emotion is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 15
The ego is the subject of all successful attempts at adaptation so far as these are achieved by the will. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; para 11.
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 17
Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the soul and not to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 50.
We can certainly hand it to Augustine that all natures are good, yet just not good enough to prevent their badness from being equally obvious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 95
Fishing is an intuitive attempt to “catch” unconscious contents (fishes). ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 137.
The causal factors determining his psychic existence reside largely in unconscious processes outside consciousness, and in the same way there are final factors at work in him which likewise originate in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 253
Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97
As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 29
Magnesia is rather the “complete or conjoined mixture from which this moisture is extracted, i.e., the root-matter of our Stone” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241.
The complicated procedure for producing the magnesia is described in the treatise “Aristoteles de perfecto Magisterio.” It is the whitened arcane substance ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241
Pandolfus says in the Turba: “I command you to take the hidden and venerable secret thing, which is the white magnesia” ~Carl Jung, Sermo XXI, CW 9ii, Para 241
In Khunrath, magnesia is synonymous with “chaos” and “Aes Hermetis.” He calls it: “A Catholic or Universal, that is, a Cosmic Ens or Entity, Three-in-One, naturally compounded of Body, Spirit, and Soul, the one and only true Subiectum Catholicon and true Universal Materia lapidis Philosophorum” ~Carl Jung, Von hylealischen Chaos, pp. 5f., CW 9ii, Para 241
The magnesia is feminine, just as the magnet is masculine by nature. Hence it carries “in its belly the sal Armoniacum et vegetabile,” meaning the arcane substance of the Stone. Even in Greek alchemy magnesia or “magnes” denoted the hermaphroditic transformative substance ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241
For the alchemists, magnesia is associated with “magnes” (magnet) not only phonetically, but also in meaning, as a recipe of Rosinus shows: ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241
Rosinus: Take therefore this animate Stone, the Stone which has a soul in it, the mercurial, which is sensible and sensitive to the presence and influence of the magnesia and the magnet, and [which is] the calaminary and the living Stone, yielding and repelling by local motion ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241.
For behind all this looms the vast and unsolved riddle of life itself and of evolution in general, and the question of overriding importance in the end is not the origin of evolution but its goal. Nevertheless, when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. When that happens, anamnesis of the origins is a matter of life and death. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 279
. . . no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 15
If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Par 423.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 14
The will can control them [the impulses] only in part. It may be able to suppress them, but it cannot alter their nature, and what is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded with a resentment that makes the otherwise harmless natural impulse our enemy ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 51
I should also like the term “God” in the phrase “the will of God” to be understood not so much in the Christian sense as in the sense intended by Diotima, when she said: “Eros, dear Socrates, is a mighty daemon” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 51
The Greek words daimon and daimonion express a determining power which comes upon man from outside, like providence or fate, though the ethical decision is left to man. He must know, however, what he is deciding about and what he is doing. Then, if he obeys he is following not just his own opinion, and if he rejects he is destroying not just his own invention ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 51
Here I would like to refer to the authors already cited. Rider Haggard calls She “Wisdom’s Daughter”; Benoît’s Queen of Atlantis has an excellent library that even contains a lost book of Plato. Helen of Troy, in her reincarnation, is rescued from a Tyrian brothel by the wise Simon Magus and accompanies him on his travels ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 64
It is just the most unexpected, the most terrifyingly chaotic things which reveal a deeper meaning. And the more this meaning is recognized, the more the anima loses her impetuous and compulsive character ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 64
Gradually breakwaters are built against the surging of chaos, and the meaningful divides itself from the meaningless. When sense and nonsense are no longer identical, the force of chaos is weakened by their subtraction ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 64
In this way a new cosmos arises. This is not a new discovery in the realm of medical psychology, but the age-old truth that out of the richness of a man’s experience there comes a teaching which the father can pass on to the son. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 64
In elfin nature wisdom and folly appear as one and the same; and they are one and the same as long as they are acted out by the anima. Life is crazy and meaningful at once. And when we do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest scale. There is then little sense and little nonsense either. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 65
When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened. Interpretations are only for those who don’t understand; it is only the things we don’t understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 65
Thus the anima and life itself are meaningless in so far as they offer no interpretation. Yet they have a nature that can be interpreted, for in all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for everything that works is grounded on its opposite. It takes man’s discriminating understanding, which breaks everything down, into antinomial judgments, to recognize this. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 66
Once he comes to grips with the anima, her chaotic capriciousness will give him cause to suspect a secret order, to sense a plan, a meaning, a purpose over and above her nature, or even we might almost be tempted to say to “postulate” such a thing, though this would not be in accord with the truth ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 66
For in actual reality we do not have at our command any power of cool reflection, nor does any science or philosophy help us, and the traditional teachings of religion do so only to a limited degree. We are caught and entangled in aimless experience, and the judging intellect with its categories proves itself powerless. Human interpretation fails, for a turbulent life-situation has arisen that refuses to fit any of the traditional meanings assigned to it. It is a moment of collapse ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 66
We sink into a final depth Apuleius calls it “a kind of voluntary death.” It is a surrender of our own powers, not artificially willed but forced upon us by nature; not a voluntary submission and humiliation decked in moral garb but an utter and unmistakable defeat crowned with the panic fear of demoralization. Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima. This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype of life itself CW 9i, Para 66
I purposely refrained from mentioning this thoroughly characteristic aspect of the anima earlier, because the first encounter with her usually leads one to infer anything rather than wisdom. This aspect appears only to the person who gets to grips with her seriously. Only then, when this hard task has been faced, does he come to realize more and more that behind all her cruel sporting with human fate there lies something like a hidden purpose which seems to reflect a superior knowledge of life’s laws ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 64
All ideas of rebirth are founded on this fact. Nature herself demands a death and a rebirth. As the alchemist Democritus says: “Nature rejoices in nature, nature subdues nature, nature rules over nature” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 234
There are natural transformation processes which simply happen to us, whether we like it or not, and whether we know it or not. These processes develop considerable psychic effects, which would be sufficient in themselves to make any thoughtful person ask himself what really happened to him ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 234
Mandalas are birth-places, vessels of birth in the most literal sense, lotus-flowers in which a Buddha comes to life. Sitting in the lotus-seat, the yogi sees himself transfigured into an immortal ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 234
Natural transformation processes announce themselves mainly in dreams. Elsewhere I have presented a series of dream-symbols of the process of individuation. They were dreams which without exception exhibited rebirth symbolism. In this particular case there was a long-drawn-out process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 235
This “other being” is the other person in ourselvesthat larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul. That is why we take comfort whenever we find the friend and companion depicted in a ritual, an example being the friendship between Mithras and the sun-god ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 235
This relationship is a mystery to the scientific intellect, because the intellect is accustomed to regard these things unsympathetically. But if it made allowance for feeling, we would discover that it is the friend whom the sun-god takes with him on his chariot, as shown in the monuments ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 235
It is the representation of a friendship between two men which is simply the outer reflection of an inner fact: it reveals our relationship to that inner friend of the soul into whom Nature herself would like to change usthat other person who we also are and yet can never attain to completely. We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 235
The transformation processes strive to approximate them to one another, but our consciousness is aware of resistances, because the other person seems strange and uncanny, and because we cannot get accustomed to the idea that we are not absolute master in our own house ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 235
We should prefer to be always “I” and nothing else. But we are confronted with that inner friend or foe, and whether he is our friend or our foe depends on ourselves ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 235
You need not be insane to hear his voice [of the inner being']. On the contrary, it is the simplest and most natural thing imaginable. For instance, you can ask yourself a question to which “he” gives answer. The discussion is then carried on as in any other conversation. You can describe it as mere “associating” or “talking to oneself,” or as a “meditation” in the sense used by the old alchemists, who referred to their interlocutor as aliquem alium internum,a certain other one, within’ ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 236
This form of colloquy with the friend of the soul was even admitted by Ignatius Loyola into the technique of his Exercitia spiritualia, but with the limiting condition that only the person meditating is allowed to speak, whereas the inner responses are passed over as being merely human and therefore to be repudiated ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 236
This state of things has continued down to the present day. It is no longer a moral or metaphysical prejudice, butwhat is much worse an intellectual one ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 236
The “voice” is explained as nothing but “associating,” pursued in a witless way and running on and on without sense or purpose, like the works of a clock that has no dial. Or we say “It is only my own thoughts!” even if, on closer inspection, it should turn out that they are thoughts which we either reject or had never consciously thought at allas if everything psychic that is glimpsed by the ego had always formed part of it! ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 236
Naturally this hybris serves the useful purpose of maintaining the supremacy of ego-consciousness, which must be safeguarded against dissolution into the unconscious. But it breaks down ignominiously if ever the unconscious should choose to let some nonsensical idea become an obsession or to produce other psychogenic symptoms, for which we would not like to accept responsibility on any account ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 236
Our attitude towards this inner voice alternates between two extremes: it is regarded either as undiluted nonsense or as the voice of God. It does not seem to occur to any one that there might be something valuable in between ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 237
The “other” may be just as one-sided in one way as the ego is in another. And yet the conflict between them may give rise to truth and meaning but only if the ego is willing to grant the other its rightful personality ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 237
It [the `other’] has, of course, a personality anyway, just as have the voices of insane people; but a real colloquy becomes possible only when the ego acknowledges the existence of a partner to the discussion ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 237
The alchemists projected the inner event into an outer figure, so for them the inner friend appeared in the form of the “Stone,” of which the Tractatus aureus says: “Understand, ye sons of the wise, what this exceeding precious Stone crieth out to you: Protect me and I will protect thee. Give me what is mine that I may help thee.” To this a scholiast adds: “The seeker after truth hears both the Stone and the Philosopher speaking as if out of one mouth.” The Philosopher is Hermes, and the Stone is identical with Mercurius, the Latin Hermes ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 238
From the earliest times, Hermes was the mystagogue and psychopomp of the alchemists, their friend and counsellor, who leads them to the goal of their work. He is “like a teacher mediating between the stone and the disciple” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 238
To others the friend appears in the shape of Christ or Khidr or a visible or invisible guru, or some other personal guide or leader figure ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 238
In this case the colloquy is distinctly one-sided: there is no inner dialogue, but instead the response appears as the action of the other, i.e., as an outward event ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 238
The alchemists saw it in the transformation of the chemical substance. So if one of them sought transformation, he discovered it outside in matter, whose transformation cried out to him, as it were, “I am the transformation!” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 238
But some were clever enough to know, “It is my own transformation not a personal transformation, but the transformation of what is mortal in me into what is immortal. It shakes off the mortal husk that I am and awakens to a life of its own; it mounts the sun-barge and may take me with it” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 238
We go through a door into a tower-like room, where we climb a long flight of steps. On one of the topmost steps I read an inscription: Vis ut sis.' The steps end in a temple situated on the crest of a wooded mountain, and there is no other approach. It is the shrine of Ursanna, the bear-goddess and Mother of God in one. The temple is of red stone. Bloody sacrifices are offered there. Animals are standing about the altar. In order to enter the temple precincts one has to be transformed into an animala beast of the forest. The temple has the form of a cross with equal arms and a circular space in the middle, which is not roofed, so that one can look straight up at the sky and the constellation of the Bear. On the altar in the middle of the open space there stands the moon-bowl, from which smoke or vapour continually rises. There is also a huge image of the goddess, but it cannot be seen clearly. The worshippers, who have been changed into animals and to whom I also belong, have to touch the goddess's foot with their own foot, whereupon the image gives them a sign or an oracular utterance likeVis ut sis’ ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 343
In this dream the bear-goddess emerges plainly, although her statue “cannot be seen clearly” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 343
The relationship to the Self, the supraordinate personality, is indicated not only by the oracle “Vis ut sis” but by the quaternity and the circular central precinct of the temple ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 343
From ancient times any relationship to the stars has always symbolized eternity. The soul comes “from the stars” and returns to the stellar regions. “Ursanna’s” relation to the moon is indicated by the “moon-bowl” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 343
Where there is an undervaluation of sexuality the Self is symbolized as a phallus. Undervaluation can consist in an ordinary repression or in overt devaluation. In certain differentiated persons a purely biological interpretation and evaluation of sexuality can also have this effect ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii Para 357
Any such conception overlooks the spiritual and “mystical” implications of the sexual instinct. These have existed from time immemorial as psychic facts, but are devalued and repressed on rationalistic and philosophical grounds. In all such cases one can expect an unconscious phallicism by way of compensation. A good example of this is the mainly sexualistic approach to the psyche that is to be found in Freud ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 357
Just as the circle is contrasted with the square, so the quaternity is contrasted with the 3 + 1 motif, and the positive, beautiful, good, admirable, and lovable human figure with a daemonic, misbegotten creature who is negative, ugly, evil, despicable and an object of fear ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 9ii, 355
Like all archetypes, the Self has a paradoxical, antinomial character. It is male and female, old man and child, powerful and helpless, large and small. The Self is a true “complexio oppositorum,” though this does not mean that it is anything like as contradictory in itself. It is quite possible that the seeming paradox is nothing but a reflection of the enantiodromian changes of the conscious attitude, which can have a favourable or an unfavourable effect on the whole ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 355
)The same is true of the unconscious in general, for its frightening figures may be called forth by the fear which the conscious mind has of the unconscious. The importance of consciousness should not be underrated; hence it is advisable to relate the contradictory manifestations of the unconscious causally to the conscious attitude, at least in some degree ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 355
But consciousness should not be overrated either, for experience provides too many incontrovertible proofs of the autonomy of unconscious compensatory processes for us to seek the origin of these antinomies only in the conscious mind ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 355
Between the conscious and the unconscious there is a kind of “uncertainty relationship,” because the observer is inseparable from the observed and always disturbs it by the act of observation. In other words, exact observation of the unconscious prejudices observation of the conscious and vice versa ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 355
Thus the Self can appear in all shapes from the highest to the lowest, inasmuch as these transcend the scope of the ego personality in the manner of a daimonion ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 356
The final factors at work in us are nothing other than those talents which “a certain nobleman” entrusted to his “servants,” that they might trade with them (Luke 19:12 ff.). It does not require much imagination to see what this involvement in the ways of the world means in the moral sense. Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious s/he is, the more the devil drives her/him. . . . Only ruthless self-knowledge o the widest scale, which sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives of human action, offers some guarantee that the end result will not turn out too badly ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 255.
It is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, consciousness, patience, etc., are of the greatest value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective self-criticism are valuable on the intellectual side. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 46.
Sooner or later nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together as both of them, independently of one another and from opposite directions, push forward into transcendental territory, the one with the concept of the atom, the other with that of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 412
No amount of insight into the relativity and fallibility of our moral judgment can deliver us from these defects, and those who deem themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of mankind, because they are twisted with the pain and fear of their own sickness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97
This subjective knowledge of the self [is what is meant by]: “No one can know himself unless he knows what, and not who, he is, on what he depends, or whose he is (or to whom or what he belongs) and for what end he was made.” This distinction . . . is crucial. . . . Not the subjective ego-consciousness of the psyche is meant, but the psyche itself as the unknown, unprejudiced object that still has to be investigated. . . . “What” refers to the neutral self, the objective fact of totality, since the ego is on the one hand causally “dependent on” or “belongs to” it, and on the other hand is directed toward it as to a goal ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 252.
The shadow, the syzygy, and the Self are psychic factors of which an adequate picture can be formed only on the basis of a fairly thorough experience of them. Just as these concepts arose out of an experience of reality, so they can be elucidated only by further experience ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 63.
We know only a small part of our psyches. The causal factors determining [one’s] psychic existence reside largely in the unconscious processes outside consciousness , and in the same way there are final factors at work in [one] that likewise originate in the unconscious. . . . Causes and ends thus transcend consciousness to a degree that ought not to be underestimated, and this implies that their nature and action are unalterable and irreversible [to the degree that] they have not become objects of consciousness. They can only be corrected through conscious insight and moral determination, which is why self-knowledge, being so necessary, is feared so much ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 253.
Through the Christ crucified between the two thieves, man gradually attained knowledge of his shadow and its duality. This duality had already been anticipated by the double meaning of the serpent. Just as the serpent stands for the power that heals as well as corrupts, so one of the thieves is destined upwards, the other downwards, and so likewise the shadow is on one side regrettable and reprehensible weakness, on the other side healthy instinctively and the prerequisite for higher consciousness. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; Page 255; Para 402.
Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 126
Who are we to imagine that “it couldn’t happen here”? We have only to multiply the population of Switzerland by twenty to become a nation of eighty millions, and our public intelligence and morality would then be automatically divided by twenty in consequence of the devastating moral and psychic effects of living together in huge masses. Such a state of things provides the basis for collective crime, and it is then really a miracle if the crime is not committed …. It has filled us with horror to realize all that man is capable of, and of which, therefore, we too are capable. Since then a terrible doubt about humanity, and about ourselves, gnaws at our hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 412
Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic — and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience. Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the passion for show and new clothes. What is more, these images — are they Christian or Buddhist or what you will — are lovely, mysterious, and richly intuitive. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 7-8.
The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 282
Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions. Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity. Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam. . . . And on top of this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature’s business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 35
When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 90
Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya—and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 24
The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down. Instead, dogma is “believed”; it is hypostatized, as the Protestants hypostatize the Bible, illegitimately making it the supreme authority, regardless of its contradictions and controversial interpretations. (As we know, anything can be authorized out of the Bible.) Dogma no longer formulates anything, no longer expresses anything; it has become a tenet to be accepted in and for itself, with no basis in any experience that would demonstrate its truth. Indeed, faith has itself become that experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 276
Myths are miracle tales and treat of all those things which, very often, are also objects of belief. In the everyday world of consciousness such things hardly exist; that is to say, until 1933 only lunatics would have been found in possession of living fragments of mythology. After this date the world of heroes and monsters spread like a devastating fire over whole nations, proving that the strange world of myth had suffered no loss of vitality during the centuries of reason and enlightenment. If metaphysical ideas no longer have such a fascinating effect as before, this is certainly not due to any lack of primitivity in the European psyche, but simply and solely to the fact that the erstwhile symbols no longer express what is now welling up from the unconscious as the end-result of the development of Christian consciousness through the centuries. This end result is a true antimimon pneuma, a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, woolly-mindedness, criminal amorality, and doctrinaire fanaticism, a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods, spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug, fit only to be fed wholesale to the mass man of today. That is what the post-Christian spirit looks like. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 66
