Carl Jung Anthologies “Absolute Knowledge” – “Dreams” [Part 1]

The following is meant for personal study only. It is a work in progress and will be updated periodically:

Absolute Knowledge, Active Imagination, Alone, Afternoon of Life, Ancestral, Angels, Animals, Alchemy, Ancestral, Anima/Animus, Animus, Archetypes, Artist, Assumption, Atheism, Aquarius, Being, Belief, Bible, Bollingen, Books, Bottom, Brain, Bridges, Buber, Buddha, Cancer, Catholic, Chaos, Character, Child, Christ in Liber Novus, Church, Collective Unconscious, Common Sense, Complexes, Creative Life, Daimon, Death, Depression, Doubt, Dragons, Dreams

Carl Jung and “Absolute Knowledge” – Anthology

Man’s consciousness is receptive to what Jung called â€˜absolute knowledge a cosmic principle or quasi intelligence outside the psyche. All thinking which takes place in the ego obscures this ˜knowledge.The;quieting of the ego is required before one can approach it. Marie Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, (Page number needed)

The meaning that unites these inner and outer happenings consists of knowledge unmediated by the sense organs.;This quality of knowledge is what Jung calls absolute knowledge, since it seems to be detached from our consciousness. [CW 8, par. 148] Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 35.

The absolute knowledge which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self-subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449

The lowering of consciousness means on the other hand an approach to the unconscious, and because the unconscious seems to have access to this “absolute knowledge,” information can be mediated which can no longer be explained rationally and causally. Carl Jung letter to S. Wieser, 6July1951

The unconscious has a kind of absolute knowledge, but we cannot prove it is an absolute knowledge, because the Absolute, the Eternal, is transcendental. Carl Jung, Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 375-391.

Carl Jung on Active Imagination – Anthology

This process of active imagination is the making conscious of the material which lies on the threshold of consciousness. Consciousness is an effort and you have to sleep in order to recuperate from the task. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Volume II, Page 12.

The alchemistic development of active imagination broke off after the Middle Ages but such interruptions do not occur in the East. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 3, Page 14.

Children are full of active imagination but we think of it as a childish activity. This is an error, for we find it everywhere among primitives and in all ancient cultures all over the world. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 3, Page 12.

Active imagination is to be understood as a way or method, to heal, raise and transform the personality. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 174.

Through active imagination the image is imprinted on the psychic essence of personality with the purpose of transformation. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 174.

Active imagination is the intentional activating of a function which otherwise remains passive. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.

We do not stop to think that nothing would exist, there would be no culture in the world, if it were not for active imagination; it is always the forerunner, everything springs from it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.

I have seen such cases where a second personality brings about an absolute change in character. It is this phenomenon which is made conscious here through active imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 106.

The meaning of this passage age is that through active imagination the Yogin succeeds in making his senses and functions independent. It is the purification of the senses. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page 59.

The unconscious comes into action through the attitude of the conscious in active imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

The East understands active phantasying and its inner meaning far better than we do. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Page 238.

If someone has a mastery of total critical evaluation, it is possible for him to reach the processes of the unconscious through automatic writing instead of through “active imagination.” ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 18.

The technique of active imagination can prove very important in difficult situations — where there is a visitation, say. It only makes sense when one has the feeling of being up against a blank wall. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 18.

Active imagination is only legitimate if one is confronted with an insurmountable obstacle in a situation where no one can give advice. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 18.

Active imagination and automatic writing, painting and carving pictures from the unconscious, are all indirect methods of finding out what the unconscious means. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 18.

Passive fantasy is always in need of conscious criticism whereas active fantasy [,,,] does not require criticism so much as understanding. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Par. 714.

I used the same technique [Active Imagination] of the descent, but this time I went much deeper. The first time I should say I reached a depth of about one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 68

The paintings initially started out as illustrations of the fantasies in the text, and thereafter could be considered active imaginations in their own right, at times referring to contemporaneous fantasies in Jung’s Black Books. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xii

Carl Jung on being “Alone.” – Anthology.

My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you; therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you. The touchstone is being alone with oneself. This is the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 330.

Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.

To the extent that he does live in reality the whole range of his particular life, the individual is . . . an alchemical retort, in which the elements present in the collective are melted down and refashioned to form a new synthesis, which is then offered to the collective. But the predigestion of evil which he carried out as part of the process of assimilating his shadow makes him, at the same time, an agent for the immunization of the collective. An individual’s shadow is invariably bound up with the collective shadow of his group, and as he digests his own evil, a fragment of the collective evil is invariably co-digested at the same time. ~Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, p. 130.

The highest and most decisive experience of all . . . is to be alone with . . . [one’s] own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 32.

[The philosophers] called their stone animate because, at the final operations, by virtue of the power of this most noble fiery mystery, a dark red liquid, like blood, sweats out drop by drop from their material and their vessel. And for this reason they have prophesied that in the last days a most pure [or genuine] man, through whom the world will be freed, will come to earth and will sweat bloody drops of a rosy or red hue, whereby the world will be redeemed from its Fall. In like manner, too, the blood of their stone will free the leprous metals a ~and also men from their diseases. . . . and that is the reason why the stone is called animate ;For in the blood of this stone is hidden its soul. . . . For a like reason they have called it their microcosm, because it contains the similitude of all things of this word, and therefore again they say that it is animate, as Plato calls the macrocosm animate. ~Gerhard Dorn, Quoted in Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 381.

Since the stone represents the homo totus, it is only logical for Dorn to speak of the “putissimus homo” [most true man] when discussing the arcane substance and its bloody sweat, for this is what it is all about. He is the arcanum, and the stone and its parallel or prefiguration is Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. This “most pure” or “most true” man must be no other than what he is, just as “argentum putum” is unalloyed silver; he must be entirely man, a man who knows and possesses everything human and is not adulterated by any influence or admixture from without. This man will appear on earth only “in the last days.” He cannot be Christ, for Christ by his blood has already redeemed the world from the consequences of the Fall. . . . On no account is it a question here of a future Christ and salvator microcosmi, but rather of the alchemical servator cosmi (preserver of the cosmos), representing the still unconscious idea of the whole and complete man, who shall bring about what the sacrificial death of Christ has obviously left unfinished, namely the deliverance of the world from evil. Like Christ he will sweat a redeeming blood, but . . . it is “rose-colored”; not natural or ordinary blood, but symbolic blood, a psychic substance, the manifestation of a certain kind of Eros which unifies the individual as well as the multitude in the sign of the rose and makes them whole. ~Gerhard Dorn, Quoted in Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 390.

As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. I cannot presume to pass judgment on his final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion-be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion-ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with his own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12: Page 32.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.

What is meant is, that you should be with yourself, not alone but with yourself, and you can be with yourself even in a crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1484.

Carl Jung on “Afternoon of Life” -Anthology

 The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 114.

But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 784

Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 787.

Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of lifeâ€™s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 78

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning. The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind, and the care of our children. This is the obvious purpose of nature. But when this purpose has been attained â€”and more than attained shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests, and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 787

Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as going forward. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of lifeâ€™s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Page 111

;Obviously it is in the youthful period of life that we have most to gain from a thorough recognition of the instinctual side. A timely recognition of sexuality, for instance, can prevent that neurotic suppression of it which keeps a man unduly withdrawn from life, or else forces him into a wretched and unsuitable way of living with which he is bound to come into conflict. Proper recognition and appreciation of normal instincts leads the young person into life and entangles him with fate, thus involving him in life’s necessities and the consequent sacrifices and efforts through which his character is developed and his experience matured. For the mature person, however, the continued expansion of life is obviously not the right principle, because the descent towards life’s afternoon demands simplification, limitation, and intensification- in other words, individual culture. A man in the first half of life with its biological orientation can usually, thanks to the youthfulness of his whole organism, afford to expand his life and make something of value out of it. But the man in the second half of life is oriented towards culture, the diminishing powers of his organism allowing him to subordinate his instincts to cultural goals. Not a few are wrecked during the transition from the biological to the cultural sphere. Our collective education makes practically no provision for this transitional period. Concerned solely with the education of the young, we disregard the education of the adult, of whom it is always assumed-on what grounds who can say?-that he needs no more education. There is an almost total lack of guidance for this extraordinarily important transition from the biological to the cultural attitude, for the transformation of energy from the biological form into the cultural form. This transformation process is an individual one and cannot be enforced by general rules and maxims. It is achieved by means of the symbol. Symbol-formation is a fundamental problem that cannot be discussed here. I must refer the reader to Chapter V in my Psychological Types, where I have dealt with this question in detail. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 113

An inexperienced youth thinks one can let the old people go, because not much more can happen to them anyway they have their lives behind them and are no better than petrified pillars of the past. But it is a great mistake to suppose that the meaning of life is exhausted with the period of youth and expansion; that, for example, a woman who has passed the menopause is finished. afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 114

Man has two aims the first is the natural aim, the begetting of children and the business of protecting the brood; to this belongs the acquisition of money and social position. When this aim has been reached a new phase begins the cultural aim. For the attainment of the former we have the help of nature and, on top of that, education; for the attainment of the latter, little or nothing helps. Often, indeed, a false ambition survives, in that an old man wants to be a youth again, or at least feels he must behave like one, although in his heart he can no longer make believe. This is what makes the transition from the natural to the cultural phase so terribly difficult and bitter for many people; they cling to the illusion of youth or to their children, hoping to salvage in this way a last little scrap of youth.

One sees it especially in mothers, who find their sole meaning in their children and imagine they will sink into a bottomless void when they have to give them up. No wonder that so many bad neuroses appear at the onset of life’s afternoon. It is a sort of second puberty, another storm and stress a period, not infrequently accompanied by tempests of passion ”the dangerous the problems that crop up at this age are no longer to be solved by the old recipes the hand of this clock cannot be put back. What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 114

The transition from morning to afternoon means a revaluation of the earlier values. There comes the urgent need to appreciate the value of the opposite of our former ideals, to perceive the error in our former convictions, to recognize the untruth in our former truth, and to feel how much antagonism and even hatred lay in what, until now, had passed for love. Not a few of those who are drawn into the conflict of opposites jettison everything that had previously seemed to them good and worth striving for; they try to live in complete opposition to their former ego.  Changes of profession, divorces, religious convulsions, apostasies of every description, are the symptoms of this swing over to the opposite.

The snag about a radical conversion into one’s opposite is that one’s former life suffers repression and thus produces just as unbalanced a state as existed before, when the counterparts of the conscious virtues and values were still repressed and unconscious.  Just as before, perhaps, neurotic disorders arose because the opposing fantasies were unconscious, so now other disorders arise through the repression of former idols. It is of course a fundamental mistake to imagine that when we see the non-value in a value or the untruth in a truth, the value or the truth ceases to exist. It has only become relative. Everything human is relative, because everything rests on an inner polarity; for everything is a phenomenon of energy. Energy necessarily depends on a pre-existing polarity, without which there could be no energy. There must always be high and low, hot and cold, etc., so that the equilibrating process-which is energy can take place. Therefore the tendency to deny all previous values in favour of their opposites is just as much of an exaggeration as the earlier one-sidedness. And in so far as it is a question of rejecting universally accepted and indubitable values, the result is a fatal loss. One who acts in this way empties himself out with his values, as Nietzsche has already said. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 115

Carl Jung on “Ancestral” – Anthology

You live inasmuch as these Mendelian units are living. They have souls, are endowed with psychic life, the psychic life of that ancestor; or you can call it part of an ancestral soul. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1401.

Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 237.

This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or ‘archetype’ [q.v.] of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman . . . Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion.” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 391.

Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.

The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 240.

If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139

There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, page 38.

In the redemption of the individual, the whole past will be redeemed, and that includes all the inferior things as well, the animals, and all the ancestral souls, everything that has not been completed; all creation will be redeemed in the apokatastasis [at the time of the Last Judgement], there will be a complete restoration of things as they have been. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1280

The deposit of manâ’s whole ancestral experience is so rich in emotional imagery of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337

These constituents of the personality which one may call functions, or Mendelian units, or the primitives would call them remnants of ancestral souls these constituents do not always fit. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 453

Carl Jung on “Angels” -Anthology.

Why, when Pope Pius XII in one of his last discourses deplored that the world was no longer conscious enough of the presence of angels, he was saying to his faithful Catholics in Christian terms exactly what I am trying to say in terms of psychology to those who stand more chance of understanding this language than any other. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

But God, who also does not hear our prayers, wants to become man, and for that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darknessâ€”the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 746.

Every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 432.

The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. ~Carl Jung, Answer to Job, Para 746.

A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.

The word meditation is used, when someone holds an inner dialogue (colloquium) with someone else who is invisible, and also when God is invoked, or when someone speaks to himself or to his good angel. ~Dr. Rulandus, Cited ETH, Page 171.

In these terrible days when evil is once again inundating the world in every conceivable form, I want you to know that I am thinking of you and of your family in Hungary, and hope with you that the avenging angel will pass by their door. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 336.

Around the birth of Christ, there follows the Age of Pisces. Pisces is a water sign.

That is probably why we have to look for the spirit in the water, in life’s flow of images, and in the unconscious. And now we are on the threshold of the sign of Aquarius. The air element is assigned to it, and it is symbolized by an angel or a human being, instead of an animal. Here the spirit is meant to become something subtle again, and man to become who he is. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 354-355.

Carl Jung on “Animals.” – Anthology

The Animals. We appreciate them much more. We think of the psychology of animals.In the 19th century they made laws for their protection, and began to treat them more decently, but it is only in recent years that we begin to think of a few animals as our brothers. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 21.

There is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man.;The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 359.

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 8.

Because they are so closely akin to us and share our unknowingness, I loved all warm-blooded animals who have souls like ourselves and with whom, so I thought, we have an instinctive understanding. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 67.

This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 359.

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Page 446.

Emotional manifestations are based on similar patterns, and are recognizably the same all over the earth. We understand them even in animals, and the animals themselves understand each other in this respect, even if they belong to different species. ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page 234.

The most pronounced intuitives have what the Scotch call second sight, they can, for instance, foretell the weather, many animals also have this last power. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 100.

Often when people behave in an exceedingly unexpected manner the appearance of an archetype is the explanation ; archetypes go back not only through human history, but to our ancestors the animals, that is why we are able to understand animals so well and make friends with them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 177.

Primitives are re ally human animals living on the lap of the earth and from its sap. We are merely enlightened! ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 200.

In these days, on the other hand, we are becoming very sentimental about animals, every kind of society for the prevention of cruelty to animals exists, which shows that we are getting more friendly towards our instincts. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 220.

One o the aims of some kinds of Yoga is to understand the voice of all animals, but we are not convinced in the West that horses and dogs have such important thoughts. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 17.

Carl Jung on “Alchemy” “Alchemy” – Anthology

But Mercurius is the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter, the god of revelation, lord of thought and sovereign psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 292.

Not for nothing did alchemy style itself an “art,” feelingand rightly soâ€”that it was concerned with creative processes that can be truly grasped only by experience, though intellect may give them a name. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 482.

That from which things arise is the invisible and immovable God. ~Liber Platonis Quartorum, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 323.

But Mercurius is the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter, the god of revelation, lord of thought and sovereign psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 292.

For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 312.

True, what the soul imagines happens only in the mind, but what God imagines happens in reality. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 280.

“Sense” and “nonsense” are merely man-made labels which serve to give us a reasonably valid sense of direction. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.

All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.

In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called “individuation.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.

It is only the intervention of time and space here and now that makes reality. Wholeness is realized for a moment onlyâ€”the moment that Faust was seeking: all his life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 214.

Just as the father represents collective consciousness, the traditional spirit, so the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 71.

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.

Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life; it is real only when it is known. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.

Natural man is not a “self”â€”he is the mass and a particle in the mass, collective to such a decree that he is not even sure of his own ego. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.

I conjecture that the treasure is also the “companion,” the one who goes through life at our side in all probability a close analogy to the lonely ego who finds a mate in the self, for at first the self is the strange non-ego. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.

But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.

Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may. not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. He does not know that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way.  In the light of the possibilities revealed by intuition, man’s earthliness is certainly a lamentable imperfection; but this very imperfection is part of his innate being, of his reality. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.

Only the gods can pass over the rainbow bridge; mortal men must stick to the earth and are subject to its laws. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.

We can never reach the level of our intuitions and should therefore not identify ourselves with them. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.

We should not rise above the earth with the aid of “spiritual” intuitions and run away from hard reality, as so often happens with people who have brilliant intuitions. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.

I have been accused of deifying the soul. Not I but God Himself deified it.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.

But a conscious attitude that renounces its ego-bound intentions not in imagination only, but in truth and submits to the supra-personal decrees of fate, can claim to be serving a king. This more exalted attitude raises the status of the anima from that of a temptress to a psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 380.

It [the unconscious] is and remains beyond the reach of subjective arbitrary control, in a realm where nature and her secrets can be neither improved upon nor perverted, where we can listen but may not meddle. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 46.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 46.

It should therefore be an absolute rule to assume that every dream, and every part of a dream, is unknown at the outset, and to attempt an interpretation only after carefully taking up the context. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 44.

The substance is always the same, but a new value is given to it, and the new value is the treasure. That is the secret of alchemy for instance. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 653.

On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes. But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion”. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 96.

This light dwells in the “square inch” or in the “face”, that is between the eyes. It is the visualization of the “creative point.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Alchemical Studies, Page 25.

The circulation is not merely movement in a circle, but means on the one hand the marking off of the sacred precinct, and on the other, the fixation and concentration. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Alchemical Studies, Page 25.

When I say as a psychologist , that God is an archetype, I mean by that the “type” in the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 149

However we may picture the relationship between God and soul, one thing is certain: The soul cannot be “nothing but. ” On the contrary it has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity. Even if it were only the relationship of a drop of water to the sea … ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 10.

So long as religion is only faith and outward form, the religion’s function is not experienced in our souls, nothing of any importance has happened. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 12.

A saying of the alchemist is, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The saying holds for God, for the anima mundi and for the soul of man. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.

A very widespread view conceives spirit as a higher and psyche as a lower principle of activity, and conversely the alchemists thought of spirit as the ligamentum animae et corporis, regarding it as a spiritus vegetativus (the later life-spirit or nerve-spirit). ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386.

There is no recrossing the Rubicon. ~Carl Jung; “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy”, 1935.

This process of becoming human is represented in dreams and inner images as the putting together of many scattered units, and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification of something that was always there. The speculations of alchemy, and also of some Gnostics, revolve around this process. It is likewise expressed in Christian Dogma, and more particularly in the transformation mystery of the Mass. ~Carl Jung; â€œTransformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 399.

[The alchemist Gerhard] Dorn . . . says, “In the body of man there is hidden a certain substance of heavenly nature known to very few ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion” in CW 11, page 93, note 47.

Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. ~Carl Jung; “Alchemical Studies, 1942.

The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites. ~Carl Jung; “Alchemical Studies”, 1942.

The union of opposites on a higher level of consciousness is not a rational thing, nor is it a matter of will; it is a process of psychic development that expresses itself in symbols. Carl Jung; Collected Works 13; Alchemical Studies; Page 16.

Alchemy has performed for me the great and invaluable service of providing material in which my experience could find sufficient room, and has thereby made it possible for me to describe the individuation process at least in its essential aspects. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Paragraph 792.

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence. ~Carl Jung; “The Philosophical Tree” (1945); CW 13: Alchemical Studies; Page 307.

Everything that the modern mind cannot define it regards as insane. ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Alchemy,” 1944.

Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched, and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside-in image and in word, in Church and Bible-but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy, Page 11.

Once the exploration of the unconscious has [begun] … , the individual is confronted with the abysmal contradictions of human nature, and this confrontation in turn leads to the possibility of a direct experience of light and darkness, of Christ and the devil. ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Alchemy,”1944.

I would not deny the possibility of parallel dreams, i.e., dreams whose meaning coincides with or supports the conscious attitude, but in my experience, at least, these are rather rare. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12; Page 48.

In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg â€” symbolized by the round cooking vessel â€” will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Page 202.

The stirring up of conflict is a Lucipherian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes (omnes superfluitates comburit). But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion. – “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (1939). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 179

The reality of evil and its incompatibility with good cleave the opposites asunder and lead inexorably to the crucifixion and suspension of everything that lives. Since â€˜the soul is by nature Christian this result is bound to come as infallibly as it did in the life of Jesus: we all have to be â€˜crucified with Christ,â€™ i.e., suspended in a moral suffering equivalent to veritable crucifixion. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Paragraph 470.

A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour. ~Carl Jung; The Philosophical Tree; CW 13; Alchemical Studies; Page 335.

The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration. ~Carl Jung; Alchemical Studies.

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 : 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 283

From the earliest times, Hermes was the mystagogue and psycho pomp of the alchemists, their friend and counselor, who leads them to the goal of their work. He is â€œlike a teacher mediating between the stone and the disciple.â€ 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. 283

It would be blasphemy to assert that God can manifest Himself everywhere save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship between Cod and the soul automatically precludes any devaluation of the latter. It would be going perhaps too far to speak of an affinity; but at all events the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relation to God, i.e. a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the God-image [q.v.]” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 399-400 and Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 11.

The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 398 and Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 44.

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung; The Philosophical Tree; CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335

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 .

Insanity is possession by an unconscious content that, as such, is not assimilatable to consciousness, nor can it be assimilated since the very existence of such contents is denied. ~Carl Jung; Alchemical Studies; Collected Works 13, par 53.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not â€” which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Page 51.

Hierosgamos. Sacred or spiritual marriage, union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity and also in alchemy. Typical examples are the representation of Christ and the Church as bridegroom and bride (sponsus et sponsa) and the alchemical conjunction of sun and moon. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 395.

Hence one could say cum grano salis that history could be constructed just as easily from one’s own unconscious as from the actual texts. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 86.

Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche a blissful and terrible experience. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.

The intellect may be the devil , but the devil is the “strange son of chaos” who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 90.

But the principle of the unconscious is the autonomy of the psyche itself, reflecting in the play of its images not the world but itself, even though it utilizes the illustrative possibilities offered by the sensible world in order to make its images clear. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 146

Matter in alchemy is material and spiritual, and spirit spiritual and material. ~Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, Page 140.

With a truly tragic delusion these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.

It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.

I did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul is naturaliter religiosa, i.e., possesses a religious function. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 14.

[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as chaosâ or nigredoâ. Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. ~Carl Jung, Aion, CW 9 II, Para 304.

No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you. ~Carl Jung citing an Alchemist, Letters Vol II, Page 595.

The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration. ~Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 139.

“Sense” and “nonsense” are merely man-made labels which serve to give us a reasonably valid sense of direction. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222, Para 330.

But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222, Para 330.

No matter how lonely you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you. ~Carl Jung, citing an Alchemist, Letters Vol. II, Page 595.

The color blue cannot be found in alchemy, but it is found in the East, where it takes the place of black and actually represents a color of the underworld. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 366.

As I see it, the psyche is a world in which the ego is contained. Maybe there are fishes who believe that they contain the sea. We must rid ourselves of this habitual illusion of ours if we wish to consider metaphysical assertions from the standpoint of psychology. ~Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies; Page 76, Para 51.

Thus, with Augustine, the first day of creation begins with self-knowledge, by which is meant knowledge not of the ego but of the self, that objective phenomenon of which the ego is the subject. ~Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, Page 248, Para 301.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.

From the alchemical saying :

Heaven above All that is above

Heaven below Also is below

Stars above Grasp this

Stars below And rejoice. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, par. 384.

Hence the must fix his eye not on what is done but on how it is done, because therein is decided the whole character of the doer. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 31, Para 36.

I do not hold myself responsible for the shortcomings in the lay public’s knowledge of psychology. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 4.

But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 6.

I for my part prefer the precious gift of doubt, for the reason that it does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 8.

If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 8.

On the contrary it [The Soul] has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 10.

As the eye to the sun, so the soul corresponds to God. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 10.

The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 11.

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 12.

So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 12.

Has it not yet been observed that all religious statements contain logical contradictions and assertions that are impossible in principle, that this is in fact the very essence of religious assertion? ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 15.

If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of dogma on the other, why then does he not trust God to speak in the soul? ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 17.

The archetypes of the unconscious can be shown empirically to be the equivalents of religious dogmas. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 17.

In the West the archetype is filled out with the dogmatic figure of Christ; in the East, with Purusha, the Atman, Hiranyagarbha, the Buddha, and so on. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 17.

The message of the Christian symbol is Gnosis, and the compensation effected by the unconscious is Gnosis in even higher degree. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 25.

The alchemistic development of active imagination broke off after the Middle Ages but such interruptions do not occur in the East. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 3, Page 14.

One text says that the “heart” of Mercurius is at the North Pole and that he is like a fire (northern lights). He is, in fact, as another text says, “the universal and scintillating fire of the light of nature, which carries the heavenly spirit within it.” ~Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, Para 256.

To begin with I did not have the feeling at all that I was guilty of plagiarism with my [anima/animus] theory, but in the last 5 years it has become more and more uncanny as I have discovered quite suspicious traces of it also in the old alchemists, and now the mischief seems complete since it turns out that I was discovered already in the 18th century. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 248.

When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths, for night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change into yin. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Alchemical Studies, Para 13.

Man was understood, already in antiquity, as a small mirror image of the whole of the world. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Page 59.

But that “the One” should meditate, and that the world should be produced by the spirit in its creative role, is a conception which goes directly back to the philosophy about the Nous in antiquity. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Pages 59-60.

The idea lies concealed here that Christianity is only concerned with the problem of the salvation of man, whereas alchemy is concerned with that of the whole of nature. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Page 61.

The world is an image to us, even when we have a scientific conception of it and assert: “This is so and so”, it is still only an image. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Page 62.

Our modern scientific attitude tries to eliminate every subjective factor from scientific reasoning. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 65.

And matter [which was alive and had psychical qualities for him) contained a secret intention, a kind of wish, as if it wanted to be transformed. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 66.

In the cheap and vile substance, which can be found everywhere and which is despised, the highest and most precious substance mind is hidden, which longs to be redeemed and to return to its original state of incorruptibility, to the form in which it was originally created and in which it was of the same nature as the creator. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 66.

We are used to thinking of matter and spirit as of two wholly different and opposite principles. But to the alchemist, the materia was filled with a spiritus, and the two were inseparably one. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 67.

For man has the yearning in himself to become what he would call the perfect man. Or rather, there is the image of a perfect and complete being in his unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 67.

There must be a psychical equivalent of matter preformed in man, and this is our own matter, our physical world: the body, for the body is matter. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 67.

The vegetative processes in our bodies, in their normal functioning, cannot be reached by our consciousness or influenced by our will. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 67.

Inasmuch as they cannot be influenced by consciousness, the functioning of the intestines, the heart, the glands, the whole world of the cerebro-spinal reflexes, and so on, all belong to the vegetative psyche, and lie in the dark, in the unconscious. The vegetative processes in our bodies, in their normal functioning, cannot be reached by our consciousness or influenced by our will. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 68.

â€¦I have been working for many years on the psychology of the unconscious, and it was the enigmatical and puzzling structure of the unconscious which brought me to alchemy, as well as to the study of Yoga and of the Ignatian exercises. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture 10, Page 81.

This means, applied to alchemy, that it is death to take alchemy as an external occupation, but the man who regards it as an inward experience, can live and rejoice. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

The earth, in the alchemistic sense, means the body and in a double sense: chemical bodies (substances), minerals etc., and the human body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 101.

Who would have thought that the alchemists, popularly supposed to be searching for gold, were really promising themselves freedom from illusion, exaggerated emotion, passion, excess and all possible vices ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 108.

The “Processing” is the alchemistic procedure; this, Taoism and the Book of Changes are all the same thing, according to Wei Po-Yang. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 109.

We must assume, therefore, that the spirit has two aspects in alchemy, the human mind as we know it, and the serpent mind, which we can only say is unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.

Therefore the Chinese alchemistic treatises, as far as we know them, do not differ in any essential way from the western treatises, in fact in places they agree with each other almost word for word. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 112.

It was Khunrath who said that Christ is the saviour of man, whereas the mysterious substance of alchemy is the saviour of the universe, not only of man but of nature. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 121.

The central idea of Taoism is no moral question, but is the Tao, the indefinable essence of the right way, and this is also the mystery of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 142.

The goal which the alchemist sets himself, however, is not a direct redemption of the human being, nor is it a propitiation of the Deity nor a defence against evil. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 143.

It [Alchemy] is the idea of producing a perfect and complete being, a being which has a redeeming effect and which has many names: panacea, medicina catholica, the philosophers’ stone and innumerable other synonyms. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 143.

The goal of alchemy is not merely material, it is partly in “the Beyond”, and is almost exactly similar to the goal of Taoism, where the whole effort is directed towards finding or creating Tao. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 143.

For the Mass itself is an “opus” (the Benedictines themselves use this term), it is a work of transformation, and is therefore similar to the alchemistic procedure. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 156.

The alchemistic opus is older than the Mass, just as the eternal water of alchemy is older than Christian baptism. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 156.

And so we find them in alchemy also, and the fact is recorded that in deep meditation dissociation occurs between the ego and a “second”, that takes on the form of an inner figure, or represents something quite objective which will answer questions or produce enlightening remarks. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 172.

The purpose of the meditation of the alchemists is also spiritualis, but in contrast to the other methods of meditation which we studied here – those of Yoga, Mahayana Buddhism and the Ignatian excercises – the subject of meditation in alchemy is something unknown, and not a known dogmatic formula. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 174.

We can therefore assume, psychologically speaking, that the object which is to be transformed in alchemy is connected with the human body: it is a mystery of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.

We think of a chaos as complete confusion, but to the alchemists it was a confusion of definite qualities and of special factors. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 201-202.

The idea is that primeval man possessed a substance, a sort of earth, out of which Paradise could grow, and Adam (or primeval man) carries the secret of this earth in himself. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.

The snake in alchemy is the “mercurial serpent”, the old Gnostic image for the Nous, the mind, where the spirit was represented as a serpent, as the Agathodaemon (the good daemon), or directly called the serpent of the Nous. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.

This serpent does not represent “reason” or anything approaching it, but rather symbolises a peculiar autonomous mind which can possess one completely, a spirit of revelation which gives us “Intuitionen” (intuitions). ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.

Since the time of the old Gnostics, the serpent has been the symbol for the brain and its appendages; that is, for the lower centres of the brain and for the spinal cord, partly on account of its shape, but also from introspective reasons. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.

One ould say, in a certain sense, that the unconscious was the invisible, psychical part of the tangible and visible nervous system, just as one might say consciousness was the invisible part of the brain. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.

Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter. We cannot climb above our own heads, a fact which should be a warning to all those people who try to explain the nature of God. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.

â€¦the serpent is the hypostatic, underlying materia (the essence of matter), which sinks into the water, or is as it were in the water, and, through illusion, it deceives the senses. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 219.

To put it more simply: the prima materia can be won from the centre of a stone or substance, but then it is no longer designated as a substance but as an agent. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.

Therefore the prima materia is called “monad”, “ens reale” and “forma interna”, that is, it is the inner form which gives things their existence, and is, therefore, the cause of all existence. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.

And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.

We could define the unconscious as a psychical existence in ourselves of which we are unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 224.

Even today the majority of people have no idea what psychology is; they have a personal psychology and some metaphysical convictions. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 224.

And it is a curious fact that, all over the earth wherever we find astrology, the stars have essentially the same meaning. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 225.

While a man sees something in the sky, there is no chance of his seeing it in himself, and so naturally he will attribute his own actions to the stars. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 225.

The well-known sentence in the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil”, meant, as it was first understood, deliver us from the evil principle of the Heimarmene. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 225.

The beautiful old name, Elizabeth, is a remnant of the same idea. It originated in Babylon and means: “My deity is the seven”, that is, these even planets, for only seven were known in those days. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Pages 225-226.

The things, which impress us from outside, can only do so because of our inner attitude. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 226.

You can put the most marvellous things before the eyes of a stupid person and they will make no impression on him, for all impressions come from inside ourselves. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 226.

The elements are of an earthly nature, the physical and chemical constituents of our bodies. These are the earth in us, so to speak, and the stars represent the beginning of psychical life, the influence of the stars in the condition of the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 229.

These are, so to speak, the re-animated souls of the ancestors which have been lying dormant in the unconscious, and the alchemists call these units or souls the sleepers or the dead in Hades who are resurrected by the “holy waters” (that is the miraculous water of alchemy, the fertilising Mercury). ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.

If we regard alchemy rationally it is complete nonsense but it is exceedingly meaningful psychologically, the whole riddle or secret of the human psyche is to be found in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 117.

The alchemists returned in matter to the mother, the first carrier of the feminine unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 117.

Alchemybegan about the same time as Christianity, in fact we find alchemical ideas in China long before our era, so one can only be sure that the symbolism and language of the Fathers of the Church play an enormous role in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 161-162.

The coniunctio in alchemy is a union of the masculine and feminine, of the spiritual and material principles, from which a perfect body arises, the glorified body after the Last Judgement, the resurrection body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 159.

This means an eternal body, or the subtle body, which is designated in alchemy as the philosopher’s stone, the lapis aethereus or invisibilis. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 159.

In alchemy, the redemption of man is brought about through the opus; in contrast to Christianity, where redemption depends entirely on the grace of God. The eastern concept is identical with the alchemical idea: it is the task of the individual to redeem himself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 110.

The chemical and the psychological processes went hand in hand, the alchemists worked with such intensity and expectation that it had a psychological effect on them. This is difficult for us to understand. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 110.

Every profound student of alchemy knows that the making of gold was not the real purpose and that the process was a western form of Yoga. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 107.

The alchemists think of the Redeemer as lying hidden or sleeping in the materia, he does not only descend from heaven but comes also from the depths of matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 189.

An old alchemist said that God was obviously displeased with his work on the second day when he had separated the waters above from the waters below, thus creating the Binarius (two) which is the devil. On all the other days “God saw that it was good” but not on the second day. (Compare Gen. I. 6-8.) ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

“It is by the revelation of the highest and greatest God that I have attained this art, and only through diligent study, wakefulness, and through constantly reading the authentic books.â€ ~Carl Jung, Citing an Alchemist, ETH Lecture V. Page 161.

I use the word “Gnosis” intentionally, because alchemy retained, or rediscovered, a great many things which played a very important role in the early days of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 162.

The lapis philosophorum of the alchemists is the same thing as the Vajra, it is the thing which is produced in the laboratory of a man’s life and which is far more durable than he is. These thoughts run parallel both in the East and West. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 9Dec38, Page 43.

Women played a considerable part in alchemy, and worked at it themselves. This is not the case in Indian Yoga, with the exception of Tantrism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24Feb1939, Pages 92.

Alchemical philosophy is an instrument and a way to the inner transformation of man, a problem which is practically unknown today. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 99.

This leads us over to the secret gnosis of the Middle Ages, when it takes the form of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198

Psychology did not suddenly spring into existence; one could say that it is as old as civilization itself. The ancient science of astrology, which has always appeared in the wake of culture all over the world, is a kind of psychology and alchemy is another unconscious form. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture I, Page 11.

Anthropos: Original or primordial man, an archetypal image of wholeness in alchemy, religion and Gnostic philosophy. There is in the unconscious an already existing wholeness, the “homo totus” of the Western and the ChÃªn-yÃªn (true man) of Chinese alchemy, the round primordial being who represents the greater man within, the Anthropos, who is akin to God. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 152.

Christ can indeed be imitated even to the point of stigmatization without the imitator coming anywhere near the ideal or its meaning. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 7.

The Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal Christ in its outward aspect and thus to rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 8.

If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 8.

As the eye to the sun, so the soul corresponds to God. Since our conscious mind does not comprehend the soul it is ridiculous to speak of the things of the soul in a patronizing or depreciatory manner. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 11.

Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 12.

Just as the alchemists knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could only happen “Deo concedente,” so the modern psychologist is aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life or of matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 296.

These “centres” are the so-called chakras? and you not only find them in the teachings of yoga but can discover the same idea in old German alchemical books, which surely do not derive from a knowledge of yoga. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 16.

In alchemy there lies concealed a Western system of yoga meditation, but it was kept a carefully guarded secret from fear of heresy and its painful consequences. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 219.

For the practising psychologist, however, alchemy has one inestimable advantage over Indian yoga its ideas are expressed almost entirely in an extraordinarily rich symbolism, the very symbolism we still find in our patients today. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 219.

The help which alchemy affords us in understanding the symbols of the individuation process is, in my opinion, of the utmost importance. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 219.

The third degree of [Alchemical] conjunction is universal: it is relation or identity of the personal with the supra-personal atman, and of the individual Tao with the universal Tao. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 762.

An alchemical text says: “The mind should learn compassionate love for the body.” ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.

It [Alchemy] is the mental work of 1,700 years, in which there is stored up all they could make out about the nature of the archetypes, in a peculiar way that’s foolish. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17.

It [Alchemy] is also called Hermetic Philosophy, though, of course, that conveys just as little as the term alchemy. â€”It was the parallel development, as Narcissism was, to the conscious development of Christianity, of our Christian philosophy, of the whole psychology of the middle ages. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17.

I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of eons. ~Carl Jung, Quoting an Alchemical Text, MDR 227.

It is not my responsibility that alchemy is occult and mystical, and I am just as little guilty of the mystical delusions of the insane or the peculiar creeds of mankind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 184-187.

Faust II has been my companion all my life but it was only 20 years ago that certain things began to dawn on me, especially when I read Christian Rosencreutz’s Chymical Wedding, which Goethe also knew but, interestingly enough, did not mention among the alchemical literature of his Leipzig days. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 246-247.

So far as we know, Goethe used only the relatively late alchemical literature, and it was the study of the classical and early medieval texts which first convinced me that Faust I and II is an opus alchymicum in the best sense. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 246-247.

Inasmuch as we attribute to the Holy Spirit the faculty of procreating in matter, we must unavoidably grant it a nature capable of contact with material existence, i.e., a chthonic aspect, as the alchemists did; otherwise it could not influence Physis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 267-268.

Just as some alchemists had to admit that they never succeeded in producing the gold or the Stone, I cannot confess to have solved the riddle of the coniunctio mystery. On the contrary I am darkly aware of things lurking in the background of the problem-things too big for our horizons. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396

Theope, as far as I can make out, Meister Eckhart is about the first where the self begins to play a noticeable role. After him some of the great German alchemists took up the idea and handed it down to Jacob Boehme and Angelus Silesius and kindred spirits. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 453-454.

Goethe’s Faust almost reached the goal of classical alchemy, but unfortunately the ultimate coniunctio did not come off, so that Faust and Mephistopheles could not attain their oneness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 453-454.

Astrology differs very much from alchemy, as its historical literature consists merely of different methods of casting a horoscope and of interpretation, and not of philosophical texts as is the case in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The bird signifies the aerial, volatile spirit (in the chemical sense “spirit” is volatile, but it also designates the Spiritus Sanctus), whose physical and spiritual meanings are united in the alchemical spiritus Mercurialis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 476-477

As you know, I have reopened the discussion about alchemical philosophy, i.e., I have at least shown a way which allows a new interpretation of its essential thoughts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 534-536

The physical side of the problem is a well-known matter, whereas the psychological and Hermetic side of this problem is accessible only to a very few, on account of the fact that the subject of unconscious phenomena is studied only by a very few and the study of alchemy is-if possible-still more unknown. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 534-536

On the side of physics it was Pauli alone who appreciated alchemical thought very highly. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 534-536

The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 195, Para 392.

I have not been there [Oxford] again although I always dreamt and hoped to delve more deeply into the treasures of alchemistic manuscripts at the Bodleian. Fate has decreed otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580

All lif is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222

“Sense” and “nonsense” are merely man-made labels which serve to give us a reasonably valid sense of direction. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222

But just as Buddhism in its many differentiations overlaid the original spiritual adventure, so Christian rationalism has overlaid medieval alchemistic philosophy, which has been forgotten for about 200 years. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 600-603

So I am not in the least surprised when you say that the alchemical pairs of opposites can be correlated with the endophylactictrophotropic and the ergotrop-dynamic systems. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 617-620

The fact that deity and devil belong together also plays a great role in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.

Nobody has ever known what this primal matter is. The alchemists did not know, and nobody has found out what is really meant by it, because it is a substance in the unconscious which is needed for the incarnation of the god. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 886

Thus, the alchemical process also begins with such a division into the four elements, by which the body is put back into its primordial state and so can undergo transformation. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 367.

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, Aion, 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.

Since the object of this endeavor [Alchemy] was seen outside as well as inside, as both physical and psychic, the work extended as it were through the whole of nature, and its goal consisted in a symbol which had an empirical and at the same time a transcendental aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 700.

This remarkable capacity of the human psyche for change, expressed in the transcendent function, is the principal object of late medieval alchemistic philosophy, where it was expressed in terms of alchemical symbolism. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 360

For the alchemists the process of individuation represented by the opus was an analogy of the creation of the world, and the opus itself an analogy of God’s work of creation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 550

Since the psychological condition of any unconscious content is one of potential reality, characterized by the polar opposites of being and non-being, it follows that the union of opposites must play a decisive role in the alchemical process. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 557

We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid it reflects the face we turn towards it. Hostility it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 29

The experience of the unconscious is a personal secret communicable only to very few, and that with difficulty. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 61

The archetype is, so to speak, an eternal presence, and it is only a question of whether it is perceived by the conscious mind or not. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 3

There is always an attraction between conscious mind and projected content. Generally it takes the form of a fascination. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 436.

So long as a content remains in the projected state it is inaccessible. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 555.

I may define self as the totality of the conscious and unconscious psyche, but this totality transcends our vision; it is a veritable lapis invisibilitatis [stone of invisibility]. In so far as the unconscious exists it is not definable; its existence is a mere postulate and nothing whatever can be predicated as to its possible contents. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 247.

As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 32

The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 32

The labours of the doctor as well as the quest of the patient are directed towards that hidden and as yet unmanifest whole man, who is at once the greater and the future man. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 6

But no matter how much the parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 152

Our prehistory is in truth the spirit of gravity, which needs steps and ladders because, unlike the disembodied airy intellect, it cannot fly at will. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 79

Experience of the opposites has nothing whatever to do with intellectual insight or with empathy. It is more what we would call fate. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 23.

Without the experience of the opposites there is no experience of wholeness and hence no inner approach to the sacred figures. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 24.

Since the psychological condition of any unconscious content is one of potential reality, characterized by the polar opposites of being and on-being it follows that the union of opposites must play a decisive role in the alchemical process. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 557

It has yet to be understood that the Mysterium magnum [the great mystery] is not only an actuality but is; first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 13.

The man who does not know this from his own experience may be a most learned theologian, but he has no idea of religion and still less of education. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 13.

Hence a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 18

Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 18

The alchemist related himself not only to the unconscious but directly to the very substance which he hoped to transform through the power of imagination. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 394

However remote alchemy may seem to us today, we should not underestimate its cultural importance for the Middle Ages. Today is the child of the Middle Ages and it cannot disown its parents. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 432

It is clear enough from this material what the ultimate aim of alchemy really was: it was trying to produce a corpus subtile, a transfigured and resurrected body, i.e., a body that was at the same time spirit. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 511

There the main concern is the body, in other words, the attainment of immortality through the transformation of the body. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 511

Since all the essentials [in Alchemy] are expressed in metaphors they can be communicated only to the intelligent, who possess the gift of comprehension. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 423.

They [Alchemists] rarely have pupils, and of direct tradition there seems to have been very little, nor is there much evidence of any secret societies or the like. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 422

Alchemy was never a business or a career, but a genuine opus to be achieved by quiet, self-sacrificing work. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 422.

It seems as if all the personal entanglements and dramatic changes of fortune that make up the intensity of life were nothing but hesitations, timid shrinking, almost like petty complications and meticulous excuses for not facing the finality of this strange and uncanny process of crystallization. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 326.

Often one has the impression that the personal psyche is running around this central point like a shy animal, at once fascinated and frightened, always in flight, and yet steadily drawing nearer. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 326.

In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called individuation~.Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 330

All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 330

But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 330

Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 564

Only by standing firmly on our own soil can we assimilate the spirit of the East. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 72

The West lays stress on the human incarnation, and even on the personality and historicity of Christ, whereas the East says: Without beginning, without end, without past, without future. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 80

The Christian subordinates himself to the superior divine person in expectation of his grace; but the Oriental knows that redemption depends on the work he does on himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 80

The Tao grows out of the individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 80

On the contrary, when I began my career as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, I was completely ignorant of Chinese philosophy, and only later did my professional experience show me that in my technique I had been unconsciously following that secret way which for centuries had been the preoccupation of the best minds of the East. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 10

We would do well to harbour no illusions in this respect: no understanding by means of words and no imitation can replace actual experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 482

More than once I have had to reach for a book on my shelves, bring down an old alchemist, and show my patient his terrifying fantasy in the form in which it appeared four hundred years ago. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 325.

It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the superman Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163.

Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163.

Whether his fate comes to him from without or from within, the experiences and happenings on the way remain the same. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 26.

Just as evening gives birth to morning, so from the darkness arises a new light, the stella matutina, which is at once the evening and the morning starâ€” Lucifer, the light-bringer. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 299

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 129

If people would only take the trouble to turn up the actual writings of the ancient alchemists, they would find a deep treasure-trove of wisdom, much of which is perfectly applicable to the very events which are happening in the world today. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 444

 This represents the projection of a drama both cosmic and spiritual in laboratory terms. The opus magnum [the great work] had two aims: the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 228

It is for this reason that the alchemists believed in the truth of matter, because matter was actually their own psychic life. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 22

Carl Jung on “Ancestral” – Anthology

This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or ‘archetype’ [q.v.] of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman . . .Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion.” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 391.

If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139

The deposit of manâ’s whole ancestral experience rich in emotional imagery of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337

The constituents of the personality which one may call functions, or Mendelian units, or the primitives would call them remnants of ancestral souls these constituents do not always fit. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 453

Carl Jung on Anima/Animus – Anthology

Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind. This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.

The unconscious as we know can never be done with once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.

It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success. The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.

The, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work. Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are. ~Carl Jung; Syzygy: Anima and animus.

The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his “mind.” Mind makes up the soul, or better, the “animus” of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60

For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the “spiritual” sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the “world and woman,” i.e., the anima projected on to the world. ~”A Study in the Process of Individuation” (1934) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 559

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 humor to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, cliches 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 the languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: Page 29

<The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales.

The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious.

The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man’s hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations. As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis.

The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, and then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment. ~Archetypes of the collective unconscious. From Collected Works of C. G. Jung , Vol. 9, Part 1, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 3-41).

The formulation of the archetypes is described as an empirically derived concept, like that of the atom; it is a concept based not only on medical evidence but on observations of mythical, religious and literary phenomena, these archetypes are considered to be primordial images, spontaneous products of the psyche which do not reflect any physical process, but are reflected in them. It is noted that while the theories of materialism would explain the psyche as an epiphenomenon of chemical states in the brain, no proof has yet been found for this hypothesis; it is considered more reasonable to view psychic production as a generating rather than a generated factor. The anima is the feminine aspect of the archetypal male/female duality whose projections in the external world can be traced through myth, philosophy and religious doctrine. This duality is often represented in mythical syzygy symbols, which are expressions of parental imagos; the singular power of this particular archetype is considered due to an unusually intense repression of unconscious material concerning the parental imagos. Archetypal images are described as preexistent, available and active from the moment of birth as possibilities of ideas which are subsequently elaborated by the individual. The anima image in particular is seen to be active in childhood, projecting superhuman qualities on the mother before sinking back into the unconscious under the influence of external reality. In a therapeutic sense, the concept of the anima is considered critical to the understanding of male psychology. There is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time. Therefore we have to conclude that what we call psychological motives are in a way identical with star positions . . . We must form a peculiar hypothesis. This hypothesis says that the dynamics of our psyche is not just identical with the position of the stars . . . better to assume that it is a phenomenon of time – Carl G. Jung in 1929

Although “wholeness” seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical records of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. [The Self, ibid,par. 59.]

The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona’s counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife’s slipper. If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” P.309

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. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29

Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious; an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or “archetype” of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man.” Marriage as a Psychological Relationship” (1925) In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.338

With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow-so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. [“The Shadow, ibid par. 19.]

The symbol is 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 specified 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. ~”The Psychology of the Child Archetype” (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.291

 The persona, the anima, and the little game of illusion that gives meaning to many lives due to getting incapacitated somehow the persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extroverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona’s counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife’s slipper.

If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. – Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” P.309

The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairy-tales.  The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious. The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man’s hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations. As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis. The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment. The result of a phenomenological study of psychic structure, consisting of the observance and description of the products of the unconscious, is described as the development of a psychological typology of situations and figures, called motifs, in the psychic processes of man. The principal types of motifs of the human figure include the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother as a supraordinate personality or a maiden, the anima in man and the animus in woman. One such motif is the Kore figure, belonging in man to the anima type and in woman to the supraordinate personality, or the self; like the other psychic figures, the Kore is observed to have both positive and negative manifestations. Images such as the Kore are considered to rise from an area of the personality which has an impersonal, collective nature, and to express this psychic material in the conscious. The experience of these archetypal expressions has the effect of widening the scope of consciousness. Several dream visions described by men and women are analyzed in their manifestations of the Kore symbol as supraordinate personality and anima. I reference. ~The phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales. 1. Concerning the word “spirit.” In: Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 207-214).

 Anima and animus are both characterized by an extraordinary many-sidedness. In a marriage it is always the contained who projects this image upon the container, while the latter is only partially able to project his unconscious image upon his partner. The more unified and simple this partner is, the less complete the projection. In which case, this highly fascinating image hangs as it were in mid air, as though waiting to be filled out by a living person. There are certain types of women who seem to be made by nature to attract anima projections; indeed one could almost speak of a definite “anima type.” The so-called “sphinxlike” character is an indispensable part of their equipment, also an equivocalness, an intriguing elusiveness — not an indefinite blur that offers nothing, but an indefiniteness that seems full of promises, like the speaking silence of a Mona Lisa. A woman of this kind is both old and young, mother and daughter, of more than doubtful chastity, childlike, and yet endowed with a naive cunning that is extremely disarming to men. Not every man of real intellectual power can be an animus, for the animus must be a master not so much of fine ideas as of fine words — words seemingly full of meaning which purport to leave a great deal unsaid. He must also belong to the “misunderstood” class or be in some way at odds with his environment, so that the idea of self-sacrifice can insinuate itself. He must be a rather questionable hero, a man with possibilities, which is not to say that an animus projection may not discover a real hero long before he has become perceptible to the sluggish wits of the man of “average intelligence.” ~ (from Marriage as a Psychological Relationship Anima and Animus C.J. Jung (1925):

 â€œSOUL. [psyche, personality, persona, anima,] I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a personality. In order to make clear what I mean by this, I must introduce some further points of view. It is, in particular, the phenomena of somnambulism, double consciousness, split personality, etc., whose investigation we owe primarily to the French school, that have enabled us to accept the possibility of a plurality of personalities in one and the same individual. (CW6, Para 797)

The name’s people give to their experiences are often very revealing. What is the origin of the word Seele? Like the English word soul, it comes from the Gothic saiwalu and the old German saiwalÃ´, and these can be connected etymologically with the Greek aiolos, â€˜quick-moving, twinkling, iridescentâ The Greek word psyche also means â€˜butterfly. SaiwalÃ´ is related on the other side in the Old Slavonic sila, strength. These connections throw light on the original meaning of the word soul; it is moving force, that is, life-force.The- Latin words animus, ˜spirit, and anima, âsoul, arc the same as the Greek anemos,˜wind. The other Greek word for wind, pneuma , also means spirit. In Gothic we find the same word in us-anan,to breathe out, and in Latin it is anhelare, to pant. In Old High German, spiritus sanctus was rendered by atum,˜breath. In Arabic, ˜wind is rih, and rÃ¼h is soul, spirit. The Greek word psyche has similar connections; it is related to psychein, to breathe, psychos, â€˜cool, psychros, â€˜cold, chill, and physa, ellows. These connections show clearly how in Latin, Greek, and Arabic the names given to the soul are related to the notion of moving air, the cold breath of the spirits. And this is probably the reason why the primitive view also endows the soul with an invisible breath-body. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 663.

Carl Jung on “Animus” – Anthology

In states of excitement we speak to ourselves as though to an excited horse, that bit is the part possessed by the anima. In a woman the animus is multiform so that he cannot be nailed down so well as the anima. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 27.

On a low level the animus is an inferior Logos, a caricature of the differentiated masculine mind, just as on a low level the anima is a caricature of the feminine Eros. ~Carl Jung, Commentary Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 41.

For the son, the animus is hidden in the dominating power of the mother and sometimes she leaves him with a sentimental attachment that lasts throughout life and seriously impairs the fate of the adult. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Page 29.

The animus is the masculine thinking in a woman. ~ Carl Jung, CW 13, The Philosophical Tree; Page 267.

Like every archetype, the animus has a Janus face. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, The Philosophical Tree; Page 268.

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.

A woman is oriented towards the animus because it is the son of the unknown father, the Old Sage, whom she never comes to know. This motive is hinted at in the Gnostic texts where Sophia in her madness loves the Great Father On the other hand a man does not know the mother of the anima. She may be personified, for example, in Sophia or the seven times veiled Isis. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.

To a man the anima is the Mother of God who gives birth to the Divine Child. To a woman the animus is the Holy Spirit, the procreator. He is at once the light and the dark God — not the Christian God of Love who contains neither the Devil nor the Son. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung; Pages 31-32.

The animus which is not realized by the mother is like a part of a soul with a relative existence of its own. . ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 29.

The power operating through the animus emanates specifically from the self, which is hidden behind it, and from its mana. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 29.

. . . 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, clichÃ©s 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; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 392 and Aion, CW 9, ii, Page 15

The symbolic form of love (animus-anima) shrinks from nothing, least of all from sexual union.  Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 213-214.

It has just struck me that in my commentary I have suggested using logos for â€œhun instead of animus, because animus i a natural term for the mind’s of a woman, corresponding to the anima of a man. European philosophy must take into account the existence of feminine psychology. The ânima of a woman might suitably be designated Eros.â Carl Jung to Richard Wilhelm, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 67-68.

The animus of women is an answer to the spirit which rules the man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 479-481.

Thus hun [Animus] means ‘cloud-demon,’ a higher ‘breath-soul’ belonging to the yang principle and therefore masculine. After death, hun rises upward and becomes shen, the ‘expanding and self-revealing’ spirit or god. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.

The fact that the animus and the anima part after death and go their ways independently shows that, for the Chinese consciousness, they are distinguishable psychic factors which have markedly different effects, and, despite the fact that originally they are united in ‘the one effective, true human nature’, in the ‘house of the Creative,’ they are two. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.

‘The animus is in the heavenly heart.’ The animus lives in the daytime in the eyes (that is in consciousness); at night it houses in the liver. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.

Hun [Animus], then, would be the discriminating light of consciousness and of reason in man, originally coming from the logos spermatikos of hsing, and returning after death through shen to the Tao. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 116.

The animus lives in the daytime in the eyes; at night it houses in the liver. When living in the eyes, it sees; when housing itself in the liver, it dreams. Dreams are the wanderings of the spirit through all nine Heavens and all the nine Earths. ~Richard Wilhelm, Secret of the Golden Flower

In any case, animus (hun) is the light, yang-soul, while anima (p’o) is the dark, yin-soul. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 16.

If, on the other hand, it has been possible during life to set going the “backward-flowing, rising movement of the life-forces, if the forces of the anima are mastered by the animus, then a release from external things takes place. They are recognized but not desired. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17.

If we want to draw the psychological conclusion we must go further and say that the West has an anima, that is, a feminine unconscious, and that the East has an animus, that is, a masculine unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 204.

Possession caused by the anima or animus presents a different picture. . . .In the state of possession both figures lose their charm and their values; they retain them only when they are turned away from the world, in the introverted state, when they serve as bridges to the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 222f.

The animus is obstinate, harping on principles, laying down the law, dogmatic, world-reforming, theoretic, word-mongering, argumentative, and domineering. Both alike have bad taste: the anima surrounds herself with inferior people, and the animus lets himself be taken in by second-rate thinking. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 222f.

The Soul which accrues to ego-consciousness during the Opus has a feminine character in the man and a masculine character in a woman.  His anima wants to reconcile and unite; her animus tries to discern and discriminate. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Par. 522.

The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Par. 28f.

Thus animus and anima are images representing archetypal figures which mediate between consciousness and the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

The projection of anima and animus causes mutual fascination. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 402.

The unpleasant power-complex of the female animus is encountered only when a woman does not allow her feeling to express itself naturally or handles it in an inferior way. But this, as said, can happen in all situations of life and has nothing whatever to do with the right to vote. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 477-478

So we should talk to our animus or animaâ€¦so you listen to the inner mentor, you develop your inner ear; or you write automatically, and a word is formed by your hand, or your mouth speaks that which you have not thought ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.

And mind you, the animus is as terrible a reality as the anima. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 295

The animus is not created by the conscious, it is a creation of the unconscious, and therefore it is a personification of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 208

The animus is a sort of film between reality and a woman’s mind , she always talks about things as they should be, so when she says a thing is really so, it is really not so at all.; ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1228.

The animus when on his way, on his quest, is really a psychopompos, leading the soul back to the stars whence it came. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1229

On the way back out of the existence in the flesh, the psychopompos [Animus] develops such a cosmic aspect, he wanders among the constellations, he leads the; soul over the rainbow bridge into the blossoming fields of the stars. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1229

I could even go as far as to say that without the anima and animus there would be no object, no other human being, because you perceive differences only through that which is a likeness to the differences in yourself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1357

The animus is meant to be cosmic. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1228.

The animus is not created by the conscious, it is a creation of the unconscious, and therefore it is a personification of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 208-209

The anima and animus have tremendous influence because we leave the shadow to them. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 53.

A woman possessed by the animus is always in danger of losing her femininity, her adapted feminine persona, just as a man in like circumstances runs the risk of effeminacy.  ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the â€œspiritualâ€ sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the â€œworld and woman,â€ i.e., the anima projected on to the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 559

A subtle body, breath or smoke resembling, which can also be correctly described as anima. Anima is the feminine of animus, which is identical with the Greek word anemos which means wind or breath. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

I would strongly advise you to do this bit of analysis with a woman, since experience has shown that analysis with a man always has an effect on the animus, which for its part loosens up the personality again, whereas analysis with a woman tends on the contrary to have a “precipitating” effect. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 190-191

Carl Jung on “Anti-Semitism -” Anthology

I am no anti-Semite. From all this I gained neither honours nor money, but I am glad that I could be of service to those in need. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 219

The mere fact that I speak of a difference between Jewish and Christian psychology suffices to allow anyone to voice the prejudice that I am an anti-Semite. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 160-163

I have included in it an essay by a Jewish author on the psychology of the Old Testament, just to annoy the Nazis and all those who have decried me as an anti-Semite. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 160-163

One risks being labelled as anti-Semite or pro-Semite without being heard at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 223-224

It is a downright lie to quote me as saying that Jews are dishonest in analysis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 160-163

The mere fact that I speak of a difference between Jewish and Christian psychology suffices to allow anyone to voice the prejudice that I am an anti-Semite. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 160-163

There is a number of Jewish doctors who have studied with me, but the reason why you haven’t discovered them is that they are undiscoverable on account of their fear of being recognized as Jungians. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 223-224

As a matter of fact my first and most gifted pupils were Jews. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 223-224

Certainly the Jews have lived much longer in other countries but without the contact to the soil that was not accessible to them due to their being rooted in the Torah. ~Erich Neumann, Jung Correspondence 30 Jan 1936

I myself have personally treated very many Jews and know their psychology in its deepest recesses, so I can recognize the relation of their racial psychology to their religion, but it would be quite beyond me to relate Islam or the ancient Egyptian religion to its devotees as I lack any intimate knowledge of Arab;and Egyptian psychology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 233

On account of my critical utterances I was “marked down” by the Gestapo, my books were banned in Germany, and in France they were for the most part destroyed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 404-406

We naturally hope not to be implicated in the war, but there is only one conviction in Switzerland, that if it has to be, it will be on the side of the Allies. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 276

He [Jung] listened daily to the B.B.C. and knew that England was the only hope, and that they would never give in. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 24.

We are all terribly sorry for England and France. If they should lose the war, we also shall not escape the reign of the Antichrist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 282

Referring to the rumours of his so-called Nazi sympathies, C.G. told me that his name was on the black List in Germany because of his views, and that he would certainly have been shot at once had he fallen into Nazi hands. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 26

Incidentally, if I were a Jew-eater I would hardly bring out books together with Jews as i have just done, or introduce books by Jewish authors. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 167

No one is more deeply convinced than I that the Jews are a people with a culture. Between culture and cultural form there is, as we know, an essential difference.  ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 167

If the Nazis had invaded Switzerland during the Second World War, I would have become a Catholic out of protest because the Catholic Church would then have represented the only spiritual power. That is, of course, if I had not been shot first. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 45.

Here in Switzerland we are still rationed, but can’t complain about anything since we were miraculously spared the Nazi madness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 401.

If somebody is clever enough to see what is going on in people’s minds, in their unconscious minds, he will be able to predict. For instance, I could have predicted the Nazi rising in Germany through the observation of my German patients. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 20.

It led to Jung, on his return, asking Swiss high schoolers to come to Kusnacht to observe them and compare them to the manic Germans. One was the 18 year old Marie Louise Von Franz : “One morning it was about the middle of the stopped me on the stairs and said: Take care, you are getting dangerously out of yourself.;I knew he was right but had no idea why, until he added:These people are all in a panic, they are scared stiff and have no idea where all this is leading.;I am afraid nothing can save them and that they are heading for inevitable disaster, but at least we will earn the merit of trying to help them as long as we can.That was enough to save my situation, for I realized at once that, since I had not seen their panic, I had become infected, via the unconscious.The next day, seeing that I was once more in myself, Jung had a long talk about the whole thing with an English friend and me.To anyone who, like myself, was with Jung in Berlin in July, 1933, and who saw and heard him frequently during the next twenty-eight years, the libel that Jung was a Nazi is so absurd and so entirely without foundation that it goes against the grain to take it seriously enough to contradict it. Moreover, for the most part it is believed only by the people who want to believe it, and it is always useless to waste energy on them.this in 1914 and I have never forgotten the lesson.” ~Barbara Hannah, 1933 conference in Berlin attended by Jung, Emma, Toni, Heinrich Zimmer and Barbara Hannah.

It is in my view a great mistake to suppose that the psyche of a new-born child is a tabula rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it. In so far as the child is born with a differentiated brain that is predetermined by heredity and therefore individualized, it meets sensory stimuli coming from outside not with any aptitudes, but with specific ones, and this necessarily results in a particular, individual choice and pattern of apperception. These aptitudes can be shown to be inherited instincts and preformed patterns, the latter being the a priori and formal conditions of apperception that are based on instinct. Their presence gives the world of the child and the dreamer its anthropomorphic stamp. They are the archetypes, which direct all fantasy activity into its appointed paths and in this way produce, in the fantasy-images of children’s dreams as well as in the delusions of schizophrenia, astonishing mythological parallels such as can also be found, though in lesser degree, in the dreams of normal persons and neurotics.It is not, therefore, a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW, 9i, Para 136

The original structural components of the psyche are of no less surprising a uniformity than are those of the visible body.;The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the prerational psyche.They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content.Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual’s life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845

Carl Jung on “Answer to Job” – Anthology

Anthology<In my view, the discussion of Matter must have a scientific basis. That is why I pressed for [Answer to Job] and[Synchronicity]to be published at the same time. ~Carl Jung, Atom and Archetype, Pages 97-101

God wanted to become man and still wants to … ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 455.

If there is anything like the spirit seizing one by the scruff of the neck, it was the way this book [Answer to Job] came into being. . . . It came upon me suddenly and unexpectedly during a feverish illness. . . . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 20.

I am accustomed to living in a more or less complete intellectual vacuum, and my Answer to Job has done nothing to diminish it.  On the contrary, it has released an avalanche of prejudice, misunderstanding, and, above all, atrocious stupidity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 115-116.

The book [Answer to Job] “came to me” during the fever of an illness. It was as if accompanied by the great music of a Bach or a Handel. I don’t belong to the auditory type. So I did not hear anything, I just had the feeling of listening to a great composition, or rather of being at a concert. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 115-116.

Allow me to tell you that I am profoundly grateful to you for your most remarkably objective review of my uncouth attempt [Answer to Job] to disturb the obnoxious somnolence of the guardians. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 155-157

Your succour comes at a time when it is badly needed; soon a little book of mine will be published in England which my publishers in USA did not dare to print. Its title is: Answer to Job. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 192-193

The German edition [Answer to Job] over here has already upset the representatives of three religions, not because it is irreligious but because it takes their statements and premises seriously. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 192-193

Already Philip Toynbee has reviewed it [Answer to Job] in an “abysmally stupid” way as R.F.C. Hull, the translator, rightly says (in a letter to me). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 212-214.

My Answer to Job was left by the Bollingen Press to the English publishers, since they were apparently afraid of something like “Unamerican activities” and the loss of prestige presumably. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 230-232.

They [Archetypes] guide but they also mislead; how much I reserve my criticism for them you can see in Answer to Job, where I subject archetypal statements to what you call “blasphemous” criticism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

The fact of God’sunconsciousness throws a peculiar light on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from his sins, even if he is baptized in the prescribed manner and thus washed clean, as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin, that is, from the wrath of God. Consequently, the work of salvation is intended to save man from the fear of God. Answer to Job ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.

The tragic counter play between inside and outside (depicted in Job and Faust as the wager with God) represents, at bottom, the energetics of the life process, the polar tension that is necessary for self-regulation. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 311

The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity. It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail. At the same time objective, non-psychic parallel phenomena can occur which also represent the archetype. It not only seems so, it simply is so, that the archetype fulfils itself not only psychically in the individual, but objectively outside the individual. My own conjecture is that Christ was such a personality. The life of Christ is just what it had to be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time. It is a symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather as if Job and Yahweh were combined in a single personality. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648

In his striving for unity, therefore, man may always count on the help of a metaphysical advocate, as Job clearly recognized. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 740

Job realizes God’s inner antinomy, and in the light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 584

The fact of God unconsciousness throws a peculiar light on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from his sins, even if he is baptized in the prescribed manner and thus washed clean, as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin, that is, from the wrath of God. Consequently, the work of salvation is intended to save man from the fear of God. Answer to Job ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.

Christ appears as a guarantee of God’s benevolence. He is our advocate in Heaven, Job’s “God against God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473

The primordial experience is not concerned with the historical bases of Christianity but consists in an immediate experience of God (as was had by Moses, Job, Hosea, Ezekiel among others) which “convinces” because it is “overpowering.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424

Man must know that he is man’s worst enemy just as much as God had to learn from Job about His own antithetical nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Pages 238-243.

Soon a little book of mine which I have published with the physicist Prof. W. Pauli will come out in English. It is even more shocking than Job, but this time to the scientist, not the theologian. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 230-232.

You should have seen the press reviews of Job! The naive stupidity of it all is beyond imagination. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 104

What you write about the effect of Job on analysts accords with my own experience: the number of individuals capable of reacting is relatively very small and analysts are no exception. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 104

I live in my deepest hell, and from there I cannot fall any further. ~Carl Jung on how he could live with the knowledge he had recorded in the Book of Job,  Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 174.

Job did not have to suffer for his sins as his friends thought; it was rather that God required Job to look at His dark side as well. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 49.

The inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world, but also of the pleromatic drama for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus. . . . the two main climaxes are formed first by the Job tragedy and secondly by Ezekielâ€™s revelation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 686.

Carl Jung on “Archetypes” – Anthology

Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time.

Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, other contents can also arise from it. Besides a majority of mere recollections, really new thoughts and creative ideas can appear which have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths like a lotus. ~”Approaching the Unconscious” In Man and His Symbols (1964), In CW 18: P.37

In the centre there is a lotus with the Buddha sitting in it, and the decisive experience is the final knowledge that the meditator himself is the Buddha, whereby the fateful knots woven in the opening story are apparently resolved. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 572.

The western rose is wholly parallel to the eastern lotus. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21.

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.

Mary is represented as a sea flower in one hymn and Christ as the sea bird that rests in her. This is exactly the eastern motif of the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 118.

Later the single lotus is imagined on the firm ground of seven jewels, which is reality; so it is on the foundation of reality that the lotus is induced through imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 103.

Mani means pearl or great treasure, padme is the lotus and hum, like om, has no definite meaning, it is a sound like the humming of bees. So we find the pearl and the lotus sandwiched between a singing sound and a humming sound. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 36.

Christ is spoken of as being born or hidden in a rose, or as a sea bird resting in a flower of the sea. This is a direct analogy to Buddha appearing in the Lotus in the Amitabha Land with geese and swans about him. Pages 100-101.

Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew. This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.

The mystical rose, like the lotus in India, grows for the salvation of man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.

We could adopt Tao and Atman as our solutions, possibly, but only on the assumption that these terms have meant to their originators what our philosophical ideas mean to us. But that is not so; Tao and Atman grew, Atman out of the lotus, while Tao is the still water.  ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 87

But we find the chief parallel to the lotus in the hymnology of Mary, where she is called the flower of Heaven, the noble rose of Heaven, the rose without thorn; she is also greeted as the sweet rose, etc. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939

An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself.

The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para -395

Archetypes were, and still are, living psychic forces that demand to be taken seriously, and they have a strange way of making sure of their effect. Always they were the bringers of protection and salvation, and their violation has as its consequence the “perils of the soul” known to us from the psychology of primitives. Moreover, they are the infallible causes of neurotic and even psychotic disorders, behaving exactly like neglected or maltreated physical organs or organic functional systems. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 266

Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology.

The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and collective psychology moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness.The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect . . . The archetypal images decide the fate of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 342

I have often been asked where the archetype comes from and whether it is acquired or not. This question cannot be answered directly. Archetypes are, by definition, factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a way that they can be recognized only from the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously, and presumably they form the structural dominants of the psyche in general. They may be compared to the invisible presence of the crystal lattice in a saturated solution. As a priori conditioning factors they represent a special, psychological instance of the biological “pattern of behaviour,” which gives all living organisms their specific qualities. Just as the manifestations of this biological ground plan may change in the course of development, so also can those of the archetype. Empirically considered, however, the archetype did not ever come into existence as a phenomenon of organic life, but entered into the picture with life itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 222

To the extent that the archetypes intervene in the shaping of conscious contents by regulating, modifying, and motivating them, they act like instincts. It is therefore very natural to suppose that these factors are connected with the instincts and to enquire whether the typical situational patterns which these collective form-principles apparently represent are not in the end identical with the instinctual patterns, namely, with the patterns of behaviour. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 104

The archetype or primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct’s perception of itself, or as the self portrait of the instinct, in exactly the same way as consciousness is an inward perception of the objective life process. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 277

We must constantly bear in mind that what we mean by “archetype” is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualizations of it possible, namely, the archetypal images and ideas. We meet with a similar situation in physics: there the smallest particles are themselves irrepresentable but have effects from the nature of which we can build up a model.;The archetypal image, the motif or mythologem, is a construction of this kind. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 417

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

Just as the “psychic infra-red,” the biological instinctual psyche, gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its chemical and physical conditions, so the “psychic ultra-violet,” the archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 420

The archetypal representations (images and ideas) mediated to us by the unconscious should not be confused with the archetype as such. They are very varied structures which all point back to one essentially “irrepresentable” basic form. The latter is characterized by certain formal elements and by certain fundamental meanings, although these can be grasped only approximately. The archetype as such is a psychoid factor that belongs, as it were, to the invisible, ultra-violet end of the psychic spectrum … It seems to me probable that the real nature of the archetype is not;capable of being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I call it psychoid [quasi-psychic]. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 417

transcendental background is as certain as our own existence, but it is equally certain that the direct perception of the archetypal world inside us is just as doubtfully correct as that of the physical world outside us. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 787

In spite or perhaps because of its affinity with instinct, the archetype represents the authentic element of spirit, but a spirit which is not to be identified with the human intellect, since it is the latter’s spiritus rector. The essential content of all mythologies and all religions and all isms is archetypal. The archetype is spirit or anti-spirit: what it ultimately proves to be depends on the attitude of the human mind. Archetype and instinct are the most polar opposites imaginable, as can easily be seen when one compares a man who is ruled by his instinctual drives with a man who is seized by the spirit. But, just as between all opposites there obtains so close a bond that no position can be established or even thought of without its corresponding negation, so in this case also “les extremes se touchent.” ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 406

The archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 415

I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. The most we may be able to do is misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of their power by denying them. Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 784

The organism confronts light with a new structure, the eye, and the psyche confronts the natural process with a symbolic image, which apprehends it in the same way as the eye catches the light. And just as the eye bears witness to the peculiar and spontaneous creative activity of living matter, the primordial image expresses the intrinsic and unconditioned creative power of the psyche. The primordial image is thus a condensation of the living process. ~Carl Jung CW CW6, Para 748

It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept. it is far more than that: it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 96

The so-called “forces of the unconscious” are not intellectual concepts that can be arbitrarily manipulated, but dangerous antagonists which can, among other things, work frightful devastation in the economy of the personality. They are everything one could wish for or fear in a psychic “Thou.” The layman naturally thinks he is the victim of some obscure organic disease; but the theologian, who suspects it is the devil’s work, is appreciably nearer to the psychological truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659

In psychic matters we are dealing with processes of experience, that is, with transformations which should never be given hard and fast names if their having movement is not to petrify into something static. The protean mythologeme and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly and, in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept; for the symbol not only conveys a visualization of the process butâ€”and this is perhaps just as importantâ€”it also brings a re-experiencing of it, of that twilight which we can learn to understand only through inoffensive empathy, but which too much clarity only dispels. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 199

The great problems of life, including of course sex, are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are balancing and compensating factors that correspond to the problems which life confronts us with in reality. This is no matter for astonishment, since these images are deposits of thousands of years of experience of the struggle for existence and for adaptation. Every great experience in life, every profound conflict, evokes the accumulated treasure of these images and brings about their inner constellation. But they become accessible to consciousness only when the individual possesses so much self-awareness and power of understanding that he also reflects on what he experiences instead of just living it blindly. In the latter event he actually lives the myth and the symbol without knowing it. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 373

The soul gives birth to images that from the rational standpoint of consciousness are assumed to be worthless. And so they are, in the sense that they cannot immediately be turned to account in the objective world. The first possibility of making use of them is artistic, if one is in any way gifted in that direction; a second is philosophical speculation; a third is quasi-religious, leading to heresy and the founding of sects; and a fourth way of employing the dynatnis of these images is to squander it in every form of licentiousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 426

The symbol is 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

Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language. (Indeed, language itself is only an image.) The most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being. The archetypes It us never forget thisâ€”is a psychic organ present in all of us. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 271

In reality we can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide. If we cannot deny the archetypes or otherwise neutralize them, we are confronted, at every new stage in the differentiation of consciousness to which civilization attains, with the task of finding a new interpretation appropriate to this stage, in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it. If this link-up does not take place, a kind of rootless consciousness comes into being no longer oriented to the past, a consciousness which succumbs helplessly to all manner of suggestions and, in practice, is susceptible to psychic epidemics. With the loss of the past, now become “insignificant,” devalued, and incapable of revaluation, the saviour is lost too, for the saviour either is the insignificant thing itself or else arises out of it. Over and over again in the “metamorphosis of the gods,” he rises up as the prophet or first-born of a new generation and appears unexpectedly in the unlikeliest places (sprung from a stone, tree, furrow, water, etc.) and in ambiguous form (Tom Thumb, dwarf, child, animal, and so on). ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 267

All psychic events are so deeply grounded in the archetype and are so much interwoven with it that in every case considerable critical effort is needed to separate the unique from the typical with any certainty. Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species. The individual is continuously “historical” because strictly time-bound; the relation of the type to time, on the other hand, is irrelevant. Since the life of Christ is archetypal to a high degree, it represents to just that degree the life of the archetype. But since the archetype is the unconscious precondition of every human life, its life, when revealed, also reveals the hidden, unconscious ground-life of every individual. That is to say, what happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured and are expressed over and over again or once and for all. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 146

A symbol loses its magical or, if you prefer, its redeeming power as soon as its liability to dissolve is recognized. To be effective, a symbol must be by its very nature unassailable. It must be the best possible expression of the prevailing worldview, an unsurpassed container of meaning; it must also be sufficiently remote from comprehension to resist all attempts of the critical intellect to break it down; and finally, its aesthetic form must appeal so convincingly to our feelings that no arguments can be raised against it on that score. ~Carl Jung CW 6, Para 401

Do we ever understand what we think? We only understand that kind of thinking which is a mere equation, from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. But besides that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 794

As we can see from the example of Faust, the vision of the symbol is a pointer to the onward course of life, beckoning the libido towards a still distant goals lbut a goal that henceforth will burn unquenchably within him, so that his life, kindled as by a flame, moves steadily towards the far off beacon. This is the specific life-promoting significance of the symbol, and such, too, is the meaning and value of religious symbols. I am speaking, of course, not of symbols that are dead and stiffened by dogma, but of living symbols that rise up from the creative unconscious of the living man. The immense significance of such symbols can be denied only by those for whom the history of the world begins with the present day. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 202

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 â€” 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 they Christian or Buddhist or what you will are lovely, mysterious, richly intuitive. Naturally, the more familiar we are with them the more does constant usage polish them smooth, so that what remains is only banal superficiality and meaningless paradox. ~Carl Jung, Basel Seminar, Para 11

The Catholic way of life is completely unaware of psychological problems in this sense. Almost the entire life of the collective unconscious has been channeled into the dogmatic archetypal ideas and flows along like a well-controlled stream in the symbolism of creed and ritual. It manifests itself in the inwardness of the Catholic psyche. The collective unconscious, as we understand it today, was never a matter of “psychology,” for before the Christian Church existed there were the antique mysteries, and these reach back into the grey mists of Neolithic prehistory. Mankind has never lacked powerful images to lend magical aid against all the uncanny things that live in the depths of the psyche.  Always the figures of the unconscious were expressed in protecting and healing images and in this way were expelled from the psyche into cosmic space. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 2121

The gods of Greece and Rome perished from the same disease as did our Christian symbols: people discovered then, as today, that they had no thoughts whatever on the subject. On the other and, the gods of the strangers still had unexhausted mana. Their names were weird and incomprehensible and their deeds portentously darkâ€”something altogether different from the hackneyed chronique scandaleuse of Olympus. At least one couldn’t understand the Asiatic symbols, and for this reason they were not banal like the conventional gods. The fact that people accepted the new as unthinkingly as they had rejected the old did not become a problem at that time. Is it becoming a problem today? Shall we be able to put on, like a new suit of clothes, ready-made symbols grown on foreign soil, saturated with foreign blood, spoken in a foreign tongue, nourished by a foreign culture, interwoven with foreign history, and so resemble a beggar who wraps himself in kingly raiment, a king who disguises himself as a beggar? No doubt this is possible. Or is there something in ourselves that commands us to go in for no mummeries, but perhaps even to sew our garment ourselves? ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 26.

Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness. But if he cannot get along with these pedantic dogmatisms, he sees himself forced to be serious for once with his alleged trust in God, though it usually turns out that his fear of things going wrong if he did so is even more persuasive. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 28

To gain an understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience.;It is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of the natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148

Reverence for the great mysteries of nature, which the language of religion seeks to express in symbols hallowed by their antiquity, profound significance, and beauty, will not suffer from the extension of psychology to this domain, to which science has hitherto found no access.;We only shift the symbols back a little, shedding a little light on their darker reaches, but without succumbing to the erroneous notion that we have created more than merely a new symbol for the same enigma that perplexed all ages before us. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 428

Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times. The primordial images undergo ceaseless transformation and yet remain ever the same, but only in a new form can they be understood anew. Always they require a new interpretation if, as each formulation becomes obsolete, they are not to lose their spellbinding power over that jugax Mercurius and allow that useful though dangerous enemy to escape. What is that about “new wine in old bottles”? Where are the answers to the spiritual needs and troubles of a new epoch? And where the knowledge to deal with the psychological problems raised by the development of modern consciousness? Never before has “eternal” truth been faced with such a hybris of will and power. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 396

All the true things must change and only that which changes remains true. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 503

All ages before us have believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible at present. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 50

It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God-image empirically. We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between these two entities, but that does not help us at all.  On the contrary, it only helps us to separate man from God, and prevents God from becoming man. Faith is certainly right when it impresses on man’s mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God is; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence, and it is just this nearness which has to be empirically real if it is not to lose all significance. Only that which acts upon me do I recognize as real and actual. But that which does not act upon me might as well not exist. The religious need longs for wholeness, and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of our conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757

God has indeed made an inconceivably sublime and mysteriously contradictory image of himself, without the help of man, and implanted it in man’s unconscious as an archetype, the archetypal light: not in order that theologians of all times and places should be at one another’s throats, but in order that the unpresumptuous man might glimpse an image, in the stillness of his soul, that is akin to him and is wrought of his own psychic substance.  This image contains everything which he will ever imagine concerning his gods or concerning the ground of his psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 661

Carl Jung on the â€œArtist.â€ â€“ Anthology

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man,” a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Literature

The work of art has its own specific psychology which is sometimes notably different from the psychology of the artist. Were it not so, the work of art would not be autonomous. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 388-389.

The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130.

I’m no artist. I only try to get things into stone of which I think it is important that they appear in hard matter and stay on for a reasonably long time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 83.

Surely modern art is trying its best to make man acquainted with a world full of darkness, but alas, the artists themselves are unconscious of what they are doing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 549-550

As experience shows, the figure one sees is not necessarily identical with the person one identifies with it, just as the picture by an artist is not identical with the original; but it is obvious that the vision of Christ was a most important religious experience to St. Paul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 380.

Your general conclusion that contemporary Western artists unconsciously depict God’s image is questionable, as it is by no means certain that any inconceivability could be called “God,” unless one calls everything “God,” as everything ends in inconceivability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 511-512

So modern art leads us away from the too great scattering of the libido on the external object, back to the creative source within us, back to the inner values. In other words, it leads us by the same path analysis tries to lead us, only it is not a conscious leadership on the part of the artist. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 60

We can hardly predict today what the artist is going to bring forth, but always a great religion has gone hand in hand with a great art. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 61

When an artist has a figure from the collective unconscious, he at once begins to play with it esthetically, and usually makes some concretization of it as a monument, etc. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 71

Any artist is doing that quite naturally, but he is getting only the esthetic values out of it while the analyst tries to get at all the values, ideational, esthetic, feeling, and intuitional. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38

Analysis is fatal to second-rate artists, but that should be a feather in its cap. In analysis, or in an analyzed person, only something big comes through, whereas it is the tendency of our times to make it easy for every little cat or worm to be born into the art world. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 14

In everyone some kind of artist is hiding. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

I would like to emphasize that it very often does not depend upon the use one makes of an image, but rather upon the use the archetypes make of ourselves, which decides the question whether it will be artistic creation or a change of religious attitude. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626

Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 93

As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is â€œmanâ€ in a higher senseâ€”he is â€œcollective man,â€ a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

It makes no difference whether the artist knows that his work is generated, grows and matures within him, or whether he imagines that it is his own invention. In reality it grows out of him as a child its mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 159

By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130

The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130

The great work of art is a product of the time, of the whole world in which the artist is living, and of the millions of people who surround him, and of the thousands of currents of thought and the myriad streams of activity which flow around him. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 128

I find Blake a tantalizing study, since he has compiled a lot of half- or undigested knowledge in his fantasies. According to my idea, they are an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 512-514.

We find . . . in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations . . . from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 25

Carl Jung on “Astrology” – Anthology

Astrology has actually nothing to do with the Stars but is the 5000 year old psychology of antiquity and the Middle Ages. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 56.

Jung noted: “Astrologically the beginning of the next aeon, according to the starting point you select, falls between AD 2000 and 2200” (CW 9,2, Â§149, note 88). ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 274.

So the first science was astrology. That was an attempt of man to establish a line of communication between the remotest objects and himself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1496.

Synchronous events are widely accepted in Chinese philosophy and are the basis of astrology. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.

the Creator God [takes] on an astromythological, or rather an astrological, character. He has become the sun, and thus finds a natural expression that transcends his moral division into a Heavenly Father and his counterpart the devil. ~Carl Jung; CW 5, Para 176.

And it is a curious fact that, all over the earth wherever we find astrology, the stars have essentially the same meaning. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 225.

His [Jung’s] impatience was due not only to his temperament – astrologically he was a Leo – but also to his extreme sensitivity, which both enriched and burdened his life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Last Years, Pages 114-115.

Astrology, like the collective unconscious with which psychology is concerned, consists of symbolic configurations: The “planets” are the gods, symbols of the powers of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 175.

Astrology is not a mantic method but appears to be based on proton radiation (from the sun). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 22-23.

“Astrology” is another of those “random phenomena” wiped off the desk by the idol of the average,which everybody believes to be reality itself while it is a mere abstract. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 230-232.

All the grapes of the same site produce about the same wine. This is the truth stated by astrology and experience since time immemorial. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 353-355.

Sitting in the central mussel-shell, we are the “sons of the mother.” Hence the old astrological tradition says that our zodiacal sign is Virgo. However, there is no unanimity on this score, since the other version says that our sign is Taurus. It is a virile, creative sign, but earthly like Virgo. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 418-420

The fact, however, is that our whole astrological determination of time does not correspond to any actual constellation in the heavens because the vernal equinox has long since moved out of Aries into Pisces and from the time of Hipparchus has been artificially set at 0Â° Aries. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.

Consequently the correlations with the planetary houses are purely fictitious, and this rules out the possibility of a causal connection with the actual positions of the stars, so that the astrological determination of time is purely symbolic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.

Astrology is a naively projected psychology in which the different attitudes and temperaments of man are represented as gods and identified with planets and zodiacal constellations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The experiment [Astrology] is most suggestive to a versatile mind, unreliable in the hands of the unimaginative, and dangerous in the hands of a fool, as those intuitive methods always are. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

Astrological “truths” as statistical results are questionable or even unlikely. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The [astrological] superstitious use (prediction of the future or statement of facts beyond psychological possibilities) is false. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

There is no psychological exposition of astrology yet, on account of the fact that the empirical foundation in the sense of a science has not yet been laid. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

Undoubtedly astrology today is flourishing as never before in the past, but it is still most unsatisfactorily explored despite very frequent use. It is an apt tool only when used intelligently. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The great astrological periods do exist. Taurus and Gemini were prehistoric periods, we don’t know much about them.  But Aries the Ram is closer; Alexander the Great was one of its manifestations. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

At breakfast he [Jung] spoke of astrology (one of his daughters is interested in it), and of a German book in which he is criticised for giving support to horoscopes. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 91

This man also asked C.G. if he believed in astrology because he had mentioned it; but, said C.G., it is not necessary to â€˜believeâ€™ in such concepts â€“ he simply observes  that they are sometimes relevant. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 102

And now we are coming to the end of the Pisces era, as was foretold nearly two thousand years ago by the Arabian astrologer Albumasar. The pre-Christian time was Aries. ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 302

The fact that astrology nevertheless yields valid results proves that it is not the apparent positions of the stars which work, but rather the times which are measured or determined by arbitrarily named stellar positions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 138-139

“The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast,” says Seni to Wallensteinâ€”a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we knew even a little about the secrets of the heart. But for this, so far, men have had little understanding. Nor would I dare to assert that things are any better today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

Carl Jung on the “Assumption” – Anthology

[About the Assumption of the Virgin Mary] Jung said that she has already entered into the nuptial chamber and that thus, naturally, after a time there will be a child. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with Jung, Page 15

Jung gave great importance to the papal bull of the Assumptio Maria. He held that it “points to the hieros gamos in the pleroma, and this in turn implies, as we have said, the future birth of the divine child, who, in accordance with the divine trend toward incarnation, will choose as his birthplace the empirical man. This metaphysical process is known as the individuation process in the psychology of the unconscious” ~Liber Novus, Footnote 200, Page 299.

Now that the Catholic Church has taken the momentous step of the assumption, Protestantism is really and truly nailed fast to the Patriarchal line of the Old Testament and way behindhand in the matter of dogmatic development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 9-10.

You are quite right; with the dogma of the Assumptio the unconscious “wells into the Church,” since Woman is its (the unconscious) representative on earth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 230-232.

The anima is a representative of the unconscious and hence a mediatrix, just as the Beata Virgo is called “mediatrix” in the dogma of the Assumption. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424

If the miracle of the Assumptio is not a living and present spiritual event, but consists of a physical phenomenon that is reported or only believed to have happened some 2000 years ago, then it has nothing to do with the spirit, or just as little as any parapsychological stunt of today. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

It is more than probable that the idea of the Assumptio did not begin its real life in apostolic times but  considerably later. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

The miracle of the Assumptio obviously began to operate noticeably from the VI century onwards only. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

If the Assumption means anything, it means a spiritual fact which can be formulated as the integration of the female principle into the Christian conception of the Godhead. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

If the Assumptio is an essentially concrete historical fact, then it is no more a living spiritual experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

If we designate the Assumptio as a fact in time and space we ought to add that it happens really in eternity and everywhere, and what we perceive of it through our senses is corruptible matter, i.e., we don’t see it, but we infer or believe in the idea. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

Carl Jung on “Atheist” “Atheism”

The Catholic who has turned his back on the Church usually develops a secret or manifest leaning towards atheism, whereas the Protestant follows, if possible, a sectarian movement. The absolutism of the Catholic Church seems to demand an equally absolute negation, whereas Protestant relativism permits of variations. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph, 34.

I have been alternately accused of agnosticism, atheism, materialism and mysticism. ~Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 207.

He [Man] will [mis] understand it and he will be tempted to ruin the universal life of the earth by radioactivity. Materialism and atheism, the negation of God, are indirect means to attain this goal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

But this expression seems to me very apt, for “bowels” simply means contents, and in “the Unknowable One,” Nietzsche surely refers to the unknown god who, he said, was dead. It is a funny thing, however, that throughout the whole of Zarathustra you get a feeling as if this god whom he calls dead were not absolutely dead. He is somehow lurking in the background as the great unknowable one of whom you should not speak; you simply should not take him into consideration: he is too dangerous to be mentioned. So his peculiar expression that you should not be interested in the bowels of the unknowable one means that there is somebody there, only he is utterly taboo. You see, that is explained psychologically by the fact that Nietzsche calls himself an atheist, for anybody who calls himself an atheist is a negative theist; naturally he would not deny a thing if he did not think it was there to be denied. He would not add the a. It is an admission of God when you call yourself an atheist, because whether you assert a thing or deny it, you confirm that it is: you cannot deny a thing without giving it a certain existence. It does exist somewhere even if you assume that it exists only in the minds of other people; that it exists in the minds of other people means that it does exist. So Nietzsche’s God exists somewhere and has contents but he must be careful not to mention them. That an atheist is particularly concerned with God is not understood with us because we are still unspeakably barbarous in that respect, but the East is a bit more differentiated in such matters. They have the saying that a man who loves God needs seven rebirths in order to be redeemed or to reach Nirvana, but a man who hates God needs only three. And why? Because a man who hates God will think of him much oftener than a man” who loves God. So the atheist hates God, but he is in a way a better Christian than the man who loves him; Nietzsche is a better Christian and far more moral than the Christians before and after him. You see that explains a great deal of Zarathustra, which is a highly moral book. If anybody should try to live that teaching, he would have astonishing experiences. He would certainly feel himself to be a better Christian than all those before him. He could buy a halo for his own private use and make himself the first and only saint of his private church. It is true of course that we use that expression “the bowels of … “rather in connection with the earth, and in a psychological sense we mean the contents of the unconscious, which we think of as below. But to the Christian era the unconscious was by no means below; it was a fiery and luminous heaven above. All the heavenly “powers and principalities” of the Catholic church are really the contents of the unconscious,’ but at that time they projected the unconscious into the world above, and only through the descent which has taken place in the last four hundred years, has it been brought down into the lower regions, the earth, into the real bowels, the intestinal region, the kingdom of the sympathetic nervous system. ~Carl Jung, Nietzscheâ€™s Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 72â€“ 73.

Nietzsche calls himself an atheist, but this formulation is of course a bit influenced by the idea that God is when he is said to be. In calling yourself an atheist, you make that concession to your primitive magic thinking-as if you could produce something by saying it is. As Kant said, that word is nothing but a copula in a judgment; you need to use a verb that expresses existence, but you have not produced a thing by it. If you say you possess a hundred dollars, they don’t necessarily exist. But Nietzsche’s idea confirms our explanation of the old wise man as the original Christian revelation continued in the idea of the paraclete, the Comforter, withdrawing slowly from the world and becoming a hermit, re-identifying himself again with the natural background from which he came. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 40-41.

These many forms of rebirth rites show that it is a representation collective, an archetypal idea, which means that the process in question is a regular quality of the collective unconscious, the original disposition of man. And because it has occurred everywhere, it always comes back again in one form or another. If we live at all, we will always seek the fulfilment of the archetype of rebirth; one could say it came to pass on the slightest provocation. So when Nietzsche declares that God is dead, instantly he begins to transform. With that declaration he is no longer a Christian, he is an atheist or it doesn’t matter what. He immediately gets into the process of that archetype of rebirth, because those vital powers in us which we call “God” are powers of self-renewal, powers of eternal change. Goethe felt that: there is a beautiful verse in Faust about the kingdom of the mothers where everything is in a continuous state of self-renewal, a continuous rearrangement. And this kingdom of the mothers is the abyss of the deity; it is the darkness of the good, the deus absconditus, the auctor rerum, the dark father of created things. Also one can say it is the original mother. Now, we have a peculiar sphere in our unconscious which corresponds to such concepts, and we call that “God,” the creative or the creating god. And as soon as this projection or this declaration, this creative god (whatever it is) is abolished, instantly that process begins in us. We are caught in those powers. If you don’t want to be caught in them, then don’t make such declarations; it is exceedingly foolish to make them, because you thus provoke the unconscious. Of course you think it is quite futile whether you make such a declaration or not, that you can say this or that about God and it makes no difference whatever. But I tell you it does make a difference in reality, only you won’t connect it with things. You see, the man Nietzsche himself did not realize, when he said God was dead, that it meant that he would get into the mill, into the alchemical pot where he is cooked and transformed. As he did not realize, for instance, that thinking is a most exhausting creative process. He says that all his thoughts jumped out of his brain like Pallas jumping out of the head of Zeus, “: but on the next page he complained about the terrible vomiting and awful headaches he was always pestered with when working.”‘ That is generally so; we don’t connect psychological and physical conditions. You see, that declaration is a very obnoxious thing: it gets him into trouble right away, but he does not realize it. The trouble is that he has to create the Superman. His first word is: I teach you the Superman, not realizing that he has to give birth to a Superman, that he is confronted with the task of creating the Superman. And what is the best proof that he does not realize it? ~Carl Jung, Nietzscheâ€™s Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 54-55

As long as people can live in such a system, if it really expresses the bets of the unconscious, then it is good and there is nothing to he said against it; you cannot even criticize it. That means, of course, inasmuch as people are serious and have not simply put an a before their creed-instead of theism, atheism. I should not call atheists serious: they don’t see that they are still theists in denying God. I understand by “serious people” those who know that such a thing as a religious experience is possible, and that it means the greatest good one could possibly imagine. Such people realize, of course, that the Christian symbol as it is handed down, as it stands now, does not provide a form through which a complete life is possible. And inasmuch as this is again a truth, we have the problem of what we can do or how we can live when that symbol fails us. For instance, we can assume that people who have such a problem are abnormal, that it is a sort of choice of unbalanced minds that simply cannot bow to tradition, who are too abnormal to be expressed by a fairly collective or normal symbol, so that even Christ as a comprehensive symbol, or what Buddha is in the East, is unable to express those particular whims of modern minds. That is the attitude of very intelligent people. They take it that these so-called modern problems are just sort of neurotic protuberances, more or less morbid, because they hold that everything that reasonably can be, is already expressed in the Christian dogma. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsch’es Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 95-96

I have talked to very intelligent people in France about this question, and the Protestants and Jews understood what I meant, but the normal French Catholic does not understand at all, because for him the unconscious doesn’t exist. Even if he doesn’t believe in the church, he is at least an atheist, which means a good Catholic. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 121.

And mind you, man is forever in the funny position of the religious atheist, whose psychology has been beautifully characterized by Bernard Shaw in one of his plays: the atheist complains and laments over the fact that he has lost his atheistic belief–all his highest convictions have been lost, he can no longer believe in atheism. Of course, it is exactly the same whether a man is a theist or an atheist; it is only plus and minus. But that has been the preoccupation of man forever. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche Zarathustra Seminar, Page 348.

That religion could be psychology has not dawned upon them. They may be atheists but you know what an atheist is: simply a man who is outside instead of inside the church walls. Instead of saying, yes, I believe that you exist, he stands outside of the house and says, no, I don’t believe that you are God. That is the only difference: an atheist is just as Catholic as those within the walls. So they cannot understand of what modern psychology is talking, because this whole world of problems, the symbols we are dealing with, is for them still within the walls of the church, safely walled in. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1011

Unfortunately enough, it is the common fate; even the atheist who is always shouting up to God, “I don’t believe that you exist!”-even such a man is already on the way to lose the church entirely. You see, as long as you can be a member of an atheist club or something of the sort, you are not really outside of the church. . ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1011.

Now, since a man’s spiritual vocation in the widest sense has been thrust upon him to an increasing degree by the unconscious, this naturally gave rise to the view that the God-image was a spirit who required man’s spirit. This is not an invention of Christianity or of philosophy, but a common human experience to which even the atheist bears witness. The important thing is what he talks about, not whether he agrees with it or not. The other definition of God therefore asserts: “God is spirit.” The pneumatic God-image has been further attenuated as the Logos, and this gives the “love of God” that peculiarly abstract quality which is also apparent in the idea of “Christian love.” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Page 65.

Nietzsche thought himself quite conscious and responsible when he smashed the old tablets, yet he felt a peculiar need to back himself up with a revivified Zarathustra, a sort of alter ego, with whom he often identifies himself in his great tragedy Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche was no atheist, but his God was dead. The result of this demise was a split in himself, and he felt compelled to call the other self “Zarathustra” or, at times, “Dionysus.” In his fatal illness he signed his letters “Zagreus,” the dismembered god of the Thracians. The tragedy of Zarathustra is that, because his God died, Nietzsche himself became a god; and this happened because he was no atheist. He was of too positive a nature to tolerate the urban neurosis of atheism. It seems dangerous for such a man to assert that “God is dead”: he instantly becomes the victim of inflation. Far from being a negation, God is actually the strongest and most effective “position” the psyche can reach, in exactly the same sense in which Paul speaks of people “whose God is their belly” (Phil. 3: 19).

The strongest and therefore the decisive factor in any individual psyche compels the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from man. Anything despotic and inescapable is in this sense “God,” and it becomes absolute unless, by an ethical decision freely chosen, one succeeds in building up against this natural phenomenon a position that is equally strong and invincible. If this psychic position proves to be absolutely effective, it surely deserves to be named a “God,” and what is more, a spiritual God, since it sprang from the freedom of ethical decision and therefore from the mind. Man is free to decide whether “God” shall be a “spirit” or a natural phenomenon like the craving of a morphine addict, and hence whether “God” shall act as a beneficent or a destructive force. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Pages 85-86

I would like to point out to my critic that I have in my time been regarded not only as a Gnostic and its opposite, but also as a theist and an atheist, a mystic and a materialist. In this concert of contending opinions I do not wish to lay too much stress on what I consider myself to be, but will quote a judgment from a leading article in the British Medical Journal (9 February 1952), a source that would seem to be above suspicion. “Facts first and theories later is the keynote of Jung’s work. He is an empiricist first and last.” This view meets with my approval. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 664

In calling themselves “atheists” or “agnostics,” people dissatisfied with the Christian tradition are not being merely negative. In many cases it is easy to observe the phenomenonof the “compensating God,” as I have demonstrated in my most recent works. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 678.

It is sheer malevolence to accuse me of an atheistic attitude simply because I try to be honest and disciplined. Speaking for myself, the question whether God exists or not is futile. I am sufficiently convinced of the effects man has always attributed to a divine being. If I should express a belief beyond that or should assert the existence of God, it would not only be superfluous and inefficient, it would show that I am not basing my opinion on facts. When people say that they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don’t need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 706-707

Carl Jung on “Aquarius” – Anthology

1940 is the year when we approach the meridian of the first star in Aquarius. It is the premonitory earthquake of the New Age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 285-286.

“If as seems probable, the aeon of the fishes is ruled by the archetypal motif of the ‘hostile brothers,’ then the approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites. It will then no longer be possible to write off evil as a mere privatio boni; its real existence will have to be recognized”). ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 275

He [Jung] notes that around 7 BC there was a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, representing a union of extreme opposites, which would place the birth of Christ under Pisces. Pisces (Latin for “fishes”) is known as the sign of the fish and is often represented by two fish swimming in opposite directions. ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 273.

What does this mean for humanity? What does it mean to say that man dies yet only the risen still live? All these questions may become actual during the next two thousand years, in the era of Aquarius. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 43.

Around the birth of Christ, there follows the Age of Pisces. Pisces is a water sign. That is probably why we have to look for the spirit in the water, in lifeâ€™s flow of images, and in the unconscious. And now we are on the threshold of the sign of Aquarius. The air element is assigned to it, and it is symbolized by an angel or a human being, instead of an animal. Here the spirit is meant to become something subtle again, and man to become who he is. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 354-355.

Saturn is the ruler of the sign of Aquarius, and it is quite possible that Khunrath meant the coming age, the age of Aquarius, the water carrier, which is almost due now. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XV, Page 128.

psychological status, viz. that of Aquarius, which is certainly a oneness, presumably that of the Anthropos, the realization of Christ’s allusion: “Dii estis.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

And now we are moving into Aquarius, of which the Sibylline Books say: Luciferi vires accendit Aquarius acres (Aquarius inflames the savage forces of Lucifer). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 229-230

The vernal equinox is moving out of the sign of Pisces into the sign of Aquarius, just as it did out of Taurus (the old bull gods) into Aries (the ram-horned gods) and then out of Aries (the sacrificed lamb) into Pisces. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 225-226.

He [Jung] spoke of Aquarius and the significance of Khrushchev’s visit to America. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 295

Carl Jung on “Assumption” – Anthology

The anima is a representative of the unconscious and hence a mediatrix, just as the Beata Virgo is called “mediatrix” in the dogma of the Assumption. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424

It is more than probable that the idea of the Assumptio did not begin its real life in apostolic times but  considerably later. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

The miracle of the Assumptio obviously began to operate noticeably from the VI century onwards only. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

If the Assumptio means anything, it means a spiritual fact which can be formulated as the integration of the female principle into the Christian conception of the Godhead. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

If the Assumptio is an essentially concrete historical fact, then it is no more a living spiritual experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

Carl Jung on “Being” – Anthology

One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.

At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266.

Because I also want my being other, I must become a Christ. I am made into Christ, I must suffer it. Thus the redeeming blood flows. Through the self-sacrifice my pleasure is changed and goes above into its higher principle. Love is sighted, but pleasure is blind. Both principles are one in the symbol of the flame. The principles strip themselves of human form. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 254.

If a God ceases being the way the zenith, he must fall secretly. The God becomes sick if he oversteps the height of the zenith. That is why the spirit of the depths took me when the spirit of this time had led me to the summit. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 241.

From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on manâ€¦ ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.

Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.

The beginning of all things is love, but the being of things is life. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 327.

My I, you’re a barbarian. I want to live with you; therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you. The touchstone is being alone with oneself.  This is the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 330.

I hold together what Christ has kept apart in himself and through his example in others, since the more the one half of my being strives toward the good, the more the other half journeys to Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 315.

If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there, drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked and tormented for the sake of our sins, so that you totally become his nature, deny his being-apart-from-you; you should be he himself not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 234.

The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 231.

Everything that becomes too old becomes evil, the same is true of your highest. Learn from the suffering of the crucified God that one can also betray and crucify a God, namely the God of the old year. If a God ceases being the way of life, he must fall secretly. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 241.

In the light of the possibilities revealed by intuition, man’s earthliness is certainly a lamentable imperfection; but this very imperfection is part of his innate being, of his reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 114.

In that “spiritualism” and “materialism” are statements on Being, they represent metaphysical judgments. ~Carl Jung, Atom and Archetype, Pages 97-101

â€¦ it would be an arbitrary limitation of the concept of God to assume that He is only good and so deprive evil of real being. If God is only good, everything is good~Carl Jung, Letters II, 519

Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33

I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 358.

Common is the view that spirit and psyche are essentially the same and can be separated only arbitrarily. Wundt takes spirit as the inner being, regardless of any connection with an outer being. ~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386

I do not know for what reason the universe has come into being, and shall never know. Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem. But if an idea about it is offered to me – in dreams or in mythic traditions – I ought to take note of it. I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis that I know cannot be proved. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 301-302.

Nature, the psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfolded – and what more could I wish for? To me the supreme meaning of Being can consist only in the fact that it is, not that it is not or is no longer. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 276.

We know that Tom Thumbs, dactyls, and Cabiri are personifications of creative forces¦ Thus the creative dwarfs toil away in secret; the phallus also working in darkness, begets a living being. ~Carl Jung, CW5, para. 180

When they [the mystics] descend into the depths of their own being they find â€˜in their heartâ€™ the image of the sun, they find their own life-force which they call the â€˜sunâ€™ 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, CW 5, Para. 176.

The God-image thrown up by a spontaneous act of creation is a living figure, a being that exists in its own right and there-fore confronts its ostensible creator autonomouslyâ€¦ As proof of this it may be mentioned that the relation between the creator and the created is a dialectical. ~Carl Jung; CW 8, para. 95-96.

Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 326.

The God-image thrown up by a spontaneous act of creation is a living figure, a being that exists in its own right and there-fore confronts its ostensible creator autonomously as proof of this it may be mentioned that the relation between the creator and the created is a dialectical. ~Carl Jung; CW 8, para. 95-96.

The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Page 652.

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; Page 25.

…a symbol of the unity of personality, a symbol of the self, where the war of opposites finds peace. In this way the primordial being becomes the distant goal of manâ€™s self-development. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 293.

Spirit and matter may well be forms of one and the same transcendental being. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Â¶ 392.

Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But â€˜the heart glows,â€™ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being. Dealing with the Unconscious has become a question of life for us. ~Carl Jung, CW, 9i, Para 50.

[The trickster] is a forerunner of the savior . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para 472.

The attainment of wholenesss requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 556.

This living being appears outwardly as the material body, but inwardly as a series of images of the vital activities taking place within it.  ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 619.

Our concern with the unconscious has become a vital question, a question of spiritual being or non-being. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 52.

For there is no coming into being and dying but in time. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 101.

The four always expresses the coming into being of what is essentially human, the emergence of human consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 367.

We can distinguish no form of being that is not psychic in the first place. All other realities are derived from and indirectly revealed by it, actually with the artificial aid named science. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.

Only after I had written about pages in folio, it began to dawn on me that Christ-not the man but the divine being-was my secret goal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 479-481.

A child, too, enters into this sublimity, and there detaches himself from this world and his manifold individuations more quickly than the aged. So easily does he become what you also are that he apparently vanishes. Sooner or later all the dead become what we also are. But in this reality we know little or nothing about that mode of being, and what shall we still know of this earth after death? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 343.

This perfect being is a conception of an optimum of life, and it is symbolically represented as the all-round being. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture 10, Page 81.

The goal which the alchemist sets himself, however, is not a direct redemption of the human being, nor is it a propitiation of the Deity nor a defence against evil. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 143.

Without doubt, also, the realization of the opposite hidden in the unconscious, i.e. the ‘reversal’, signifies reunion with the unconscious laws of being, and the purpose of this reunion is the attainment of conscious life or, expressed in Chinese terms, the bringing about of the Tao. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Pages 95-96.

One source is the unconscious, which spontaneously produces such fantasies; the other source is life, which, if lived with complete devotion, brings an intuition of the self, the individual being. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 99.

Man as a spiritual being is made human by essence (hsing). The individual man possesses it. but it extends far beyond the limits of the individual. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 11.

Man is the mirror which God holds up before him, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 111-112.

These various formulations indicate the same being that we find in the Gnosis as the ethereal man, light and diaphanous, identical with gold, diamond, carbuncle, the Grail, and, in Indian philosophy, with the Purusha or personified as Christ or Buddha. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 118.

Yoga does not lead to the ego but to the knowledge that the ego is only a phenomenon, it is the face, skin or symptom of an incomprehensible being. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 136.

Kant himself emphasises that God, the Highest Being, is in no way affected by what we know about him. So the Yogin analyses what he knows about Buddha and takes the last word in the Mantra: “Aham” for this purpose. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 55.

We must know how the human psyche came into being for in the unconscious the old ways are always trodden again. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

Nirvana, for instance is a positive non-being, this is something which you cannot say anything about. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

The unconscious is a living being with its use, object, and goal, and is eternally looking for a way to reach that goal – a way which is not our personal one, but the human way, mankind’s way. ~ Carl Jung, Lecture VI 2June1934, Page 113.

The history of energetics is largely intuitive, it starts primitively as intuitions of archetypes, first they were beings, now they are mathematical formulas. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 100.

The individual is all-important as he is the carrier of life, and his development and fulfillment are of paramount significance. It is vital for each living being to become its own entelechia and to grow into that which it was from the very beginning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 19

Just as man, as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence and his own spiritual and moral autonomy anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.

I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Carl Jung, Jung Van der Post, Page 216.

“The Christian symbol is a living being that carries the seeds of further development in itself.”its foundations remain the same eternally,” “Christianity must be interpreted anew in each aeon,” otherwise “it suffocates in traditionalism.” ~Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 149.

Consciousness is obviously the supreme quality: the destiny of the world is to achieve entry into human consciousness. Man is the being God has sought not only to show him the world, but because the Creator needs man to illuminate his creation. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.

As intelligent beings, however, we are dependent on human society; the unconscious is no substitute for reality. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 60.

The psyche is nothing different from the living being. It is the psychical aspect of the living being. It is even the psychical aspect of matter. It is a quality. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 27.

If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless machine and Man’s existence a useless freak. My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says ‘No’ to it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, 14Sept1960.

Only a mythical being has a range greater than man’s. How then can man form any definite opinions about himself? ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 4.

Nobody has ever been entirely liberated from the opposites, because no living being could possibly attain to such a state, as nobody escapes pain and pleasure as long as he functions physiologically. He may have occasional ecstatic experiences when he gets the intuition of a complete liberation, f.i. in reaching the state of sat-chit-ananda. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 303.

I may say that I know what is infinite and eternal; I may even assert that I have experienced it; but that one could actually know it is impossible because man is neither an infinite nor an eternal being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 375-379.

But becoming Man, he becomes at the same time a definite being, which is this and not that. Thus the very first thing Christ must do is to sever himself from his shadow and call it the devil (sorry, but the Gnostics of Irenaeus already knew it!). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138

But theologians suffer from the fact that when they say “God,” then that God is. But when I say “God,” I know I have expressed my image of such a being and I am honestly not quite sure whether he is just like my image or not, even if I believe in God’s existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.

I know these moments of liberation come flashing out of the process, but I shun them because I always feel at such a moment that I have thrown off the burden of being human and that it will fall back on me with redoubled weight. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.

I hold the contrary view that there are certain experiences (of the most varied kinds) which we characterize by the attribute “divine” without being able to offer the slightest proof that they are caused by a Being with any definite qualities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

A complete life, unconditionally lived, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It leads us into all dangers and defeats, and into the light of knowledge, which is to say, into maximal consciousness. This is the aim of the incarnation as well as the Creation, which wants each being to attain its perfection. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 267-268.

Purusha as creator sacrifices himself in order to bring the world into being: God dissolves in his own creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 304-306.

What am I without this individual consciousness of mine? Even what I have called the “self” functions only by virtue of an ego which hears the voice of that greater being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381.

To the former [Mathematician], number is a means of counting; to the latter [Psychology], it is a discovered entity capable of making individual statements if it is given a chance. In other words: in the former case number is a servant, in the latter case an autonomous being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 404-405

This can be expressed in other words by saying that there is a relativity of the psychic and physical categories-a relativity of being and of the seemingly axiomatic existence of time and space. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449

After thinking all this over I have come to the conclusion that being “made in the likeness” applies not only to man but also to the Creator: he resembles man or is his likeness, which is to say  that he is just as unconscious as man or even more unconscious, since according to the myth of the incarnatio he actually felt obliged to become man and offer himself to man as a sacrifice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 493-496

Words have become much too cheap. Being is more difficult and is therefore fondly replaced by verbalizing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 502-503

Yet I should consider it an intellectual immorality to indulge in the belief that my view of a God is the universal, metaphysical Being of the confessions or “philosophies.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 525-526

We are not convinced that our thoughts are original beings that walk about in our brains, and we invent the idea that they are powerless without our gracious creative act; we invent this in order not to be too much influenced by our thoughts. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82

After all, an animal is not just a thing with fur on it; it is a complete being. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 115

It is as though in men the animal likeness stopped at the spinal cord while in women it extends into the lower strata of the brain, or that man keeps the animal kingdom in him below the diaphragm, while in women it extends throughout her being. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 124

Writing is a difficult question, since it is not only a blessing but also a bad temptation because it tickles the devil of self-importance. If you want to write something, you have to be quite sure that the whole of your being wants this kind of expression. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 612-613

His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 623-624

The patient is permeated by what you are by your real being and pays little attention to what you say. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking:

Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364The self would be the preceding stage, a being that is more than man and that definitely manifests; that is the thinker of our thoughts, the doer of our deeds, the maker of our lives, yet it is still within the reach of human experience. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978

It [Self] is a restricted universality or a universal restrictedness, a paradox; so it is a relatively universal being and therefore does not deserve to be called God.; ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978

So if you speak of individuation at all, it necessarily means the individuation of beings who are in the flesh, in the living body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202

Children also contain a future personality within themselves, the being that they will be in the following years. ~Carl Jung, Children Dreams Seminar, Page 50.

But such a thing [Individuation] is only possible if the individual in every moment of existence fulfills his complete being, lives the primitive pattern, fulfills all the expectations that he was originally born with. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 760-761

Only man as an individual being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 1

Consciousness is a precondition of being. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 132-133

Mary is the bud which contains the becoming being that is undergoing transformation. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939.

This potential man was not the biological man but the philosophical man, a peculiar being, which is also sometimes called anima. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

Man is the mirror which God holds up to himself, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 112

Carl Jung on “Being” – Anthology

I believe that we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God. I daily weigh up my whole life and I continue to regard the fiery brilliance of the God as a higher and fuller life than the ashes of rationality. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

Men who have understanding should not just believe, but should wrestle for knowledge to the best of their ability. Belief is not everything, but neither is knowledge. Belief does not give us the security and the wealth of knowing. Desiring knowledge sometimes takes away too much belief. Both must strike a balance. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 336.

I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. I repeat: he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around in himself who holds him back from the best. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 260.

Believe me: It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 231.

Is there anyone among you who believes he can be spared the way? Can he swindle his way past the pain of Christ? I say: “Such a one deceives himself to his own detriment. He beds down on thorns and fire. No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is to come. You should all become Christs. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 235.

The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child: This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.

I believe that we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God. I daily weigh up my whole life and I continue to fiery brilliance of the God as a higher and fuller life than the ashes of rationality. The ashes are suicide to me. I could perhaps put out the fire but I cannot deny to myself the experience of the God. Nor can I cut myself off from this experience. I also do not want to, since I want to live. My life wants itself whole. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 339.

The spirit of this time has condemned us to haste. You have no more futurity and no more past if you serve the spirit of this time. We need the life of eternity. We bear the future and the past in the depths. The future is old and the past is young. You serve the spirit of this time, and believe that you are able to escape the spirit of the depths. But the depths do not hesitate any longer and will force you into the mysteries of Christ. It belongs to this mystery that man is not redeemed through the hero, but becomes a Christ himself. The antecedent example of the saints symbolically teaches us this. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 253.

What a thinker does not think he believes does not exist, and what one who feels does not feel he believes does not exist. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 248.

My master and my brother, I believe you have completed your work’s. What one individual can do for men, you have done and accomplished and fulfilled. The time has come when each must do his own work of redemption. Mankind has grown older and a new month has begun.  ~Christ to Dr. Jung, The Red Book, Page 356.

Just as the old prophets [ancients] stood before the Mysterium of Christ, I also stand as yet before the [this] Mysterium of-Christ, [insofar as I reassume the past] although I live two thousand years after-him [later] and at one time believed I was a Christian. But I had never been a Christ. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253, Footnote 228.

The spirit of the depths is pregnant with ice, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror. You see in these days what the spirit of the depths bore. You did not believe it, but you would have known it if you had taken counsel with your fear. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.

You serve the spirit of this time, and believe that you are able to escape the spirit of the depths. But the depths do not hesitate any longer and will force you into the mysteries of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253.

You’re stubborn. What I mean is that it’s hardly a coincidence that the whole world has become Christian. I also believe that it was the task of Western man to carry Christ in his heart and to grow with his suffering, death, and resurrection. ~Carl Jung to The Red One, Liber Novus, Page 260.

One used to believe that one could murder a God. But the God was saved, he forged a new axe in the fire, and plunged again into the flood of light of the East to resume his ancient cycle. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 283.

A free man knows only free Gods and devils that are self-contained and take effect on account of their own force. If they fail to have an effect, that is their own business, and I can remove this burden from myself. But if they are effective, they need neither my protection nor my care, nor my belief. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 307.

May man rule in the human world. May his laws be valid. But treat the souls, daimons, and Gods in their way; offering what is demanded. But burden no man, demand and expect nothing from him, with what your devil-souls and God-souls lead you to believe, but endure and remain silent and do piously what befits your kind. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 343.

In the garden it had to become apparent to me that I loved Salome. This recognition struck me, since I had not thought it. What a thinker does not think he believes does not exist, and what one who feels does not feel he believes does not exist. You begin to have a presentiment of the whole when you embrace your opposite principle, since the whole belongs to both principles, which grow from one root. ~Carl Jung and Elijah, Liber Novus, Page 248.

God is a mystery, and everything we say about Him is said and believed by human beings¦ when I speak of God I always mean the image man has made of himâ€¦ ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 384

People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 40.

The problem of my destiny goes back a hundred and fifty years. Indeed it appeared as early as the twelfth century, as I have now discovered. Formerly I believed it only went back to Goethe’s Faust. (Jung now told the dream of his ancestors in which the last was only able to move his little finger.) The problem that appeared as a question in the twelfth century became my extremely personal destiny. Already Goethe had found an answer a hundred and fifty years ago. My father was so tormented by it that he died at the age of fifty-four. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 67.

At the Reformation two things happened which upset the absolute attitude of that day: (a) Crucifixes were found in Mexico, which undermined the belief in the uniqueness of the Christian religion where the crucifixion was the central teaching, (b) The rediscovery of Gnosticism, the Dionysian myth and so forth, which showed that teachings similar to Christianity had been prevalent before the birth of Christ. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 15.

The belief, the self-confidence, perhaps also the devotion with which the analyst does his work, are far more important to the patient (imponderabilia though they may be), than the rehearsing of old traumata. ~Carl Jung; CW 4; par. 584.

There are analysts who believe that they can get along without self-analysis. This is Munchausen psychology, and they will certainly remain stuck. They forget that one of the most important therapeutically effective factors is subjecting you to the objective judgment of another. As regards ourselves we remain blind, despite everything and everybody. Carl Jung; “The Theory of Psychoanalysis”; CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis; Page 449.

It is hard to believe that this teeming world is too poor to provide an object for human love – it offers boundless opportunities to everyone. It is rather the inability to love which robs a person of these opportunities. The world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and beautiful. What compels us to create a substitute from within ourselves is not an external lack, but our own inability to include anything outside ourselves in our love. Certainly the difficulties and adversities of the struggle for existence may oppress us, yet even the worst conditions need not hinder love; on the contrary, they often spur us on to greater efforts. Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation (1952). CW 5: Page 253.

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism; we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code. ~Carl G. Jung, in the introduction to Frances G. Wickes’ “Analysis der Kinderseele” (The Inner World of Childhood), 1931.

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something stronger than myself, something that people call God. ~Carl Jung; “The Old Wise Man” published in Time, 1955. [Note: Dr. Jung’s clarification of this quotation may be read at this link: http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/2012/11/dr-jung-said-i-dont-believe-i-know.html%5D

It was universally believed in the Middle Ages as well as in the Greco-Roman world that the soul is a substance. Indeed, mankind as a whole has held this belief from its earliest beginnings, and it was left for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a â€œpsychology without the soul.~Carl; CW 8.

Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

It is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times, the basic mythological ideas were “invented” by a clever old philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward “believed” by a credulous and uncritical people. But the very word “invent” is derived from the Latin invenire, and means “to find” and hence to find something by “seeking” it. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 69.

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet. ~Carl Jung; The Integration of the Personality p. 72

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, Para 423.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep. Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his church, to live the “symbolic life. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 140.

it is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol. ~Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols, Page 53.

We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man’s affinity with the gods. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Page 242.

The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know itâ€”I don’t need to believe it. ~Carl Jung; Interview in Hugh Burnett; Face to Face (1959); Page 51.

My subjective attitude is that I hold every religious position in high esteem but draw an inexorable dividing line between the content of belief and the requirements of science. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 124-125.

It seems to me, however, that when belief enters into practical life we are entitled to the opinion that it should be coupled with the Christian virtue of modesty, which does not brag about absoluteness but brings itself to admit the unfathomable ways of God which have nothing to do with the Christian revelation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 124-125.

We shall also see that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body in the name of the spirit.  ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 218-220.

The mistake, it seems to me, is that these critics actually believe only in words, without knowing it, and then think they have posited God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 486-489.

If Christ in Gethsemane had no fear, then his passion is null and void and the believer can subscribe to docetism! Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 398-400.

Freud and Adler believe that the unconscious consists only of contents which have once been conscious; for me it is a thing in itself, it is my belief and in fact I know that dreams are exactly what they say. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 162.

I sincerely hope you don’t believe what people say about me. If I did, I should have buried myself long ago. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 503-505.

The Essenes were a sect of people who lived in a monastery by the Dead Sea, they practiced a kind of mental healing, or therapy, and believed in the interpretation of dreams. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 166.

The essential thing is not what the dreamer believes but what he is; it is not my creed that matters, but what I am, every gesture betrays me. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 199.

Death is psychologically as important as birth, and like it, is an integral part of life. … As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal, and life’s inclination towards death begins as soon as the meridian is passed. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para. 68.

The analysis of older people provides a wealth of dream symbols that psychically prepare the dreams for impending death. It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. The unconscious believes quite obviously in a life after death. ~Marie-Louise von Franz (1987), ix.

Often, indeed, a false ambition survives, in that an old man wants to be a youth again, or at least feels he must behave like one, although in his heart he can no longer make believe. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Pages 74-75.

The unbeliever knows as well as anybody else that this world is in a frightful mess and always was. This knowledge alone has probably never yet prompted any modern man to believe. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 216-217.

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.

In this respect our time is caught in a fatal error: we believe we can criticize religious facts intellectually; we think, for instance, like Laplace, that God is a hypothesis which can be subjected to intellectual treatment, to affirmation or denial.  ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 110.

I make a great effort to fortify the belief in immortality as far as I can, especially in my older patients, for whom such questions are crucial. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.

The meditation on the syllables of the mantra leads to identification with the highest Self. This condition, sometimes reaching ecstasy, is dangerous to the Yogin, for if the human being believes that he is the absolute he may explode. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 55.

In India it has given way to Hinduism, in which Buddha is merely the ninth, that is the last, incarnation or avatar of Vishnu. The Hindus believe that the time of Buddha has passed and that a tenth avatar of Vishnu in the form of a white horse will soon appear. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 68.

Youth has to build many walls in order to shut off the background from the ego, so that it may believe in the outer world; for to remain under the fascination of the inner images causes hesitation and lack of accomplishment, and to live, to be wholly devoted to something, is also an art which must not be despised. ~Carl Jung, Lecture X, 12Jan1934, Pages 45.

I positively do not believe that Christianity is the only and the highest manifestation of the truth. There is at least as much truth in Buddhism and in other religions too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 127.

I don’t believe in the tiger who was finally converted to vegetarianism and ate only apples. My solace was always Paul, who did not deem it beneath his dignity to admit he bore a thorn in the flesh. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 276-277.

I do not believe, I know. ~Carl Jung, BBC Interview, Face to Face.

People speak of belief when they have lost knowledge. Belief and disbelief in God are mere surrogates. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 2, Page 4.

The naive primitive doesn’t believe in God, he knows, because the inner experience rightly means as much to him as the outer. He still has no theology and hasn’t yet let himself be befuddled by booby trap concepts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 2, Page 4.

The unconscious has first to be activated; then we must extricate ourselves, doubting all the things we have hitherto believed; then we can turn back and resume our place in the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 10.

There are women who believe that man will deflect them from their goals and men who often; believe that women want to keep them from their work; yet the real causes are either fear of the other sex or of one’s own unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 51.

We believe we are playing with equations and suddenly it transpires that certain equations express the laws of electric currents. God played and formulated currents. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.

The question of religion is not so simple as you see it: it is not at all a matter of intellectual conviction or philosophy or even belief, but rather a matter of inner experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 183-184.

St. Paul for instance was not converted to Christianity by intellectual or philosophical endeavour or by a belief, but by the force of his immediate inner experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 183-184.

Actually after this vision Nicholas should have preached: “God is terrible.” But he believed his own interpretation instead of the immediate experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 375-379.

We have blotted it out with so-called “spiritual development,” which means that we live by self-fabricated electric light and-to heighten the comedy-believe or don’t believe in the sun. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.

I’m inclined to believe that something of the human soul remains after death, since already in this conscious life we have evidence that the psyche exists in a relative space and in a relative time, that is in a relatively non-extended and eternal state. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 29-30.

I am afraid I cannot conceive of any religious belief which is less than a violation of my ego-consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 50-51.

I consider it unfortunate that most theologians believe they have named God when they say “God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 65-68.

I do not feel called upon to found a religion, nor to proclaim my belief in one. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71

I am dealing with psychic phenomena and I am not at all concerned with the naive and, as a rule, unanswerable question whether a thing is historically, i.e., concretely, true or not. It is enough that it has been said and believed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 95-98.

The characteristic difference is that God’s incarnation is understood to be a historical fact in the Christian belief, while in the Jewish Gnosis it is an entirely pleromatic process symbolized by the concentration of the supreme triad of Kether, Hokhmah, and Binah in the figure of Tifereth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 91-93.

Sure enough, we must believe in Reason. But it should not prevent us from recognizing a mystery when we meet one. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 87-91.

God may be everywhere, but this in no way absolves believers from the duty of offering him a place that is declared holy, otherwise one could just as well get together for religious purposes in the 3rd class waiting-room of a railway station. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 128-129.

The Protestant is not even granted a quiet, pious place where he can withdraw from the turmoil of the world. And nowhere does there exist for God a sanctified temenos which serves only one and a sacred purpose. No wonder so few people attend church. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 128-129.

Most of your [American] psychologists, as it looks to me, are still in the XVIIIth century inasmuch as they believe that the human psyche is tabula rasa at birth, while all somewhat differentiated animals are born with specific instincts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 148-150.

As no animal is born without its instinctual patterns, there is no reason whatever to believe that man should be born without his specific forms of physiological and psychological reactions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.

I do not write for believers who already possess the whole truth, rather for unbelieving but intelligent people who want to understand something. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 197-199.

An American pupil of mine, Dr. Progoff (New York), has tried to adapt and to explain synchronicity to the average reader but he landed his ship on the rocks because he could not free his mind from the deep-rooted belief in the Sanctissima Trinitas of the axiomata time, space, and causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 215-216.

If you discuss religious problems and you bring in a psychological point of view, you instantly collide with the concretism of religious belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 227-229

Analytical psychology unfortunately just touches the vulnerable spot of the church, viz. the untenable concretism of its beliefs, and the syllogistic character of Thomistic philosophy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 227-229

“Astrology” is another of those “random phenomena” wiped off the desk by the idol of the average, which everybody believes to be reality itself while it is a mere abstract. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 230-232.

People still believe that they can posit or replace reality by words, or that something has happened when a thing is given a different name. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

No matter whether it was a Jewish or a Christian or any other belief, he [Freud] was unable to admit anything beyond the horizon of his scientific materialism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 295-296.

I have always wondered how it comes that just the theologians are often so particularly fond of the Freudian theory, as one could hardly find anything more hostile to their alleged beliefs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 295-296.

Nothing is thereby asserted, nothing denied, and this is just what Buber doesn’t understand; for he is a theologian who naively thinks that what he believes must necessarily be so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

I do not believe and do not disbelieve in the existence of UFOS. I simply do not know what to think about their alleged physical existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 403-404

If I don’t know it, it looks to me like an usurpation to say “I believe it,” or the contrary. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445

But for those people not possessing the gift of belief it may be helpful to remember that science itself points to the possibility of survival. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445

And this is the problem that is raised in our days: where do we land if we believe in the almightiness of our will and in the absolute freedom of our choice? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473

By “religion,” then, I mean a kind of attitude which takes careful and conscientious account of certain numinous feelings, ideas, and events and reflects upon them; and by “belief” or “creed” I mean an organized community which collectively professes a specific belief or a specific ethos and mode of behaviour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without “myth.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

Clearly the anti-mythological trend is due to the difficulties we have in clinging on to our previous mythological tenets of belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

I don’t believe that man, as he is today, is capable of evading the vicious circle in which he moves, as long as he is as immature as he actually is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 512-513

If you don’t feel self-sufficient, give yourself the chance to take yourself as self-sufficient even if you don’t believe it, but make an effort to allow such kindness to yourself.~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 515-516

You can easily find out from my books what I think about religion (e.g., “Psychology and Religion”). I profess no “belief.” I know that there are experiences one must pay “religious” attention to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 517-518

When I say that I don’t need to believe in God because I “know,” I mean I know of the existence of God-images in general and in particular. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520-523

Mind you, I didn’t say “there is a God.” I said: “I don’t need to believe in God, I know.” Which does not mean: I do know a certain God (Zeus, Yahweh, Allah, the Trinitarian God, etc.) but rather: I do know that I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call “God” in consensu omnium (quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditur). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 525-526

Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520-523

The fear the introvert feels rests on the unconscious assumption that the object is too much animated, and this is a part of the ancient belief in magic. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 65

I see that many of my pupils indulge in a superstitious belief in our so-called ” free will” and pay little attention to the fact that the archetypes are, as a rule, autonomous entities, and not only material subject to our choice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626

The theologian, the only person besides the psychotherapist to declare himself responsible for the cura animarum, is afraid of having to think psychologically about the objects of his belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 628-630

All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief I know that He exists. ~Carl Jung, C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 251.

A creed coincides with the established Church or, at any rate, forms a public institution whose members include not only true believers but vast numbers of people who can only be described as indifferent in matters of religion and who belong to it simply by force of habit. Here the difference between a creed and a religion becomes palpable. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 508

I believe we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

But your attitude to it matters, how you will take it, whether you believe in immortality or not, how you react to such and such an event, that matters to the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 903.

This disbelief in the devilishness of human nature goes hand in hand with the blank incomprehension of religion and its meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 106

For desire only burns in order to burn itself out, and in and from this fire arises the true living spirit which generates life according to its own laws, and is not blinded by the shortsightedness of our intentions or the crude presumption of our superstitious belief in the will. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 192

You must believe in this world, make roots, do the best you can, even if you have to believe in the most absurd things to believe, for instance, that this world is very definite, that it matters absolutely whether such-and-such a treaty is made or not. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29

We believe in doing, the Indian in impassive being. Our religious exercises consist of prayer, worship, and singing hymns. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 911.

If I can help it, I never preach my belief. If asked I shall certainly stand by my convictions, but these do not go beyond what I consider to be my actual knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 79.

I did not say in the broadcast, There is a God. I said, I do not need to believe in a God; I know. ~Carl Jung, The Listener, 21 Jan. 1960

It is for this reason that the alchemists believed in the truth of matter, because a matter was actually their own psychic life. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 228

Belief as a religious phenomenon cannot be discussed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 125.

It seems to me, however, that when belief enters into practical life we are entitled to the opinion that it should be coupled with the Christian virtue of modesty, which does not brag about absoluteness but brings itself to admit the unfathomable ways of God which have nothing to do with the Christian revelation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 125.

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

I do not believe [in a personal God], but I do know of a power of a very personal nature and an irresistible influence. I call it God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 274-275

I profess no belief. I know that there are experiences one must payr eligious attention to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 517

Therefore I speak of the beatipossidentes [those blessed with being able to believe] of belief, and this is what I reproach them with: that they exalt themselves above our human stature and our human limitation and won’t admit to pluming themselves on a possession which distinguishes them from the ordinary mortal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 375-376.

I confess with the confession of not knowing and not being able to know; believers start with the assertion of knowing and being able to know. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 375-376.

We have children and grandchildren and even if we don’t believe in immortality for ourselves, we can believe in the right to live of future people. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Pages 90-95

Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

A man likes to believe that he is master of his soul. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 83.

The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 89.

The “duality” of the ruler is based on the primitive belief that the placenta is the brother of the new-born child, which as such often accompanies him throughout life in ghostly fashion, since it dies early and is ceremonially buried. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 259-261

The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 229

If the miracle of the Assumptio is not a living and present spiritual event, but consists of a physical  phenomenon that is reported or only believed to have happened some 2000 years ago, then it has nothing to do with the spirit, or just as little as any parapsychological stunt of today. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568

The question is not why did our Christian ancestors believe things which are absurd, but how is it that humanity knows these things and prizes them so highly? ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture

He [Jung] does not believe in using a couch, but looks on patients as healthy people interfered with by their neurosis. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 74

This man also asked C.G. if he believed in astrology because he had mentioned it; but, said C.G., it is not necessary to â€˜believeâ€™ in such concepts â€“ he simply observes that they are sometimes relevant. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 102

He [Jung] said that even at school he had always been suspected of being a fraud â€“ as when the teacher refused to believe he had written his essay; there was so much in it the teacher had never heard of that he concluded C.G. had got someone else to write it for him. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 146

Carl Jung on the “Bible” – Anthology

Some examples of editorial slips made by the Church in the Bible:

“Ye will be as gods!”

“When thou art alone then I am with thee.”

If thou would ‘st pray enter into thy chamber …”

The parable of the unjust steward. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 45.

We must read the Bible or we shall not understand psychology. Our psychology, whole lives, our language and imagery are built upon the Bible. ~Carl Jung, The Visions Seminar Vol. 1; Page 156.

If, aside from your work, you read a good book, as one reads the Bible, it can become a bridge for you leading inwards, along which good things may flow to you such as you perhaps cannot now imagine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 434.

The words of the Bible and the sayings of Christ are paradox. We too must be paradox, for only then do we live our lives, only then do we reach completeness and integration of our personalities. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 40.

The Bible says, “Whosoever shall say “Racha” to his brother is guilty of hellfire.” If we substitute “shadow” for “brother” and implicate the dark brother within, we open out this biblical word into new perspectives. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.

Carl Jung on “Bollingen.” – Anthology

In Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live “in modest harmony with nature.” Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote future. Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play are close together. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 226.

I have appeared in the world, if that is good for me. My name enjoys an existence quasi-independent of myself. My real self is actually chopping wood in Bollingen and cooking the meals, trying to forget the trial of an eightieth birthday. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 270

After my wife’s death. . . I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden was myself! ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 225.

I observe myself in the stillness of Bollingen, with the experience of almost eight decades now, and I have to admit that I have found no plain answer to myself. ~Carl Jung, Jung Briefe, Page 386.

It (Bollingen Foundation) is a shining beacon in the darkness of the atomic age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 150-151.

He felt the need to represent his innermost thoughts in stone and to build a completely primitive dwelling: Bollingen was a great matter for me, because words and paper were not real enough. I had to put down a confession in stone.â€ ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xiii

Milk, as lac virginis, virgin’s milk, is a synonym for the aqua doctrinae one of the aspects of Mercurius, who had already bedeviled the Bollingen stones in the form of the trickster. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 615-616

Carl Jung on “Books” – Anthology

Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 564

Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books. ~ C.G. Jung; Letters Volume 1; Page 179.

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung; The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man; CW 10: Civilization in Transition. pg. 327

History is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood. ~Carl Jung; Woman in Europe.

You can learn a great deal of psychology through studying books, but you will find that this psychology is not very helpful in practical life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 236-237.

Your books are not books, Herr Professor. They are bread. ~A poor uneducated woman, ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 402.

And the little travelling salesman of women’s things who stopped me in the street and looked at me with immense eyes, saying “Are you really the man who writes those books? Are you truly the one who writes about these things no one knows? ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 402.

Yes. People have to read the books, by golly, in spite of the fact that they [His Books] are thick. I’m sorry. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 37.

Some of the main islands [of peace] are: my garden, the view of distant mountains, my country place where I withdraw from the noise of city life, my library. Also small things like books, pictures, and stones. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 40.

But fortunately enough, to judge from the satisfactory sale of my books, the public does not heed such inadequate criticism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 230-232.

It has happened to me more than once that educated East Asians rediscovered the meaning of their philosophy or religion only through reading my books. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 438-439

I have often asked myself where my books go and how they are received. The only thing I know definitely is that they have a tolerable sale, if compared to others treating similarly difficult subjects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 497-498

I cannot complain, though, about academic honours bestowed upon me in Europe, America and even in remote India, but I am more than doubtful about the effect my books had upon those who were responsible for the bestowal of such honours. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 497-498

I suppose that my books expect a human understanding of which the intellectual world or the world of intellect is afraid, although I can easily understand why that is so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 497-498

My books have been read largely by intellectuals, who have, of course, not been able to see feeling from this aspect, because feeling in themselves is thoroughly irrational by reason of its contamination by elements from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 134

The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264.

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 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 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 represents a 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

Carl Jung on the “Brain” – Anthology

The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Page 33.

A psychology that treats the mind as an epiphenomenon would better call itself brain-psychology, and remain satisfied with the meager results that such a psycho-physiology can yield. The mind deserves to be taken as a phenomenon in its own right; there are no grounds at all for regarding it as a mere epiphenomenon, dependent though it may be on the functioning of the brain. One would be as little justified in regarding life as an epiphenomenon of the chemistry of carbon compounds. – “On Psychic Energy” (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. pp.10

The prana discipline has practically the same effect. It concentrates the psychic energy upon the inner ways in which the prana flows. The localization in the brain is doubtful, but in general it is correct to assume that the unconscious processes are chiefly located in the lower centres of the brain from the thalamus downwards. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 497-498.

One could say, in a certain sense, that the unconscious was the invisible, psychical part of the tangible and visible nervous system, just as one might say consciousness was the invisible part of the brain. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.

This disproves the theory that a child’s mind is a tabula rasa, for it shows us that the unconscious is no empty surface, but a prepared ground; the brain is complete with the history of the world and every child is born with an unconscious assumption of the world. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 27.

Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

After a stroke general debilitation or senile depression can occur. If the brain is damaged, consciousness can slip back many levels. The real personality has then departed; what remains carries on the fight against death. Conflicts do not reach the whole person anymore and are therefore not real conflicts any longer. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 16.

In the light of this view the brain might be a transformer station, in which the relatively infinite tension or intensity of the psyche proper is transformed into perceptible frequencies or “extensions.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

The question of brain localization is an extremely delicate one, because when you destroy a certain part of the brain you destroy a certain function. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.

There is even no absolute certainty about the psyche being definitely dependent upon the brain since we know that there are facts proving that the mind can relativize space and time, as the Rhine experiments and general experience have proved sufficiently. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.

I should not worry about all this localization talk. It’s practically all foolishness, and a remnant of the old brain mythology like the explanation of sleep through the contraction of the ganglia, which is by no means more intelligent than the localization of the psyche in the pituitary gland. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.

It is on the contrary an excellent demonstration of Marxist materialism: mescalin is the drug by which you can manipulate the brain so that it produces even so-called “spiritual” experiences. That is the ideal case for Bolshevik philosophy and its “brave new world.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 222-224.

As long as you [Victor White] do not identify yourself with the avenging angel, I can feel your humanity and I can tell you that I am really sorry for my misdeeds and sore about God’s ways with the poor anthropoids that were meant to have a brain enabling them to think critically. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Pages 238-243.

But we do know that warm-bloodedness and a differentiated brain were necessary for the inception of consciousness, and thus also for the revelation of meaning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 493-496

But in these days we live by our brains alone and ignore the very definite laws of our body and the instinctive world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567

Obviously there is no law to prove that this is so, but we cannot assume that the products of our brains do not derive from nature; therefore I see no reason why we would not find astonishingly true things in the thought of the ancient sages, such as the I Ching represents. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 84

When it comes to the rather delicate task of locating the collective unconscious, you must not think of it as being compassed by the brain alone but as including the sympathetic nervous system as well. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140

We cannot repeat this distinction too often, for when I have referred to the collective unconscious as if outside our brains, it has been assumed that I meant hanging somewhere in mid-air. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 141

The creative substratum is everywhere this same human psyche and this same human brain, which, with relatively minor variations, functions everywhere in the same way. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Page xxix

He [Jung] said he had for a long time thought that the brain stem was important in our thinking life and how interested he was that the corpora quadrigemina, the four bodies, was the area, for it confirmed his idea of the importance of the square and the circle as symbols. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 157

Carl Jung on “Buddha

The symbol becomes my lord and unfailing commander. It will fortify its reign and change itself into a starry and riddling image, whose meaning turns completely inward, and whose pleasure radiates outward like blazing fire, a Buddha in the flames. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249.

All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick. The Buddha therefore finally gave up on rebirth, for he had had enough of crawling through all human and animal forms. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.

The Buddha did not need quite so long to see that even rebirths are vain. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 94.

Christ overcame the world by burdening himself with its suffering but Buddha overcame both the pleasure and suffering of the world by disposing of both. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 367.

Passion, whose conquest still requires so much effort in the case of Christ and does so incessantly and in ever greater measure, has left Buddha and surrounds him as a blazing fire. He is both unaffected and untouchable. ~Carl Jung, Footnote 276, Liber Novus, Page 367.

I see in splendor the mother of God with the child. Peter stands in front of her in admiration-then Peter alone with the key-the Pope with a triple crown-a Buddha sitting rigidly in a circle of fire-a many-armed bloody Goddess-it is Salome desperately wringing her hands-it takes hold of me, she is my own soul, and now I see Elijah in the image of the stone. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 248.

Am I a combination of the lives of these ancestors and do I embody these lives again? Have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life that I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know. Buddha left the question open, and I like to assume that he himself did not know with certainty. In the meantime it is important to ensure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 317-318.

To Western man, the meaninglessness of a merely static universe is unbearable. He must assume that it has meaning. The Oriental does not need to make this assumption; rather, he himself embodies it. Whereas the Occidental feels the need to complete the meaning of the world, the Oriental strives for the fulfilment of the meaning in man, stripping the world and existence from himself (Buddha).  I would say that both are right. Western man seems predominantly extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted. The former projects the meaning and considers that it exists in objects; the latter feels the meaning in himself. But the meaning is both within and without. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 317.

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 â€” 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 â€” are they Christian or Buddhist or what you will â€” are lovely, mysterious, and richly intuitive. ~Carl Jung; The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious; Pages 7-8.

If left to himself, [man] can naturally bring about his own salvation. Who has produced Christ? Who has produced Buddha? ~Carl Jung; “C. G.Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances” edited by Feme Jensen.

Jesus-Mani-Buddha-Lao-tse are for me the four pillars of the temple of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Volume 1, Page 65.

In the West the archetype is filled out with the dogmatic figure of Christ; in the East, with Purusha, the Atman, Hiranyagarbha, the Buddha, and so on. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 17.

I have visited the holy places of Buddhism in India and was profoundly impressed by them, quite apart from my reading of Buddhist literature. If I were an Indian I would definitely be a Buddhist. But in the West we have different presuppositions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 538.

Buddha would settle our account too early, and then it would go with us as it did when we European barbarians had that sudden arid shattering collision with the ripest fruit of antiquity-Christianity-not to the advantage of our inner development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 538.

Yet it is unquestionably true that not only Buddha and Mohammed, Confucius and Zarathustra, represent religious phenomena, but also Mithras, Attis, Cybele, Mani, Hermes, and the deities of many other exotic cults. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 9.

The psyche is therefore all-important; it is the all-pervading Breath, the Buddha-essence; it is the Buddha-Mind, the One, the Dharrjiakdya. All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 482.

I refrain from describing what would happen to Eastern man should he forget his ideal of Buddhahood, for I do not want to give such an unfair advantage to my Western prejudices. But I cannot help raising the question of whether it is possible, or indeed advisable, for either to imitate the other’s standpoint. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 483.

You cannot be a good Christian and redeem yourself, nor can you be a Buddha and worship God. It is much better to accept the conflict, for it admits only of an irrational solution, if any. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 483.

In Buddhism, this return to Nirvana is connected with a complete annihilation of the ego, which, like the world, is only illusion In Taoism, on the other hand, the goal is to preserve in a transfigured form, the idea of the person, the “traces” left by experience. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 18.

That is, as man himself is created for a purpose, he may use all created things for that purpose, and in order to do so freely he must be indifferent and unconcerned about them. One might almost think that this attitude was similar to that of Buddhism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 220.

The East regards the psychic as half physical, it is not immaterial for them as it is for us, it is definite, it has a given concreteness; so that you can actually create a Buddha through imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 37.

The light of the mandala, and therefore the mandala itself, is already the Buddha, although he himself is not yet visible. The mandala is not just the seat of the Buddha, it is identical with him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 39.

We find the same idea in the Indian Atman, a word which is related to the German Atem (breath]; it is the breath of life, which goes through everything, corresponding to the Buddha essence. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 9Dec38, Page 41.

The text tells us that the body of the sleeper is imagined to be the body of the Buddha, we should understand that as the diamond body. So it is the transformation of the ordinary body into the eternally durable body that is meant. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 9Dec38, Page 43.

The Yogin tries to establish a fourfold consciousness and the fifth in the centre, uniting all, is Buddha consciousness. The quaternity is dissolved in the essence of the Yogin, and the fourfold image of consciousness disappears. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 16Dec1938, Page 51.

Kant himself emphasises that God, the Highest Being, is in no way affected by what we know about him.  So the Yogin analyses what he knows about Buddha and takes the last word in the Mantra: “Aham” for this purpose. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 55

Very highly developed people can remember their former lives, even back into animal lives. Buddha remembered innumerable lives and spoke freely of them. There are curious cases of this kind to be found even now. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 56.

There must be a long preparation to be Buddha, if we do not realise this we are taking part in a holy ceremony with dirty hands. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 56.

Vedana-skandha = Sensation.
Samjna-skandha = Feeling.
Sangskara-skandha = Intuition.
Vijniina-skandha = Buddha Vajra-sattva . Knowledge. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 52.
All this means that in time and space I am only here in my body, I cannot be identical with Buddha, but if I can rid myself of all my personal contents, if I can distribute them as Devatas all over the universe, I can sit in the heaven of the gods and reach eternal peace. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page 62.

The Yogin’s Buddha is a subjective and objective image. It lies in the Yogin’s power to create him or to leave him uncreated and yet the Buddha has an objective existence. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 65.

As Buddha and his teaching are still recognized within the frame of the Hindu religion, you find traces of him everywhere; but his achievement, amazing consciousness and highest integrity are no longer to be found in India today, though Rishis and Yogins still make private efforts to reach its illumination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 68.

I do not know why India was not able to keep Buddhism, but I think probably its present polytheistic religion is a better expression of the Indian soul today than the one perfect Buddha.  ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 69.

While we are in avidya, we act like automatons, we have no idea what we are doing. Buddha regarded this as absolutely unethical. Avidya acts in the sense of the concupiscentia and involves us in suffering, illness and death. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 74.

Here is a piece of the superior wisdom of the East. The Yogin realizes that all the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Devatas with which he has filled the heavens are Maya illusion just as the world itself is Maya. All this plurality is illusion. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 74.

There are cases like that, they understand the world in too deep a sense. Buddha was such a case. He was a prince with everything that he wanted in the world, but he knew nothing of the truth of life. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Pages 181.

When his pupils questioned Buddha about Shunyata, he was silent or replied in a round about way.  There were things he did not want to speak of, he would not say what was best left unsaid. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII,10th February, 1939, Pages 76-81.

Consider, for example, the word “Unconscious.” I have just finished reading a book by a Chinese Zen Buddhist. And it seemed to me that we were talking about the same thing, and that the only difference between us was that we gave different words to the same reality. ~Carl Jung, Two Friendships, Page 100.

We cannot simply restrict ourselves to our view of the world, but must perforce find a standpoint from which a view will be possible that goes a little step beyond the Christian as well as the Buddhist, etc. . . . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 520.

I am trying to get nearer to the remarkable psychology of the Buddha himself, or at least of that which his contemporaries assumed him to be. It is chiefly the question of karma and rebirth which has renewed my interest in Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 548.

On Jan. 23rd I had a slight embolism followed by not too severe heart cramps. I was under house arrest for a month, forbidden all mental activity, i.e., active concentration. However, it didn’t stop me from my long planned (renewed) reading of Buddhist texts, whose  content I am leaving to simmer inside me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 544.

Nobody knows whether there is reincarnation, and equally one does not know that there is none. Buddha himself was convinced of reincarnation, but he himself on being asked twice by his disciples about it, left it quite open whether there is a continuity of your personality or not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 103-104.

The spiritual (as contrasted with the worldly) Messiah, Christ, Mithras, Osiris, Dionysos, Buddha are all visualizations or personifications of the irrepresentable archetype which, borrowing from Ezekiel and Daniel, I call the Anthropos. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 304-306.

With no human consciousness to reflect themselves in, good and evil simply happen, or rather, there is no good and evil, but only a sequence of neutral events, or what the Buddhists call the Nidhanachain, the uninterrupted causal concatenation leading to suffering, old age, sickness, and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 310-311.

Buddha’s insight and the Incarnation in Christ break the chain through the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness, which thereby acquires a metaphysical and cosmic significance. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 310-311.

The same is the case in the West, where one makes futile attempts to give life to our Christian tenets; but they have gone to sleep. Yet in Buddhism as well as in Christianity there is at the basis of both a valid truth, but its modern application has not been understood yet. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 385-386.

In Buddhist art, as in the Celtic illuminated manuscripts and sculptures, the complicated designs and intricate rhythms of the border pattern serve to coax the frightening, pullulating chaos of a disorganized psyche into harmonious forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-388

Equally, the complicated ornamentation of ritual mandalas in Buddhism could be regarded as a sort of psychic “tranquillizer,” though this way of looking at it is admittedly one-sided. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-388

The Indians, if influenced by Buddhism, habitually depotentiate their emotions by reciting a mantra. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 430-433

The Christian idea proves its vitality by a continuous evolution, just like Buddhism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 580-581

We still consider his [Socrates]  daimonion as an individual peculiarity if not worse. Such people, says Buddha, “after their death reach the wrong way, the bad track, down to the depth, into an infernal world.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 531-533

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.

And that was the case in Buddha’s own existence; he was a prince, a man of the world, and he had a wife, he had concubines, he had a child â€”then he went over to the saintly life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 797.

There is no reason whatsoever why you should or should not call the beyond-self Christ or Buddha or Purusha or Tao or Khidr or Tifereth. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1672

If you take the concept of prayer in its widest sense and if you include also Buddhist contemplation And Hindu meditation (as being equivalent to prayer), one can say that it is the most universal form of religious or philosophical concentration of the mind and thus not only one of the most original but also the most frequent means to change the condition of mind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 558

In this vision we find the same principle as in Buddhism, the consciousness of what is happening as a redeeming principle. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 322.

You notice that the meditation is not on the spirit of the Buddha, but on the Body of the Buddha; the highest truth grows from the deepest roots of the body and not from the spirit. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 28

We also find four colours in the Bardo Thodol as the lights of the four wisdoms, they form four “light-paths” to Buddhahood or redemption. These are clearly the four functions expressed as four paths of orientation. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Feb 1939

That is as you see the reason why I said that I haven’t come across Buddhist mandalas based upon 3, 5, or 6 ( 2 x 3) . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 222-223

Carl Jung on “Buber”

That Buber has a bad conscience arises from the fact that he only publishes his letters, but does not grant me a fair representation because I am just a Gnostic and at the same time he has no idea about what motivated the Gnostic. ~Jung to Neumann Correspondence, 30 Jan 1954.

Unfortunately I have no copy of the letter to the Prot. Theologian. But I will send you an offprint of my answer to Buber who has called me a Gnostic. He does not understand psychic reality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 61.

Buber has been led astray by a poem in Gnostic style I made 44 years ago for a friend’s birthday celebration (a private print!), a poetic paraphrase of the psychology of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 571.

Concerning Mr. Buber, I can tell you that to my knowledge there has never been the slightest personal friction between us and I do not think that Buber has ever been impolite to me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 101-102.

The only trouble with him [Buber] is that he does not understand what I am talking about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 101-102.

I myself, quite personally, do not find a sufficient amount of meat in him [Kierkegaard]. One hears too damn much of himself, but very little of that voice which I would prefer to hear. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 101-102.

I have no personal opinion of Buber since I have met him only a few times and I dislike forming opinions on insufficient grounds. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 101-102.

What Buber misunderstands as Gnosticism is psychiatric observation, of which he obviously knows nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

I have spent a lifetime of work on psychological and psychopathological investigations.  Buber criticizes me in a field in which he is incompetent and which he does not even understand. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

Carl Jung on “Bridges”:

But the supreme meaning is the path the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning. The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together. The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 229-230.

This meaning of events is the supreme meaning, that is not in events, and not in the soul, but is the God standing between events and the soul, the mediator of life, the way, the bridge and the going across. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 239.

He [Jung] was not especially interested in analyzing the transference, unless it was distorted by inflation, or otherwise blocking the way. He felt transference did no harm, and in face could be used as a bridge to other relations. But beware of counter-transference. ~Margaret Gildea, C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff -A Collection of Remembrances.

Only the gods can pass over the rainbow bridge; mortal men must stick to the earth and are subject to its laws. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 114.

Notwithstanding its monstrosity, the hermaphrodite has gradually turned into a subduer of conflicts and a bringer of healing, â€¦.its power to unite opposites, mediates between the unconscious substratum and the conscious mind. It throws a bridge between present-day consciousness, always in danger of losing its roots, and the natural, unconscious, instinctive wholeness of primeval times. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i, para. 292-4

The moment we enter the bridge, I fall on my knees, completely overcome by the sudden understanding that my father is going to lead me into the “supreme presence.” By sympathy he kneels at my side and I try to touch the ground with my forehead. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 490-493.

If so, the position of the archetype would be located beyond the psychic sphere, analogous to the position of physiological instinct, which is immediately rooted in the stuff of the organism and, with its psychoid nature, forms the bridge to matter in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 420.

It is lovely to hear the word “friend” from you. Fate seems to have apportioned to us the role of two piers which support the bridge between East and West. ~Carl Jung to Richard Wilhelm, Letters Vol. 1, Page 66.

According to the Hui Ming Ching, the ancient sages knew how to bridge the gap between consciousness and life because they cultivated both. In this way the shelf, the immortal body, is ‘melted out’, and in this way ‘the great Tao is completed’. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 95.

It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept. It is far more than that: it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 96

A transference in the clinical sense does not always need a personal relationship as a bridge, but can take place via a book, a piece of hearsay, or a legend. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506

On the way back out of the existence in the flesh, the psychopompos [Animus] develops such a cosmic aspect, he wanders among the constellations, he leads the  soul over the rainbow bridge into the blossoming fields of the stars. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1229

Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 95.

One of the most important and difficult tasks in the individuation process is to bridge the distance between people. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 53-54

Carl Jung on “Cancer” – Anthology.

Well you see, I couldn’t swear, but I have seen cases where I thought or wondered whether or not there was a psychogenic reason for that particular ailment; it came too conveniently. Many things can be found out about cancer, I’m sure. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 34.

It is thought that cancer may be due to the later and anarchical development of embryonic cells folded away in the mature and differentiated tissues. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.

I take his cancer to be a spontaneous growth, which originated in the part of the psyche that is not identical with consciousness. It appears as an autonomous function intruding upon consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 21.

I’m terribly sorry X. has to suffer from cancer, in her case cancer really comes too early and it is a mean way of killing people anyhow. But nature is horrible in many respects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 437-438.

Carl Jung on “Catholic” – Anthology

The mystery of the Eucharist transforms the soul of the empirical man, who is only a part of himself, into his totality, symbolically expressed by Christ. In this sense, therefore, we can speak of the Mass as the rite of the individuation process. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion

Let us take as a sample the Catholic Mass. If we study this we must recognize it to be one of the most perfect things we possess. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 119

For the Master the communion means: I give you myself, my flesh, my blood. For the disciple this means: I eat the god, his flesh and blood. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.

The proper kind of rite is not magically but psychologically efficacious. That is why a well-conducted Mass produces a powerful effect, particularly when the meaning of the ceremony can be followed. But once lost, lost forever! That is the tragedy of Protestantism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.

The ringing of the bells in the celebration of the Mass probably comes from the Mithraic cult, where bells were rung at a certain point in the mysteries. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 112

In the Middle Ages Christ was no historical figure but a perpetual presence, as he still is in the Roman Catholic Mass. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 7th July 1939

Since the relation of the ego to the self is like that of the son to the father, we can say that when the Self calls on us to sacrifice ourselves, it is really carrying out the sacrificial act on itself. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass.”; CW 11; Par 398.

So long as the self is unconscious, it corresponds to Freud’s superego and is a source of perpetual moral conflict. If, however, it is withdrawn from projection and is no longer identical with public opinion, then one is truly one’s own yea and nay. The self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine that it is psychologically possible to imagine. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 396.

Every sacrifice is . . . to a greater or lesser extent a self-sacrifice. The degree to which it is so depends on the significance of the gift. If it is of great value to me and touches my most personal feelings, I can be sure that in giving up my egoistic claim I shall challenge my ego personality to revolt. I can also be sure that the power that suppresses this claim, and thus suppresses me, must be the self. Hence it is the self that causes me to make the sacrifice; nay more, it compels me to make it . The self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 397.

This process of becoming human is represented in dreams and inner images as the putting together of many scattered units, and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification of something that was always there. The speculations of alchemy, and also of some Gnostics, revolve around this process. It is likewise expressed in Christian Dogma, and more particularly in the transformation mystery of the Mass. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”; CW 11, par. 399.

The ritual act [of the Mass] consecrates both the gift and the givers. It commemorates and represents the Last Supper which our Lord took with His disciples, the whole Incarnation, Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. But from the point of view of the divine, this anthropomorphic action is only the outer shell of husk in which what is really happening is not a human action at all but a divine event. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion.

Therefore the trans-substantiated wine, which becomes the blood of Christ in the Mass, is the anima, that is the soul, of Christ. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 189.

I have as little need to convince myself of how good the Catholic Church is for very many people. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 197-198

The Catholic Church arranges the codification of memories and the lessons of history so much better. The conservation of so much classical paganism is of inestimable value. Therefore the Catholic is the Christian Church par excellence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 339-340

Although the Catholic Church has often been accused of particular rigidity, she nevertheless admits that dogma is a living thing and that its formulation is therefore capable of change and development. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 10

Even so, as a Protestant, it is quite clear to me that, in its healing effects, no creed is as closely akin to psychoanalysis as Catholicism. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

The symbols of the Catholic liturgy offer the unconscious such a wealth of possibilities for expression that they act as an incomparable diet for the psyche. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

Let us take as a sample the Catholic Mass. If we study this we must recognize it to be one of the most perfect things we possess. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 119

God is light and darkness, the auctor rerum is love and wrath. We still pray: “Lead us not into temptation.” (The French Catholic version of the Vulgate has: “Let us not fall into temptation.”!) ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473

Our culture, which is threatened today, is primarily a Christian culture, if it had not been for the Roman Catholic Church, we should still be barbarians. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

The Roman Catholic Church provides a chance for people to get away from their complexes and back to mankind with confession and the age-old therapy was consecration by initiation which included the avowal of sins. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 132.

Thus the fact that there is a genuine religiosity in the Catholic Church proves the existence of a need for fixed and immovable ideas and forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 395-398.

The Catholic Church is liberal enough to look upon the Osiris-Horus-Isis myth, or at any rate suitable portions of it, as a prefiguration of the Christian legend of salvation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 178.

I have as little need to convince myself of how good the Catholic Church is for very many people. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 197-198

Let us take as a sample the Catholic Mass. If we study this we must recognize it to be one of the most perfect things we possess. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 119

Our culture, which is threatened today, is primarily a Christian culture, if it had not been for the Roman Catholic Church, we should still be barbarians. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

Thus the fact that there is a genuine religiosity in the Catholic Church proves the existence of a need for fixed and immovable ideas and forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 395-398.

Carl Jung on “Causality” – Anthology.

Without necessity there is neither causality nor finality, although there are not a few people nowadays who treat the concept of causality very incautiously. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 157-158.

The 4 aspects of causality make possible a homogeneous causal viewpoint but not a total one. For this purpose, it seems to me, causality (in all its aspects) has to be complemented by acausality. Not simply because freedom also is guaranteed in a law-bound world, but because freedom, i .e., acausality, does in fact exist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 157-158.

Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.

The articles of faith of science are: space, time and causality. The fourth is missing and rejected: the pleroma. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 59.

If we consider the psyche as a whole, we come to the conclusion that the unconscious psyche likewise exists in a space-time continuum, where time is no longer time and space no longer space. Accordingly, causality ceases too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 546-548.

Religious experience is numinous, as Rudolf Otto calls it, and for me, as a psychologist, this experience differs from all others in the way it transcends the ordinary categories of time, space and causality. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 230.

To understand the God-Creator as absolute potential is to recognize a power which is endowed with meaning in space and time and in causality. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 41.

The four aspects, the quaternity of the Creator- God are space, time, causality and meaning. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 42.

Just as a causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity to the Chinese mind, deals with the coincidence of events. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 593.

If causality is axiomatic, i.e., absolute, there can be no freedom. But if it is only a statistical truth, as is in fact the case, then the possibility of freedom exists. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 102.

If space and time are psychically relative, then matter is too (telekinesis!) and then causality is only Statistically true, which means that there are plenty of acausal exceptions, q.e.d. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 126-127.

The latest developments of scientific thinking, especially in physics, but recently also in psychology, make it clear that “freedom” is a necessary correlate to the purely statistical nature of the concept of causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 182-183.

Freedom could be put in doubt only because of the one-sided and uncritical overvaluation of causality, which has been elevated into an axiom although-strictly speaking-it is nothing but a mode of thought. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 182-183.

Causality as a statistical truth presupposes the existence of acausality, otherwise it cannot be a statistical truth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 317-319.

I have got stuck, on the one hand, in the acausality (or “synchronicity”) of certain phenomena of unconscious provenance and, on the other hand, in the qualitative statements of numbers, for here I set foot on territories where I cannot advance without the help and understanding of the other disciplines. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 351-352.

The trouble with parapsychology is that the very framework of our understanding and explanation, namely time, space, and causality, becomes questionable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 373-375

Everything that can be repeated experimentally is necessarily causal, for the whole concept of causality is based on this statistical result. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 420-421

How it comes about that space and time are reduced by these meaningful chance occurrences cannot be understood in terms of causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 420-421

Chance is an event, too, and if it didn’t exist causality would be axiomatic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 414-416

Leibniz as well as Schopenhauer had inklings of it [meaningful coincidences], but they gave a false answer because they started with an axiomatic causality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 414-416

I deduce the fact that acausal phenomena must exist from the purely statistical nature of causality, since statistics are only possible anyway if there are also exceptions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 425-426

On the other hand, it is obvious to me that synchronicity is the indispensable counterpart to causality and to that extent could be considered compensatory. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 425-426

It is unthinkable that a world could have existed before time and space, for whatever world we can imagine is always bound to time and space and hence to causality. The most we can imagine is that there are statistical exceptions to such a world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449

The average is a statistical truth, and this is a concept; but it implies that there must be exceptions, and there are exceptions to the general rule of space, time and causality. ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 101

There is no understanding of the fact that the mind itself has its causality; something from the inner life exerts its influence – ideas just arrive in the mind, or symptoms appear. ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 195

Again, no psychological fact can ever be exhaustively explained in terms of causality alone; as a living phenomenon, it is always indissolubly bound up with the continuity of the vital process, so that it is not only something evolved but also continually evolving and creative. Anything psychic is Janus-faced it looks both backwards and forwards. Because it is evolving, it is also preparing the future. Were this not so, intentions, aims, plans, calculations, predictions, and premonitions would be psychological impossibilities. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 718

Dreams contain images and thought associations which we do not create with conscious intent. They arise spontaneously without our assistance and are representatives of a psychic activity withdrawn from our arbitrary will. Therefore the dream is, properly speaking, a highly objective, natural product of the psyche, from which we might expect indications, or at least hints, about certain basic trends in the psychic process. Now, since the psychic process, like any other life-process, is not just a causal sequence, but is also a process with a teleological orientation, we might expect dreams to give us certain indicia about the objective causality as well as about the objective tendencies, because they are nothing less than self-portraits of the psychic life-process. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 210

We distinctly resent the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces, for it is not so long ago that we made our escape from that frightening world of dreams and superstitions, and constructed for ourselves a picture of the cosmos worthy of our rational consciousness—that latest and greatest achievement of man. We are now surrounded by a world that is obedient to rational laws. It is true that we do not know the causes of everything, but in time they will be discovered, and these discoveries will accord with our reasoned expectations. There are, to be sure, also chance occurrences, but they are merely accidental, and we do not doubt that they have a causality of their own. Chance happenings are repellent to the mind that loves order. They disturb the regular, predictable course of events in the most absurd and irritating way. We resent them as much as we resent invisible, arbitrary forces, for they remind us too much of Satanic imps or of the caprice of a deus ex machina. They are the worst enemies of our careful calculations and a continual threat to all our undertakings. Being admittedly contrary to reason, they deserve all our abuse, and yet we should not fail to give them their due. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 113

Now, since the psychic process, like any other life-process, is not just a causal sequence, but is also a process with a teleological orientation, we might expect dreams to give us certain indicia about the objective causality as well as about the objective tendencies, because they are nothing less than self-portraits of the psychic life-process. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 210

“But since, according to our hypothesis, the unconscious possesses an aetiological significance, and since dreams are the direct expression of unconscious psychic activity, the attempt to analyse and interpret dreams is theoretically justified from a scientific standpoint. If successful, we may expect this attempt to give us scientific insight into the structure of psychic causality, quite apart from any therapeutic results that may be gained. The practitioner, however, tends to consider scientific discoveries as, at most, a gratifying by-product of his therapeutic work, so he is hardly likely to take the bare possibility of theoretical insight into the aetiological background as a sufficient reason for, much less an indication of, the practical use of dream-analysis. He may believe, of course, that the explanatory insight so gained is of therapeutic value, in which case he will elevate dream-analysis to a professional duty. It is well known that the Freudian school is of the firm opinion that very valuable therapeutic results are achieved by throwing light upon the unconscious causal factors- that is, by explaining them to the patient and thus making him fully conscious of the sources of his trouble. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 295

Carl Jung on “Chaos” – Anthology.

The struggle with the unformed, with the chaos of Tiamat, is in truth a primordial experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 286

He [Jung] replied, “Yes. God spoke and created from the chaos-and here we are all gods for ourselves. ~E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 8

He cannot overcome the conflict on his own resources; after all, he didn’t invent it. He has to rely on divine comfort and mediation, that is to say on the spontaneous revelation of the spirit, which does not obey man’s will but comes and goes as it wills. This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darknesses of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. The Holy Ghost is a comforter like the Father, a mute, eternal, unfathomable One in whom God’s love and God’s terribleness come together in wordless union. And through this union the original meaning of the still-unconscious Father-world is restored and brought within the scope of human experience and reflection.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 66

The conscious mind must have reason, firstly to discover some order in the chaos of disorderly individual events occurring in the world, and secondly to create order, at least in human affairs. We are moved by the laudable and useful ambition to extirpate the chaos of the irrational both within and without to the best of our ability. Apparently the process has gone pretty far. As a mental patient once told me: “Doctor, last night I disinfected the whole heavens with bichloride of mercury, but I found no God.” Something of the sort has happened to us as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104A

The intellect may be the devil, but the devil is the “strange son of chaos” who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother. The Dionysian experience will give this devil plenty to do should he be looking for work, since the resultant settlement with the unconscious far outweighs the labours of Hercules. In my opinion it presents a whole world of problems which the intellect could not settle even in a hundred years—the very reason why it has so often gone off on a holiday to recuperate on lighter tasks. And this is also the reason why the psyche is forgotten so often and so long, and why the intellect makes such frequent use of magical, apotropaic words like “occult” and “mystic,” in the hope that even intelligent people will think these mutterings really mean something. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 119

The love-episode is a real experience really suffered, and so is the vision. It is not for us to say whether its content is of a physical, psychic, or metaphysical nature. In itself it had psychic reality, and this is no less real than physical reality. Human passion falls within the sphere of conscious experience, while the object of the vision lives beyond it. Through our senses we experience the known, but our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden, that by their very nature are secret. If ever they become conscious, they are intentionally kept secret and concealed, for which reason they have been regarded from earliest times as mysterious, uncanny, and deceptive. They are hidden from man, and he hides himself from them out of religious awe, protecting himself with the shield of science and reason. The ordered cosmos he believes in by day is meant to protect him from the fear of chaos that besets him by night —his enlightenment is born of night-fears! ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148

Nowhere and never has man controlled matter without closely observing its behaviour and paying heed to its laws, and only to the extent that he did so could he control it. The same is true of that objective spirit which today we call the unconscious it is refractory like matter, mysterious and elusive, and obeys laws which are so non-human or suprahuman that they seem to us like a crimen laesae majestatis hiimanae. If a man puts his hand to the opus, he repeats, as the alchemists say, God’s work of creation. The struggle with the unformed, with the chaos of Tiamat, is in truth a primordial experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 286

The old idea of chaos was that it held everything in potentia including man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

In the center is the individual where the opposites are united, the one peaceful spot in man, the space where nothing moves embedded in a world of chaos. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263

We have no way of knowing whether the world is Cosmos or Chaos, for, as we know the world, all the order is put into it by ourselves. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 134

Without his emphasis on the dark side of man and the chaos of his chthonic desires, I could not have found access to the “Mysterium Coniunctionis.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 469-471

In this chaos of chance, synchronistic phenomena were probably at work, operating both with and against the known laws of nature to produce, in archetypal moments, syntheses which appear to us miraculous. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 493-496

Too strong a dependence on the outside and too dynamic a view of the inside stem essentially from your desire, intention, and will, which you should push into the background a little for the sake of what really concerns you: holding your own in the chaos of this world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.

We may think of the Irish monk as a man who still has one foot in the animistic world of nature-demons with its intense passions, and the other in the new Christian order symbolized by the Cross, which condenses the primordial chaos into the unity of the personality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-388

Concentration is necessary whenever there is the possibility or threat of psychic chaos, i.e., when there is no central control by a strong ego or dominant idea. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-388

So you see, in a moment during a patient’s treatment when there is a great disorder and chaos in a man’s mind, the symbol can appear, as in the form of a mandala in a dream, or when he makes imaginary and fantastical drawings, or something of the sort. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.

In the East the Void represents a psychic emptying of all conscious contents through the practice of Yoga. In the western series the chaos, or nigredo, is not thought of as a psychic condition but as a condition of the materia. This is the great difference between the East and the West. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.

We think of a chaos as complete confusion, but to the alchemists it was a confusion of definite qualities and of special factors. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 201-202.

The “art of gold making” is a sort of creating of the world, or it is based on the pattern of the creation of the world, and, as in Genesis, a cosmos is fashioned from the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

With a disordered consciousness order can come out of the unconscious, just as conversely unconscious chaos can break into the too narrow cosmos of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.

[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 9 II, §304.

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 9 II: §376

The intellect may be the devil , but the devil is the “strange son of chaos” who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 90.

This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Para 260.

In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg — symbolized by the round cooking vessel — will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Page 202.

But for him who has seen the chaos, there.is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means. He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws. He knows the sea and can never forget it. The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.

If you marry the ordered to the chaos, you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235

Carl Jung on “Character” – Anthology

In order to give our judgment.. on the character of wholeness, we must supplement our time-conditioned thinking by the principle of correspondence [between outer and inner events], or as I have called it, synchronicity.” C.G. Jung, Aion, para 409

The feminine side of Christ is much emphasized in Christian iconology, he is usually represented as a very feminine man. The same characteristic was apparently attributed to his cousin, Mithras. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

Psychic heredity does exist —that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845

For me the unconscious is a collective psychic disposition, creative in character. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 875

Indeed, it is quite impossible to define the extent and the ultimate character of psychic existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140

When the intellect or any superior function is pushed that far, it becomes bloodless and takes on an airy, gas-like character. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 66

The inheritance of instincts is a known fact, whereas the inheritance of acquired characteristics is controversial. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 457-458

Synchronicity is not a name that characterizes an “organizing principle,” but, like the word “archetype,” it characterizes a modality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449

Adler’s character, on the contrary, was introverted in so far as he gave paramount importance to the power of the ego. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 349-350

In observing a neurotic, one does not know at first whether one is observing the conscious or the unconscious character. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 346-348

Somatic characteristics are permanent and virtually unalterable facts, whereas psychological ones are subject to various alterations in the course of personality development and also to neurotic disturbances. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 346-348

What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.

It looks as if the collective character of the archetypes would manifest itself also in meaningful coincidences, i.e., as if the archetype (or the collective unconscious) were not only inside the individual, but also outside, viz. in one’s environment, as if sender and percipient were in the same psychic space, or in the same time (in precognition cases). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

I see with regret from your letter that you are suffering very much from your noises in the ear. The unconscious often uses symptoms of this kind in order to make psychic contents audible, i.e., the symptoms are intensified by a psychogenic afflux and only then do they acquire the proper tormenting character that forces your attention inwards, where of course it gets caught in the disturbing noises. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 20-21.

The coincidence of the Fibonacci numbers (or sectio aurea) with plant growth is a sort of analogy with synchronicity inasmuch as the latter consists in the coincidence of a psychic process with an external physical event of the same character or meaning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 287-289.

Inasmuch as karma means either a personal or at least an individual inherited determinant of character and fate, it represents the individually differentiated manifestation of the instinctual behaviour pattern, i.e., the general archetypal disposition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 287-289.

As I told you yesterday, the psyche is by no means tabula rasa here, but a definite mixture and combination of genes, which are there from the very first moment of our life; and they give a definite character, even to the little child. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.

The child is born as a high complexity, with existing determinants that never waver through the whole life, and that give the child his character. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 13.

The character of the image is not determined by numbers. Pure spiritual substance is eternal. An image as such needs neither time nor space. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 60.

The archetypes are complementary and equivalents of the “outside” world and therefore possess “cosmic” character. Thins explains their numinosity and godlikeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 196.

The individual experience is woven in to this tissue, so it is of vital importance, where we come from, who our parents are, and what our early surroundings were. We say that a person has such and such a character, but one is born with a form which can only be changed with the greatest difficulty. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Page 179.

The character ming really signifies a royal command then, destiny, fate, the fate allotted to a man, so too, the duration of life, the measure of vitality at one’s disposal, and thus it comes about that ming (life) is closely related to Eros. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 11.

Human nature [hsing] and consciousness [hui] are expressed in light symbolism, and are therefore intensity, while life [ming] would coincide with extensity. The first have the character of the yang principle, the latter of the yin. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 101.

If the unconscious can be localized anywhere it is in the basal ganglia, and it has the same uncanny character. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

Such a thing is possible only when there is a detachment of the soul from the body. When that takes place and the patient lives on, one can almost with certainty expect a certain deterioration of the character inasmuch as the superior and most essential part of the soul has already left. Such an experience denotes a partial death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 435-437.

As a rule, the life of a young person is characterized by a general expansion and a striving towards concrete ends; and his neurosis seems mainly to rest on his hesitation or shrinking back from this necessity. But the life of an older person is characterized by a contraction of forces, by the affirmation of what has been achieved, and by the curtailment of further growth. His neurosis comes mainly from his clinging to a youthful attitude which is now out of season…. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, ¶75.

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 9i, para. 358

[The dream voice] “utters an authoritative declaration or command, either of astonishing common sense or of profound philosophic import. It is nearly always a final statement, usually coming toward the end of a dream, and it is, as a rule, so clear and convincing that the dreamer finds no argument against it. It has, indeed, so much the character of indisputable truth that it can hardly be understood as anything except a final and trenchant summing up of a long process of unconscious deliberation and weighing of arguments.” ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion; Page 45.

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process. ~Carl Jung; The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913).

First, fantasies (including dreams) of a personal character, which go back unquestionably to personal experiences, things forgotten or repressed, and can thus be completely explained by individual anamnesis. Second, fantasies (including dreams) of an impersonal character, which cannot be reduced to experiences in the individual’s past, and thus cannot be explained as something individually acquired. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i

I most certainly was characterized by thinking … and I had a great deal of Intuition, too. And I had a definite difficulty with Feeling. And my relation to reality was not particularly brilliant. … I was often at variance with the reality of things. Now that gives you all the necessary data for diagnosis. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung, Speaking, Pages 435-6.

The God appears in multiple guises; for when he emerges, he has assumed some of the character of the night and the nightly waters in which he slumbered, and in which he struggled for renewal in the last hour of the night. Consequently his appearance is twofold and ambiguous; indeed, it even tears at the heart and the mind. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.

The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother. The earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself. The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 247.

Carl Jung on the “Child” and “Children.” [Anthology]

I wouldn’t call the ego a creation of mind or consciousness, since, as we know, little children talk of themselves first in the third person and begin to say ‘I’ only when they have found their ego. The ego, therefore, is rather a find or an experience and not a creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1; Pages 254-255.

Small children are very old; later on we soon grow younger. In our middle age we are youngest, precisely at the time when we have completely or almost completely lost contact with the collective unconscious, the samskaras. We grow older again only as with the mounting years we remember the samskaras anew. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Appendix 1, Page 74.

Matter is an hypothesis. When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-Weltanschauung, in contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 477, Para 762.

Children are in the collective unconscious until they acquire a small consciousness of their personality, until they say “I,” or “me,” or their name. They are rooted in the collective unconscious and are uprooted from it by the flood of impressions from the outside. They know everything, but they lose the memory of it. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.

The divine primordial power is blind, since its face has become human. The human is the face of-the Godhead. If the God comes near you, then plead for your life to be spared, since the God is loving horror. The ancients said: it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. They spoke thus because they knew, since they were still close to the ancient forest, and they turned green like the trees in a childlike manner and ascended far away toward the East. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 281.

The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche on his own volition but is, on the contrary, pre-formed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. ~Carl Jung, The undiscovered Self, Page 34.

I suffer from the fact that I can so seldom have a conversation with an adequate partner. The women in my circle understand me, but for women their home, their husband, and their children, come first. Only when this is all taken care of, does a woman still have a little time for the spirit; then it is interesting. Talking with a man, on the other hand, I get a response from the cosmic spheres of the spirit. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 67.

A particle split off from the mother’s animus can enter her children and act like an evil spirit. As soon as the mother integrates this animus side of her soul, her children are freed. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 29.

Insofar as this process [of individuation], as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult. But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found . ~Carl Jung; “Answer to Job”; CW 11, par. 755.

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy any creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth. ~Carl Jung; Psychological Types Ch. 1; Page 82.

Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the environment, and especially upon children, than the [unlived] life [of] the parents. ~Carl Jung; “Paracelsus”, 1929.

How am I to be creative? Nature knows only one answer to that: Through a child (the gift of love). ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para 76.

The strong and natural love that binds the child to the father turns away, during the years when the child is outgrowing the family circle, to the higher forms of the father, to authority, to the “Fathers” of the Church and to the father-god visibly represented by them. Nevertheless, mythology is not lacking in consolations. Did not the Word become flesh? And did not the divine pneuma enter into the Virgin’s womb? The whirlwind of Anaxagoras was that same divine nous that produced the world out of itself. Why do we cherish the image of the Immaculate Mother even to this day?” ~Carl Jung; CW 8, para. 76.

One must give up the retrospective longing which only wants to resuscitate the torpid bliss and effortlessness of childhood. ~Carl Jung; The Sacrifice; CW 5; Paragraph 643.

Because a child is . . . small and its conscious thoughts scarce and simple, we do not realize the far-reaching complications of the infantile mind that are based on its original identity with the prehistoric psyche. That original mind is just as much present and still functioning in the child as the evolutionary stages of mankind are in its embryonic body. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 89.

For indeed our consciousness does not create itself it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious.” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 394 and Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11, pp. 569 f.

The individual ego is the stable in which the Christ-child is born. ~Carl Jung; Collected Works Vol. 11

That higher and “complete” man is begotten by the “unknown” father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—”vultu metabolism albums et ater”—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ’s “Except ye become as little children” is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. ~Carl Jung; The Integration of the Personality; Page 285.

Repression is a process that begins in early childhood under the moral influence of the environment and continues through life. ~Carl Jung; The Personal and the Collective Unconscious; CW 7, par. 202.

In every adult there lurks a child–an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole. -C. G. Jung CW 17: 286

Children are educated by what the grownup is and not by what he says. ~Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Psychology of the Child Archetype, Page 174.

The reason I write to you about family matters is that no visitor since Jung has so much impressed the children and done me so much good ~Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, Dec. 7, 1909.

If ego consciousness follows its own road exclusively, it is trying to become like a god or a superman. But exclusive recognition of its dependence only leads to a childish fatalism and to a world-negating and misanthropic spiritual arrogance. ~Carl Jung, The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos, Page 324.

Around the eighth year there is a transition to ego consciousness, as we have already seen in previous children’s dreams. The child breaks away from the extremely close relatedness with the familial milieu; he has already acquired a certain experience of the world, and the libido, which had up to then been tied to the parents, detaches itself from them and often is introverted. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 323.

For there is no coming into being and dying but in time. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 101.

The number in a dream always has a meaning. If we cannot find this meaning, we are the idiots, not the dream. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 101.

Nature itself speaks in such dreams. The wisdom of the child is the wisdom of nature, and it needs the utmost cunning to follow nature. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 136.

The child has to step out of this primordial world, to be able to really enter into life. . ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 184.

The Magna Mater has already had pagan children and as Ecclesia spiritualis she embraces a Christendom as huge as it is fragmented. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 395-398.

In religious instruction, we more and more refrain from making children acquainted with these images, and instead offer them moral teaching, in which the devil is ignored altogether. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 369.

The future might easily be so bad that the Church could be forced by circumstances to give up all her childish worldliness and socialism and to turn to the spiritual problem of man, which she has so sadly neglected. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 311-313.

This is because dependence on the behaviour of others is a last vestige of childhood which we think we can’t do without. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 78.

…the brain is complete with the history of the world and every child is born with an unconscious assumption of the world. But for this we could not grasp the world at all. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 27.

His secretary had to keep him provided with coins which he distributed among the children he met on his daily walks; he did this to get their thanks, for he was appallingly lonely, and needed such devices in order to reach some kind of human contact. ~ Carl Jung on J.D. Rockefeller, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 66.

We sprang from these lower vertebrates – children who suffer from atrophy of the brain show all the characteristics of animals – and this man has come up against his own instinctive nature and feels that he must fight it. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 163.

Parents must realize that they are trees from which the fruit falls in the autumn. Children don’t belong to their parents, and they are only apparently produced by them. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 217-218.

But the ground-plan of these images [Archetypal] is universal and must be assumed to be pre-existent, since it can be demonstrated in the dreams of small children or uneducated persons who could not possibly have been influenced by tradition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 538-539.

The dreams of early childhood contain mythological motifs which the children could not possibly know of. These archetypal images are the primeval knowledge of mankind; we are born with this inheritance, though this fact is not obvious and only becomes visible in indirect ways. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 119.

Adler’s letter is stupid chatter and can safely be ignored. We aren’t children here. If Adler ever says anything sensible or worth listening to I shall take note of it, even though I don’t think much of him as a person. ~Carl Jung,Freud-Jung Letters, Page 532.

The child’s psyche is unconscious, an animal psyche if you like to express it that way, and very gradually a conscious condition develops. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213.

The child born in a country takes something of that land, it is the secret influence of the place. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 241.

The Chinese do not say there is no content, but “we will not speak of it “, and they are so wise that they really do not do so, but we are so childish that we write thick books about it! ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Page 210.

In early childhood we become acquainted with fairy tales and we learn mythology in school and in our later reading, we forget most of it in consciousness, but in the depths it is all carefully treasured. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 22Feb1935, Pages 192.

A dream gives us unadorned information about the condition of a patient, it is as if a nature- being were stating his diagnosis or taking a child by the ear and telling him what he is doing. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 18Jan1935, Page 174.

We make the great mistake of thinking that children are born a tabula rasa, but this is not the case. They are born with a vast inherited memory which contains a subjective content to meet everything which they contact externally. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 108.

ll the objects in the room he might touch. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, par. 897.

Consciousness does not create itself-it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, par. 935.

But the serpent is also life. In the image furnished by the ancients, the serpent put an end to the childlike magnificence of paradise; they even said that Christ himself had been a serpent. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 136, Page 243.

I saw it, I know that this is the way: I saw the death of Christ and I saw his lament; I felt the agony of his dying, of the great dying. I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 254.

Christ has made men desirous, for ever since they expect gifts from their saviors without any service in return. Giving is as childish as power. He who gives presumes himself powerful. The virtue of giving is the sky-blue mantle of the tyrant. You are wise, Oh Philemon, you do not give. You want your garden to bloom, and for everything to grow from within itself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 316.

But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 234.

My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn. There will be no one who will laugh at me as I laughed at myself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 234.

And thus the image of the ancients is fulfilled: I pursued my soul to kill the child in it. For I am also the worst enemy of my God. But I also recognized that my enmity is decided upon in the God. He is mockery and hate and anger, since this is also a way of life. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

The image of the mother of God with the child that I foresee, indicates to me the mystery of the transformation. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 250.

Therefore, and insofar as it is the manner of the Gods to go beyond mortals, they become paralyzed, and become as helpless as children. Divinity and humanity should remain preserved, if man should remain before the God, and the God remain before man. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 281.

The ancients said: it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. They spoke thus because they knew, since they were still close to the ancient forest, and they turned green like the trees in a childlike manner and ascended far away toward the East. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 281.

Are we not sons of the Gods? Why should Gods not be our children? If my father the God should die, a God child should arise from my maternal heart. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.

My God, I love you as a mother loves the unborn whom she carries in her heart. Grow in the egg of the East, nourish yourself from my love, drink the juice of my life so that you will become a radiant God. We need your light, oh child. Since we go in darkness, light up our paths. May your light shine before us, may your fire warm the coldness of our life. We do not need your power but life. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.

It happened that I opened the egg and that the God left the egg. He was healed and his figure shone transformed, and I knelt like a child and could not grasp the miracle. He who had been pressed into the core of the beginning rose up, and no trace of illness could be found on him. And when I thought that I had caught the mighty one and held him in my cupped hands, he was the sun itself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.

My God rose in the Eastern sky; brighter than the heavenly host, and brought about a new day for all the peoples. This is why I want to go to Hell. Would a mother not want to give up her life for her child? How much easier would it be to give up my life if only my God could overcome the torment of the last hour of the night and victoriously break through the red mist of the morning? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

The devil knows what is beautiful, and hence he is the shadow of beauty and follows it everywhere, awaiting the moment when the beautiful, writhing great with child, seeks to give life to the God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

The sacrifice has been accomplished: the divine child, the image of the God’s formation, is slain, and I have eaten from the sacrificial flesh. The child, that is, the image of the God’s formation, not only bore my human craving, but also enclosed all the primordial and elemental powers that the sons of the sun possess as an inalienable inheritance. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 291.

But man must recognize his complicity in the act of evil. He must bear witness to this recognition by eating from the bloody sacrificial flesh. Through this act he testifies that he is a man, that he recognizes good as well as evil, and that he destroys the image of the God’s formation through withdrawing his life force, with which he also dissociates himself from the God. This occurs for the salvation of the soul, which is the true mother of the divine child. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 291.

Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard-are you God? Is God a child, a maiden? Forgive me if I babble. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.

The righteous man is the instrument into which God enters in order to attain self-reflection and thus consciousness and rebirth as a divine child trusted to the care of adult man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 739.

Man’s relationship to God probably has to undergo a certain important change: Instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child’s prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine love in us will be our form of worship of, and commerce with, God.

His “autobiography” he came to reluctantly; it was “the one thing I am not going to write” he had said in 1948. Strictly speaking, it is not an autobiography. He always spoke and wrote of it as “Aniela Jaffe’s project,” with contributions made by him in the form of childhood, travel, and closing chapters. ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 194.

Even in rearing a child it is often good for parents to react emotionally and not with cool superiority to the child’s bad behaviour. Children often irritate their parents just to make them show emotion. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 14.

If the question of an abortion arises the whole situation with all its implications must be taken into account. If the parents are married and healthy the child must be accepted, and the sacrifice of living a more modest life should be met if it is financially necessary. If the parents are not married the question must be weighed very carefully: would it be favourable or not, damaging or useful? ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 16.

I often have to say to an anxious mother, “It is your damned love and anxiety that are preventing your children from ever growing up.” ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 48.

The child is born as a high complexity, with existing determinants that never waver through the whole life, and that give the child his character. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 13.

Already, in earliest childhood, a mother recognizes the individuality of her child; and so, if you observe carefully, you see a tremendous difference, even in very small children. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 13.

In any case of a child’s neurosis, I go back to the parents and see what is going on there, because children have no psychology of their own, literally taken. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 13.

. . . what is meant [by the child archetype] is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 742.

Christ in “Liber Novus” – Anthology

To be Christ oneself is the true following of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 233, Page 254.

If I thus truly imitate Christ, I do not imitate anyone, I emulate no one, but go my own way, and I will also no longer call myself a Christian. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 293.

No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is to come. You should all become Christs. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.

His [Christ’s] own way led him to the cross for humanity’s own way leads to the cross. My way also leads to the cross, but not to that of Christ, but to mine, which is the image of the sacrifice and of life. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 164.

Because I also want my being other, I must become a Christ. I am made into Christ, I must suffer it. Thus the redeeming blood flows. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 254.

We should not bear Christ as he is unbearable, but we should be Christs, for then our yoke is sweet and our burden easy. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 283.

Beside them place Christ, who was the greatest among them. It was too little for him to break the world, so he broke himself And therefore he was the greatest of them all, and the powers of this world did not reach him. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 296.

It belongs to this mystery that man is not redeemed through the hero, but becomes a Christ himself. The antecedent example of the saints symbolically teaches us this. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 253.

I repeat: he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around in himself who holds him back from the best. ~Carl Jung to The Red One, Liber Novus, Page 259.

May it suffice in terms of transgression that you do not imitate Christ, since thereby you take a step back from Christianity and a step beyond it. Christ brought salvation through adeptness, and ineptitude will save you. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 297

You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do every~ thing of your own will; then you will be free and beyond Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.

It belongs to this mystery that man is not redeemed through the hero, but becomes a Christ himself. The antecedent example of the saints symbolically teaches us this. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253.

You say: the Christian God is unequivocal, he is love. But what is more ambiguous than love? Love is the way of life, but your love is only on the way of life if you have a left and a right. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244.

To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238.

I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught: God is love. But you should know that love is also terrible. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 235.

Just as the disciples of Christ recognized that God had become flesh and lived among them as a man, we now recognize that the anointed of this time is a God who does not appear in the flesh; he is no man and yet is a son of man, but in spirit and not in flesh; hence he can be born only through the spirit of men as the conceiving womb of the God. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 300.

My master and my brother, I believe you have completed your work…. What one individual can do for men, you have done and accomplished and fulfilled. The time has come when each must do his own work of redemption. Mankind has grown older and a new month has begun. ~Christ to Dr. Jung, The Red Book, Page 356.

No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 243.

The death of Christ took no suffering away from the world, but his life has taught us much; namely, that it pleases the one God if the individual lives his own life against the power of Abraxas. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 371.

I leave the spirit of this world which has thought Christ through to the end, and step over into that other funny-frightful realm in which I can find Christ again. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 295.

Break the Christ in yourself so that you may arrive at yourself and ultimately at your animal which is well-behaved in its herd and unwilling to infringe its laws. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 296.

However, just as Christ brought back human sacrifice and the eating of the sacrificed, all this happened to him and not to his brother, since Christ placed above it the highest law of love, so that no brother would come to harm as a result, but so that all could rejoice in the restoration. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 297.

Your awe-inspiring life shows how everyone would have to take their own life into their own hands, faithful to their own essence and their own love. ~Philemon to the “Shade” [Christ], The Red Book, Page 356.

Not one title of Christian law is abrogated, but instead we are adding a new one: accepting the lament of the dead. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 187.

When Christ ascended after completing his work, he led those up with him who had died prematurely and incomplete under the law of hardship and alienation and raw violence. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.

After death on the cross Christ went into the underworld and became Hell. So he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon. The image of the Antichrist, which has come down to us from the ancients, announces the new God, whose coming the ancients had foreseen. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his under worldly brother. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

Read the unknown books of the ancients, and you will learn much from them. Notice that Christ did not remain in Hell, but rose to the heights in the beyond. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

Just as Christ was crucified between the two thieves, our lowest lies on either side of our way. And just as one thief went to Hell and the other rose up to Heaven, the lowest in us will be sundered in two halves on the day of our judgment. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

we complete the Christ in us and we descend to Hell ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Who among the living is Christ and journeys to Hell in living flesh? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 318.

Did Christ, the God of man, not call himself the son of man? What was his innermost thought in doing so? Should the daughter of man be God’s name?” ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 51, Page 233.

Is there anyone among you who believes he can be spared the way? Can he swindle his way past the pain of Christ? I say: “Such a one deceives himself to his own detriment. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 234.

No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is to come. You should all become Christs. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.

Christ totally overcomes the temptation of the devil, but not the temptation of God to good and reason. Christ thus succumbs to cursing. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.

You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do every~ thing of your own will; then you will be free and beyond Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.

The Christian-my Christian-knows no curse formulas; indeed he does not even sanction the cursing of the innocent fig-tree by the rabbi Jesus” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, §1468.

You are Christians and run after heroes, and wait for redeemers who should take the agony on themselves for you, and totally spare you Golgotha. With that you pile up a mountain of Calvary over all Europe. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 254.

Because I also want my being other, I must become a Christ. I am made into Christ, I must suffer it. Thus the redeeming blood flows. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 254.

To be Christ oneself is the true following of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 233, Page 254.

The mystery showed me in images what I should afterward live. I did not possess any of those boons that the mystery showed me, for I still had to earn all of them. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 254.

I: “You sound cool and sneering. Have you never broken your heart over the holiest mysteries of our Christian religion?” ~Carl Jung to The Red One, Liber Novus, Page 259.

The form in which Christ presented the content of his unconscious to the world became accepted and was declared valid for all. Thereafter all individual fantasies became otiose and worthless, and were persecuted as heretical, as the fate of the Gnostic movement and of all later heresies testifies. The prophet Jeremiah is speaking just in this vein when he warns ~Carl Jung, CW 6, §BI.

I repeat: he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around in himself who holds him back from the best. ~Carl Jung to The Red One, Liber Novus, Page 259.

Christ overcame the world by burdening himself with its suffering but Buddha overcame both the pleasure and suffering of the world by disposing of both. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 367.

If I thus truly imitate Christ, I do not imitate anyone, I emulate no one, but go my own way, and I will also no longer call myself a Christian. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 293.

Our natural model is Christ. We have stood under his law since antiquity; first outwardly, and then inwardly. At first we knew this, and then knew it no longer. We fought against Christ, we deposed him, and we seemed to be conquerors. But he remained in us and mastered us. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 293.

It is better to be thrown into visible chains than into invisible ones. You can certainly leave Christianity but it does not leave you. Your liberation from it is delusion. Christ is the way. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 293.

The number of the unredeemed dead has become greater than the number of living Christians; therefore it is time that we accept the dead. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 297.

I: “But don’t you think that Christianity could ultimately be a transformation of your Egyptian teachings?” A: “If you say that our old teachings were less adequate expressions of Christianity, then I’m more likely to agree with you.” ~Carl Jung and the Anchorite, Liber Novus, Page 272.

When the month of the Twins had ended, the men said to their shadows: “You are I,” since they had previously had their spirit around them as a second person. Thus the two became one, and through this collision the formidable broke out, precisely that spring of consciousness that one calls culture and which lasted until the time of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Pages 314.

You are no Christian and no pagan, but a hospitable inhospitable one, a host of the Gods, a survivor, an eternal one, the father of all eternal wisdom. ~Carl Jung to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 315.

The hibernal rains began with Christ. He taught mankind the way to Heaven. We teach the way to earth. Hence nothing has been removed from the Gospel, but only added to it. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 316.

…in scientific usage the ‘self’ refers neither to Christ nor to the Buddha but to the totality of the figures that are its equivalent, and each of these figures is a symbol of the self’ ~Carl Jung, CW 12, §20.

I saw that a new God had come to be out of Christ the Lord, a young Hercules. ~Carl Jung, Footnote 237, Liber Novus, Page 254.

The righteous base their intentions more on the mercy of God, which in whatever they undertake they trust more than their own wisdom. ~Carl Jung citing The Imitation of Christ, Liber Novus, Page 294.

Just as Christ through the torment· of sanctification subjugated the flesh, so the God of this time through the torment of sanctification will subjugate the spirit. Just as Christ tormented the flesh through the spirit, the God of this time will torment the spirit through the flesh. For our spirit has become an impertinent whore, a slave to words created by men and no longer the divine word itself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Carl Jung on the “Church” – Anthology.

When the new revelation has lost its life, it means that the fire has devoured all the old wood of the past, then there still remains the Institution or Church (Ecclesia means Society). Thus what we call Church may have the form of any Society, e.g. for amusement, etc. Ecclesia means a gathering of people for any common purpose. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 19.

The Catacombs: Many rich women went; it became a sort of fashion to join in this mystery cult. The mysteries were celebrated underground because of their nature, rather than on account of the persecution. Fashion molded many things in the early Church, for example, the form of the robes; the Church hood was worn to denote that we were all one, of the same standing. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 19.

Collective relationships must be based on individual relationships, for an individual cannot exist without relatedness, for we are each cells in an organism. When we make individual relationships we lay the foundations for an invisible church. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 20.

Christ said of Peter who disavowed him, “On this rock I will build my Church.” It is a psychological fact that someone who is disloyal or a liar can be capable of uttering the truth to an extent that we cannot fore see. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 47.

Some examples of editorial slips made by the Church in the Bible:

“Ye will be as gods!”

“When thou art alone then I am with thee.”

“If thou would ‘st pray enter into thy chamber …”

The parable of the unjust steward. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 45.

The meaning of sin is that it teaches humility; the Church says, felix culpa. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 29.

Wherever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fright, and many run away. Such was the case with this theologian. I am of course aware that theologians are in a more difficult situation than others. On the one hand they are closer to religion, but on the other hand they are more bound by church and dogma. The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them. All very well if it has a supernatural or at least a “historical” foundation. But psychic? Face to face with this question, the patient will often show an unsuspected but profound contempt for the psyche. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Pages 141-142.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep. Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his church, to live the “symbolic life.” ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 140.

The earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 28, note 194.

Science seeks the truth because it feels it does not possess it. The church possesses the truth and therefore does not seek it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 2, Page 346.

The meaning of the dream is only that when the churches keep silent the psyche gives you food and drink. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 153-154.

Thus the fact that there is a genuine religiosity in the Catholic Church proves the existence of a need for fixed and immovable ideas and forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 395-398.

I thank God every day that I have been permitted to experience the reality of the imago Dei in me. Had that not been so, I would be a bitter enemy of Christianity and of the Church in particular. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 486-489.

My medical experience has increasingly compelled me to come to terms with Christian symbolism and here the Church Fathers were a great help. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 471.

A Church that has only the support of the masses can hardly be distinguished from the State. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 216-217.

I simply cannot conceive that there is anything Christian about churches whose main motive is division. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 245-246.

Alchemy began about the same time as Christianity, in fact we find alchemical ideas in China long before our era, so one can only be sure that the symbolism and language of the Fathers of the Church play an enormous role in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 161-162.

I am afraid that the historical responsibility for this state of things belongs to the Church: it did not emphasize the metaphysical significance of the individual and taught its members to deify the Church, the institution. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

Our culture, which is threatened today, is primarily a Christian culture, if it had not been for the Roman Catholic Church, we should still be barbarians. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

But we stopped at the institution of the Church, it was erected for the welfare of mankind and the divine germ of the individual was neglected and repressed, to such an extent that we have no understanding for the East and depreciate its teaching as megalomania. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

We were all taught to depend on the walls of the Chur, not on God in ourselves. How many of you even know that Christ said: “Ye are gods”? Have you ever heard a sermon on this text? I have not. But there are many passages in the New Testament which are never preached upon. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

We think we have conjured away this danger when we call it God, for Christianity has forgotten the dark side of God. The old Church knew that God was dangerous. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

But gradually God was only spoken of as the good God but the Church knew, and perhaps still knows, that God is dangerous. But it preaches in mild murmurs, for it is not popular to speak as Luther spoke of the deus absconditus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

Divinitas sancti spiritus has a peculiar relation to Mary, for the Sapientia Dei or Sophia was identified by the early Church with Mary. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

The Gnosis is a disturber of the peace of the Church, but it is full of psychological truths, many yet undiscovered. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.

We do not know why the Christian “Weltanschauung” exists, and why it is so insisted upon. The real reason is that these things lie under it, these essential roots of man; they belong to the secret teaching and had to be hidden, the Church was built over them and because of this people have become cut off from their roots. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 200.

This Christianizing of the unconscious is observable through analysis. The unconscious becomes more manageable. In time we shall have the whole Christian church in our unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Lecture, Page 25.

The Christian Church has hitherto. . . [recognized] Christ as the one and only God-man. But the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many, and the question then arises whether these many are all complete God-men. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 470.

I must know what the Church teaches but I must then ask myself what my own law is. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 39.

The existence of the Church has its own validity. Anyone who drops out of the Church loses its maternal protection and is a prey to national confessionalisms. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 45.

It takes an enormous inner strength to live through severance from the Catholic Church. It is a tremendous responsibility to endeavour to entice someone else away from the Church. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 45.

When Christ is most luminous the Church receives the least light. The light of the Church is therefore greatest when the moon is in opposition to the sun. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 45.

Many patients must grasp that there is much that lives in their psyche that is not consonant with the Church: it is the Spirit that continues to beget and bloweth where it listeth. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 45.

One need not always be in opposition to the Church. The Church is valid up to the point where life goes on. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 45.

There are often elements in the psyche that are absolutely heathen. They have to be domesticated in some way in Christianity, but there are still certain heathen elements that even the Church has not been able to absorb. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 45.

the Church severed the coniunctio from the physical realm altogether, and natural philosophy turned it into an abstract theoria. These developments meant the gradual transformation of the archetype into a psychological process which, in theory, we can call a combination of conscious and unconscious processes. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 295.

The Church stands on two feet, Protestantism only on sola fide, therefore faith is so important to it but not to the Catholic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 111-112.

Perhaps this comes from their having to preach down from the pulpit, with nobody allowed to answer back. This attitude, which I met practically everywhere, has shooed me out of the Church like so many others. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 113-114.

To my terror I was forced into a pulpit, which gave me such a shock that I have never spoken in a church again. I hadn’t realized how much a sacred and hallowed precinct meant to me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 128-129.

The profane use Protestants make of their churches I regard as a grave error. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 128-129.

Anybody going ahead is alone or thinks he is lonely at times, no matter whether he is in the church or in the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138

The Midrashim are quite aware of it, and the Christian church had to invent that awful syllogism, the privatio boni, in order to annihilate the original ambivalence of the Jewish God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.

The old popes and bishops succeeded in getting so much heathendom, barbarism and real evil out of the Church that it became much better than some centuries before: there were no Alexander VI, no auto-da-tes, no thumbscrews and racks anymore, so that the compensatory drastic virtues (asceticism etc.) lost their meaning to a certain extent. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

That is one of the reasons why the Church attracts quite a number of intelligent and responsible men in the secret (or unconscious?) hope that they will be strong enough to carry its meaning and not its words into the future. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

It is quite understandable that the ecclesiastical authorities must protect the Church against subversive influences. But it would be sabotage if this principle were carried to the extreme, because it would kill the attempts at improvement also. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

Since the world is largely sub principatu diaboli, it is unavoidable that there is just as much evil in the Church as everywhere else, and as everywhere else you have got to be careful. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

In the two Christian churches, the importance and the psychological significance of rites are not generally appreciated; to some people they are acts of faith or of habit; to others, acts of magic. But in reality there is a third aspect: the aspect of the rite as a symbolic act, giving expression to the archetypal expectation of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.

The apostles and the early Fathers of the Church had no easy life and moreover no Christian is meant to go to sleep in a safe pew. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Pages 238-243.

We ought to remember that the Fathers of the Church have insisted upon the fact that God has given Himself to man’s death on the Cross so that we may become gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 312-316.

The idea that I convert people, as it were, to the new denomination Jungianism” or better “Jungian Church” is sheer defamation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 334-335.

If the Reformation is a heresy, I am certainly a heretic too. It is of course a thorn in the flesh of the churches that I do not belong to any of the recognized sects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 334-335.

Thus the Reformation was no more a repristination of the early Church than the Renaissance was a mere revival of antiquity, but a new exposition which could not throw off its own historical evolution. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

As we are profoundly influenced in our practical life by our historical Christian education, we are also exposed to secular changes in the basic Christian dominants, e.g., the schism of the Christian Church and the development of anti-Christian traits. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 510-511

Usefulness without meaning fills pockets and the churches of Christian Science. ~Carl Jung, Hans Schmid Guisan Letters, Pages 100-114

A creed coincides with the established Church or, at any rate, forms a public institution whose members include not only true believers but vast numbers of people who can only be described as “indifferent” in matters of religion and who belong to it simply by force of habit. Here the difference between a creed and a religion becomes palpable. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 508

If you yourself can provide for it, then you are the whole mystery of the church: you are the transubstantiation. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1012-1013

One such successful interpretation has been, for instance, Mother Church, but once this form begins to show signs of age and decay a new interpretation becomes inevitable. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 351

A creed coincides with the established Church or, at any rate, forms a public institution whose members include not only true believers but vast numbers of people who can only be described as “indifferent” in matters of religion and who belong to it simply by force of habit. Here the difference between a creed and a religion becomes palpable. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 508.

It is also a fact that under the influence of a so-called scientific enlightenment great masses of educated people have either left the Church or become profoundly indifferent to it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 34.

Its nature is such that it is really understandable why the Church is actually a place of refuge or protection for those who cannot endure the fire of the divine presence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 424.

I have as little need to convince myself of how good the Catholic Church is for very many people. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 197-198

I have always known this as I had the advantage of a Christian education and have consequently never felt isolated or dried up. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 197-198

The Church as an effective force has disappeared too, and what is left? The mob, the State, the man-made State, a mere ant heap of individuals. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1st Dec 1939

The Roman Catholic Church regards Christ as the spouse of its unmarried members. Therefore he is the bridegroom of women and the bride of men. I speak, of course, of the conscious of men, to their unconscious He is also the bridegroom. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

But the task of the Church is not the same as that of psychotherapy. The Church means serving the community, therapy serves the individual. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 235

But the spiritual power of the Church has fallen, and Communism is the opposite: it has arisen as the glorification of the materia. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 57

His [Jung] father was Lutheran, but of the Basel Reformed Church. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 275

… When I treat Catholics who are suffering from neurosis I consider it my duty to lead them back to the bosom of the Church where they belong. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 191

The Catholic Church must hold fast to what still remains from earlier times of living religiosity; I on the contrary must do pioneer work in a world where everything pristine has vanished. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 118

Mass-degeneration does not come only from without: it also comes from within, from the collective unconscious. Against the outside, some protection was afforded by the droits de L’homme which at present are lost to the greater part of Europe, and even where they are not actually lost we see political parties, as naive as they are powerful, doing their best to abolish them in favour of the slave state, with the bait of social security. Against the demonism from within, the Church offers some protection so long as it wields authority. But protection and security are only valuable when not excessively cramping to our existence; and in the same way the superiority of consciousness is desirable only if it does not suppress and shut out too much life. As always, life is a voyage between Scylla and Charybdis. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 502

It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—as apparently they do—to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536

The present attempts to achieve full individual consciousness and to mature the personality are, socially speaking, still so feeble that they carry no weight at all in relation to our historic needs. If our European social order is not to be shaken to its foundations, authority must be restored at all costs. This is probably one reason for the efforts now being made in Europe to replace the collectivity of the Church by the collectivity of the State. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 221

Far too little attention has been paid to the fact that, for all our irreligiousness, the distinguishing mark of the Christian epoch, its highest achievement, has become the congenital vice of our age: the supremacy of the word, of the Logos, which stands for the central figure of our Christian faith. The word has literally become our god, and so it has remained, even if we knew of Christianity only by hearsay. Words like “Society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the “State,” far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the “State” is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities. No one seems to notice that this worship of the word, which was necessary at a certain phase of man’s mental development, has a perilous shadow side. That is to say, the moment the word, as a result of centuries of education, attains universal validity, it severs its original connection with the divine Person. There is then a personified Church, a personified State; belief in the word becomes credulity, and the word itself an infernal slogan capable of any deception. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 554

The Church has the doctrine of the devil, of an evil principle, whom we like to imagine complete with cloven hoofs, horns, and tail, half man, half beast, a chthonic deity apparently escaped from the rout of Dionysus, the sole surviving champion of the sinful joys of paganism. An excellent picture, and one which exactly describes the grotesque and sinister side of the unconscious; for we have never really come to grips with it and consequently it has remained in its original savage state. Probably no one today would still be rash enough to assert that the European is a lamblike creature and not possessed by a devil. The frightful records of our age are plain for all to see, and they surpass in hideousness everything that any previous age, with its feeble instruments, could have hoped to accomplish. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 388

In Christ’s sayings there are already indications of ideas which go beyond the traditionally “Christian” morality —for instance the parable of the unjust steward, the moral of which agrees with the logion of the Codex Bezae, and betrays an ethical standard very different from what is expected. Here the moral criterion is consciousness, and not law or convention. One might also mention the strange fact that it is precisely Peter, who lacks self-control and is fickle in character, whom Christ wishes to make the rock and foundation of his Church. These seem to me to be ideas which point to the inclusion of evil in what I would call a differential moral valuation. For instance, it is good if evil is sensibly covered up, but to act unconsciously is evil. One might almost suppose that such views were intended for a time when consideration is given to evil as well as to good, or rather, when it is not suppressed below the threshold in the dubious assumption that we always know exactly what evil is. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 696

It is not denied in medieval ecclesiastical writings that a divine influx may occur in dreams, but this view is not exactly encouraged, and the Church reserves the right to decide whether a revelation is to be considered authentic or not. In spite of the Church’s recognition that certain dreams are sent by God, she is disinclined, and even averse, to any serious concern with dreams, while admitting that some might conceivably contain an immediate revelation. Thus the change of mental attitude that has taken place in recent centuries is, from this point of view at least, not wholly unwelcome to the Church, because it effectively discouraged the earlier introspective attitude which favoured a serious consideration o£ dreams and inner experiences. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 32

He would be better advised to put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 7 Para 409

It is no longer a question of a few dozen voluntary or involuntary old maids here and there, but of millions. Our legislation and our social morality give no answer to this question. Or can the Church provide a satisfactory answer? Should we build gigantic nunneries to accommodate all these women? Or should tolerated prostitution be increased? Obviously this is impossible, since we are dealing neither with saints nor sinners but with ordinary women who cannot register their spiritual requirements with the police. They are decent women who want to marry, and if this is not possible, well—the next best thing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

A system of education does indeed exist, but it has its origins partly in antiquity and partly in the early Middle Ages. It styles itself the Christian Church. But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. Human iniquity is not to blame for this, but rather a gradual and widespread spiritual change, the first symptom of which was the Reformation. It shattered the authority of the Church as a teacher, and thereafter the authoritarian principle itself began to crumble away. The inevitable consequence was an increase in the importance of the individual, which found expression in the modern ideals of humanity, social welfare, democracy, and equality. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326

The fact that by far the greater part of humanity not only needs guidance, but wishes for nothing better than to be guided and held in tutelage, justifies, in a sense, the moral value which the Church sets on confession. The priest, equipped with all the insignia of paternal authority, becomes the responsible leader and shepherd of his flock. He is the father confessor and the members of his parish are his penitent children. Thus priest and Church replace the parents, and to that extent they free the individual from the bonds of the family. In so far as the priest is a morally elevated personality with a natural nobility of soul and a mental culture to match, the institution of confession may be commended as brilliant method of social guidance and education, which did in fact perform a tremendous educative task for more than fifteen hundred years. So long as the medieval Church knew how to be the guardian of art and science—a role in which her success was due, in part, to her wide tolerance of worldly interests—confession was an admirable instrument of education. But it lost its educative value, at least for more highly developed people, as soon as the Church proved incapable of maintaining her leadership in the intellectual sphere—the inevitable consequence of spiritual rigidity. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 433

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice. And thus, from so-called goodness, which was once really good, something has arisen which is no longer good; it has become an evasion. Nowadays any coward can make himself respectable by going to church and loving his neighbour. But it is simply an untrue state, an artificial world. ~Carl Jung, Basel Seminar, Para 88

We are now reaping the fruit of nineteenth-century education. Throughout that period the Church preached to young people the merit of blind faith, while the universities inculcated an intellectual rationalism, with the result that today we plead in vain whether for faith or reason. Tired of this warfare of opinions, the modern man wishes to find out for himself how things are. And though this desire opens the door to the most dangerous possibilities, we cannot help seeing it as a courageous enterprise and giving it some measure of sympathy. It is no reckless adventure, but an effort inspired by deep spiritual distress to bring meaning once more into life on the basis of fresh and unprejudiced experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 529

The Christian West considers man to be wholly dependent upon the grace of God, or at least upon the Church as the exclusive and divinely sanctioned earthly instrument of man’s redemption. The East, however, insists that man is the sole cause of his higher development, for it believes in “self-liberation.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 770

The creative mystic was ever a cross for the Church, but it is to him that we owe what is best in humanity. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 531

We always think that Christianity consists in a particular confession of faith and in belonging to a Church. No, Christianity is our world. Everything we think is the fruit of the Middle Ages and indeed of the Christian Middle Ages. Our whole science, everything that passes through our head, has inevitably gone through this history. It lives in us and has left its stamp upon us for all time and will always form a vital layer of our psyche, just like the phylogenetic traces in our body. The whole character of our mentality, the way we look at things, is also the result of the Christian Middle Ages; whether we know it or not is quite immaterial. The age of rational enlightenment has eradicated nothing. Even our method of rational enlightenment is Christian. The Christian Weltanschauung is therefore a psychological fact that does not allow of any further rationalization; it is something that has happened, that is present. We are inevitably stamped as Christians, but we are also stamped by what existed before Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Basel Seminar, Para 84

Everything has its history, everything has “grown,” and Christianity, which is supposed to have appeared suddenly as a unique revelation from heaven, undoubtedly also has its history. Moreover, how it began is as clear as daylight. I need not speak of the rites of the Mass and certain peculiarities of the priests’ clothing which are borrowed from pagan times, for the fundamental ideas of the Christian Church also have their predecessors. But a break in continuity has occurred because we are all overcome by the impression of the uniqueness of Christianity. It is exactly as if we had built a cathedral over a pagan temple and no longer knew that it is still there underneath. The result is that the inner correspondence with the outer God-image is undeveloped through lack of psychic culture and has remained stuck in paganism. ~Carl Jung, Basel Seminar, Para 84

The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. These things originate in a psychic condition that has remained archaic and has not been even remotely touched by Christianity. The Church assumes, not altogether without reason, that the fact of semelcredidisse (having once believed) leaves certain traces behind it; but of these traces nothing is to be seen in the broad march of events. Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside—in image and in word, in Church and Bible—but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 12

The Church represents a higher spiritual substitute for the purely natural, or “carnal,” tie to the parents. Consequently it frees the individual from an unconscious natural relationship which, strictly speaking, is not a relationship at all but simply a condition of inchoate, unconscious identity. This, just because it is unconscious, possesses a tremendous inertia and offers the utmost resistance to any kind of spiritual development.

Now, it is by no means the special prerogative of the Christian Church to try to make it possible for the individual to detach himself from his original, animal-like condition; the Church is simply the latest, and specifically Western, form of an instinctive striving that is probably as old as mankind itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 172

When, therefore, I am treating practising Catholics, and am faced with the transference problem, I can, by virtue of my office as a doctor, step aside and lead the problem over to the Church. But if I am treating a non-Catholic, that way out is debarred, and by virtue of my office as a doctor I cannot step aside, for there is as a rule nobody there, nothing towards which I could suitably lead the father-imago. I can, of course, get the patient to recognize with his reason that I am not the father. But by that very act I become the reasonable father and remain despite everything the father. Not only nature, but the patient too, abhors a vacuum. He has an instinctive horror of allowing the parental imagos and his childhood psyche to fall into nothingness, into a hopeless past that has no future. His instinct tells him that, for the sake of his own wholeness, these things must be kept alive in one form or another. He knows that a complete withdrawal of the projection will be followed by an apparently endless isolation within the ego, which is all the more burdensome because he has so little love for it. He found it unbearable enough before, and he is unlikely to bear it now simply out of sweet reasonableness. Therefore at this juncture the Catholic who has been freed from an excessively personal tie to his parents can return fairly easily to the mysteries of the Church, which he is now in a position to understand better and more deeply. There are also Protestants who can discover in one of the newer variants of Protestantism a meaning which appeals to them, and so regain a genuine religious attitude. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 218

Religious symbols are phenomena of life, plain facts and not intellectual opinions. If the Church clung for so long to the idea that the sun rotates round the earth, and then abandoned this contention in the nineteenth century, she can always appeal to the psychological truth that for millions of people the sun did revolve round the earth and that it was only in the nineteenth century that any major portion of mankind became sufficiently sure of the intellectual function to grasp the proof of the earth’s planetary nature. Unfortunately there is no “truth” unless there are people to understand it. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 166

The history of Protestantism has been one of chronic iconoclasm. One wall after another fell. And the work of destruction was not too difficult once the authority of the Church had been shattered. We all know how, in large things as in small, in general as well as in particular, piece after piece collapsed, and how the alarming poverty of symbols that is now the condition of our life came about. With that the power of the Church has vanished too—a fortress robbed of its bastions and casemates, a house whose walls have been plucked away, exposed to all the winds of the world and to all dangers. Although this is, properly speaking, a lamentable collapse that offends our sense of history, the disintegration of Protestantism into nearly four hundred denominations is yet a sure sign that the restlessness continues. The Protestant is cast out into a state of defencelessness that might well make the natural man shudder. His enlightened consciousness, of course, refuses to take cognizance of this fact, and is quietly looking elsewhere for what has been lost to Europe. We seek the effective images, the thought-forms that satisfy the restlessness of heart and mind, and we find the treasures of the East. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 31

The individual’s decision not to belong to a Church does not necessarily denote an anti-Christian attitude; it may mean exactly the reverse: a reconsidering of the kingdom of God in the human heart where, in the words of St. Augustine, the mysterium paschale is accomplished “in its inward and higher meanings.” The ancient and long obsolete idea of man as a microcosm contains a supreme psychological truth that has yet to be discovered. In former times this truth was projected upon the body, just as alchemy projected the unconscious psyche upon chemical substances. But it is altogether different when the microcosm is understood as the interior world whose inward nature is fleetingly glimpsed in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 397

Since the only salutary powers visible in the world today are the great psychotherapeutic systems which we call the religions, and from which we expect the soul’s salvation, it is quite natural that many people should make the justifiable and often successful attempt to find a niche for themselves in one of the existing creeds and to acquire a deeper insight into the meaning of the traditional saving verities. This solution is normal and satisfying in that the dogmatically formulated truths of the Christian Church express, almost perfectly, the nature of psychic experience. They are the repositories of the secrets of the soul, and this matchless knowledge is set forth in grand symbolical images. The unconscious thus possesses a natural affinity with the spiritual values of the Church, particularly in their dogmatic form, which owes its special character to centuries of theological controversy—absurd as this seemed in the eyes of later generations—and to the passionate efforts of many great men. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 390

I wish everybody could be freed from the burden of their sins by the Church. But he to whom she cannot render this service must bend very low in the imitation of Christ in order to take the burden of his cross upon him. The ancients could get along with the Greek wisdom of the ages: “Exaggerate nothing, all good lies in right measure.” But what an abyss still separates us from reason! ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 37

He [Jung] said that if we belong to the secret church, then we belong, and we need not worry about it, but can go our own way. ~E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 9

Carl Jung on “Collective Unconscious” – Anthology

The collective unconscious is the foundation of life, the eternal truth of life, the eternal basis and the eternal goal. It is the endless sea from which life originates and into which life flows back, and it remains forever the same. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 380.

Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn’t think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.

We can never enter the collective unconscious but we can send the anima or animus to bring us information. By making things with your hands without conscious intent you find a vision of the things of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, The Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.

He said that it was not the least important whether I accomplished anything outwardly in this life since my one task was to contribute to the evolution of the collective unconscious. ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39.

Where one is identified with the collective unconscious, there is no recognition of the things which come from the unconscious, they cannot be distinguished from those of the self. Such a condition is a possession by the anima or animus. Possession by the animus or anima creates a certain psychological hermaphroditism. The principle of individuation demands a dissociation or differentiation of the male and the female in ourselves. We must dissociate our self from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.

These fantasy-images undoubtedly have their closest analogues in mythological types. We must therefore assume that they correspond to certain collective (and not personal) structural elements of the human psyche…. These cases are so numerous that we are obliged to assume the existence of a collective psychic substratum. I have called this the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9I, para. 262.

The collective unconscious is common to all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called the ‘sympathy of all things’. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 138.

Whenever contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they have a disturbing effect on the conscious mind, and contusion ensues. If the activation is due to the collapse of the individual’s hopes and expectations, there is a danger that the collective unconscious may take the place of reality. This state would be pathological. If, on the other hand, the activation is the result of psychological processes in the unconscious of the people, the individual may feel threatened or at any rate disoriented, but the resultant state is not pathological, at least so far as the individual is concerned. Nevertheless, the mental state of the people as a whole might well be compared to a psychosis. “The Psychological Foundation for the Belief in Spirits (1920). ~Carl Jung; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.595

The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me. ~Carl Jung; On ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead; CW 11; Page 857.

. . . poets . . . create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream. ~Carl Jung; CW 6: 323.

The collective unconscious is simply Nature — and since Nature contains everything it also contains the unknown. … So far as we can see, the collective unconscious is identical with Nature to the extent that Nature herself, including matter, is unknown to us. I have nothing against the assumption that the psyche is a quality of matter or matter the concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that ‘psyche’ is defined as the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Letters, vol. 2, P 450

The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (‘deformed’), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 39; Para 72.

The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence. ~Psychological Types Ch. 5, p. 271

The mental state of the first years of life does not differ from the collective unconscious; it is a world rich of images. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 182.

Through his inner vision the prophet discerns from the needs of his time the helpful image in the collective unconscious and expresses it in the symbol: because it speaks out of the collective unconscious it speaks for everyone-le vrai mot de la situation! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.

The human brain is the result of a long process of evolution, as is also the collective unconscious. The individual experience is woven in to this tissue, so it is of vital importance, where we come from, who our parents are, and what our early surroundings were. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 179.

It is when we come to a summit in life that the archetypal symbols appear. These primeval pictures of human life form the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Pages 176-177.

Individuation is the transformational process of integrating the conscious with the personal and collective unconscious ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page 301.

This field is the collective unconscious where the treasure is hidden, the royal treasure in the sea. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 113.

In the collective unconscious the archetypes and the instincts are one and the same thing. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 213.

The Sambhoga-kaya corresponds exactly to the modern term collective unconscious; and the archetypal figures correspond to the Devatas of our text. ETH Lecture XIII 17Feb1939, Page 86.

The collective unconscious is a source in which all the past and all the future lie, it does not belong to the individual, but to mankind. ~ Carl Jung, Lecture VI 2June1934, Page 113.

Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion. For he will infallibly run into things that thwart and “cross” him: first, the thing he has no wish to be (the shadow); second, the thing he is not (the “other,” the individual reality of the “You”); and third, his psychic non-ego (the collective unconscious). ~Carl Jung, CW 16, par. 470.

He [Jung] said that it was not the least important whether I accomplished anything outwardly in this life since my one task was to contribute to the evolution of the collective unconscious. ~Robert A. Johnson, J.E.T., Pages 36-39.

It [Music] expresses in sounds what fantasies and visions music express in Visual images…music represents the movement, development and transformation of motifs of the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 542.

Hence there is only one collective unconscious, which is everywhere identical with itself, from which everything psychic takes shape before it is Personalized, modified, assimilated, etc. by external influences. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume I, Page 408.

It is not, however, the actual East we are dealing with but the collective unconscious which is omnipresent. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 87

The collective unconscious…appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Par. 325.

The integration of the collective unconscious amounts roughly to taking cognizance of the world and adapting to it. This does not mean that one would have to learn to know the whole world, or that one must have lived in all climates and continents of the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 159.

It is an astonishing fact, indeed, that the collective unconscious seems to be in contact with nearly everything. There is of course no empirical evidence for such a generalization, but plenty of it for its indefinite extension. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

Your argument and the beautiful quotations make it very clear that Rilke drew from the same deep springs as I did-the collective unconscious. He as a poet or visionary, I as a psychologist and empiricist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 381-382.

When you say that an experience of wholeness is the same as a “dynamic irruption of the collective unconscious,” this is an indubitable error. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.

If I speak of the collective unconscious I don’t assume it as a principle, I only give a name to the totality of observable facts, i.e., archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567

I had killed my intellect, helped on to the deed by a personification of the collective unconscious, the little brown man with me. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 62

Why doesn’t the inferior function come up at once? The inferior function is hooked up with the collective unconscious and has to come up first in the collective fantasies, which of course, in their first aspect, do not seem to be collective. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 68

When one gets an intuition of the collective unconscious, if there is any creative power in the individual a definite figure is formed, rather than that the material comes through in a fragmentary form. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 71

As a natural scientist, thinking and sensation were uppermost in me and intuition and feeling were in the unconscious and contaminated by the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 75

If we release the energy of the collective unconscious until we have no more, then we arrive at differentiation. The archetypes are sources of energy. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 99

Moral views do not touch the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 99

On this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological but psychical. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140

We cannot repeat this distinction too often, for when I have referred to the collective unconscious as “outside” our brains, it has been assumed that I meant hanging somewhere in mid-air. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 141

After this explanation it will become clear to you that the collective unconscious is always working upon you through trans-subjective facts which are probably inside as well as outside yourselves. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 141

I am concerned with phenomenal religion, with its observable facts, to which I try to add a few psychological observations about basic events in the collective unconscious, the existence of which I can prove. Beyond this I know nothing and I have never made any assertions about it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40

So the Self is part of the collective unconscious, but it is not the collective unconscious; it is that unit which apparently comes from the union of the ego and the shadow. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 754

Just as the Self is a unit in the collective unconscious, so we are units in the Self. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 754

They [Children’s Dreams] must come from the psychology of the collective unconscious; one could say they were remnants of things they had seen before they were born, and that is really vision. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.

For we may assume that the collective unconscious is in absolute peace until the individual appears. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263

The accumulated libido activates images lying dormant in the collective unconscious, among them the God-image, that engram or imprint which from the beginning of time has been the collective expression of the most overwhelmingly powerful influences exerted on the conscious mind by unconscious concentrations of libido. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 412

For the collective unconscious which sends you these dreams already possesses the solution: nothing has been lost from the whole immemorial experience of humanity, every imaginable situation and every solution seem to have been foreseen by the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 231.

It is not only possible, but for certain reasons quite probable, that the collective unconscious coincides in a strange and utterly inconceivable way with objective events. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 532-533

He [Jung] said it was always like this with his dreams; he would dream of what he would write – like the mediaeval house dream and the notion of the collective unconscious. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 83

Carl Jung on “Consciousness” – Anthology.

Only those individuals can attain to a higher degree of consciousness who are destined to it and called to it from the beginning, i.e., who have a capacity and an urge for higher differentiation. In this matter men differ extremely, as also do the animal species, among whom there are conservatives and progressives. Nature is aristocratic, but not in the sense of having reserved the possibility of differentiation exclusively for species high in the scale. So too with the possibility of psychic development: it is not reserved for specially gifted individuals. In other words, in order to undergo a far-reaching psychological development, neither outstanding intelligence nor any other talent is necessary, since in this development moral qualities can make up for intellectual shortcomings. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 198

Where instinct predominates, psychoid processes set in which pertain to the sphere of the unconscious as elements incapable of consciousness.

The psychoid process is not the unconscious as such, for this has a far greater extension. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 380

The autonomy of the unconscious therefore begins where emotions are generated. Emotions are instinctive, involuntary reactions which upset the rational order of consciousness by their elemental outbursts. Affects are not “made” or willfully produced; they simply happen. In a state of affect a trait of character sometimes appears which is strange even to the person concerned, or hidden contents may irrupt involuntarily. The more violent an affect the closer it comes to the pathological, to a condition in which the ego-consciousness is thrust aside by autonomous contents that were unconscious before. So long as the unconscious is in a dormant condition, it seems as if there were absolutely nothing in this hidden region. Hence we are continually surprised when something unknown suddenly appears “from nowhere.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 497

The “child” is therefore renatus in novam infantiam [reborn into a new infancy]. It is thus both beginning and end, an initial and a terminal creature. The initial creature existed before man was not, and the terminal creature will be when man is not. Psychologically speaking, this means that the “child” symbolizes the pre-conscious and the post-conscious essence of man. His pre-conscious essence is the unconscious state of earliest childhood; his post-conscious essence is an anticipation by analogy of life after death. In this idea the all-embracing nature of psychic wholeness is expressed. Wholeness is never comprised within the compass of the conscious mind—it includes the indefinite and indefinable extent of the unconscious as well. Wholeness, empirically speaking, is therefore of immeasurable extent, older and younger than consciousness and enfolding it in time and space. This is no speculation, but an immediate psychic experience. Not only is the conscious process continually accompanied, it is often guided, helped, or interrupted, by unconscious happenings. The child had a psychic life before it had consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 299

The personality is seldom, in the beginning, what it will be later on. For this reason the possibility of enlarging it exists, at least during the first half of life. The enlargement may be effected through an accretion from without, by new vital contents finding their way into the personality from outside and being assimilated. In this way a considerable increase of personality may be experienced. We therefore tend to assume that this increase comes only from without, thus justifying the prejudice that one becomes a personality by stuffing into oneself as much as possible from outside. But the more assiduously we follow this recipe, and the more stubbornly we believe that all increase has to come from without, the greater becomes our inner poverty. Therefore, if some great idea takes hold of us from outside, we must understand that it takes hold of us only because something in us responds to it and goes out to meet it. Richness of mind consists in mental receptivity, not in the accumulation of possessions. What comes to us from outside, and, for that matter, everything that rises up from within, can only be made our own if we are capable of an inner amplitude equal to that of the incoming content. Real increase of personality means consciousness of an enlargement that flows from inner sources. Without psychic depth we can never be adequately related to the magnitude of our object. It has therefore been said quite truly that a man grows with the greatness of his task. But he must have within himself the capacity to grow; otherwise, even the most difficult task is of no benefit to him. More likely he will be shattered by it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 215

Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too—as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an “individual.” Since the unconscious gives us the feeling that it is something alien, a non-ego, it is quite natural that it should be symbolized by an alien figure. Thus, on the one hand, it is the most insignificant of things, while on the other, so far as it potentially contains that “round” wholeness which consciousness lacks, it is the most significant of all. This “round” thing is the great treasure that lies hidden in the cave of the unconscious, and its personification is this personal being who represents the higher unity of conscious and unconscious. 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. The intuition of immortality which makes itself felt during the transformation is connected with the peculiar nature of the unconscious. It is, in a sense, non-spatial and non-temporal. The empirical proof of this is the occurrence of so-called telepathic phenomena, which are still denied by hyper-skeptical critics, although in reality they are much more common than is generally supposed. The feeling of immortality, it seems to me, has its origin in a peculiar feeling of extension in space and time, and I am inclined to regard the deification rites in the mysteries as a projection of this same psychic phenomenon. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 248-249

The attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289

The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times in his long history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290

.The role of the unconscious is to act compensatorily to the conscious contents of the moment. By this I do not mean that it sets up an opposition, for there are times when the tendency of the unconscious coincides with that of consciousness, namely, when the conscious attitude is approaching the optimum. The nearer it approaches the optimum, the more the autonomous activity of the unconscious is diminished, and the more its value sinks until, at the moment when the optimum is reached, it falls to zero. We can say, then, that so long as all goes well, so long as a person travels the road that is, for him, the individual as well as the social optimum, there is no talk of the unconscious. The very fact that we in our age come to speak of the unconscious at all is proof that everything is not in order. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 21.

And yet the attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, pre-formed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

Most people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of their conscious ego-personalities. Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 491

The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times in his long history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290

It is, however, true that much of the evil in the world comes from the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious, as it is also true that with increasing insight we can combat this evil at its source in ourselves, in the same way that science enables us to deal effectively with injuries inflicted from without. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 166

It is indeed no small matter of know of one’s guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s shadow. When we are conscious of our guilt we are in a more favourable position— we can at least hope to change and improve ourselves. As we know, anything that remains in the unconscious is incorrigible; psychological corrections can be made only in consciousness. Consciousness of guilt can therefore act as a powerful moral stimulus. In every treatment of neurosis the discovery of the shadow is indispensable, otherwise nothing changes. In this respect, I rely on those parts of the German body-politic which have remained sound to draw conclusions from the facts. Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. Was it not Meister Eckhart who said: “For this reason God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and often winks at them, mostly sending them to people for whom he has prepared some high destiny. See! Who was dearer to our Lord or more intimate with him than his apostles? Not one of them but fell into mortal sin, and all were mortal sinners.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440

Just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 19

Personality consists of two things: first, consciousness and whatever this covers, and second, an indefinitely large hinterland of unconscious psyche. So far as the former is concerned, it can be more or less clearly defined and delimited; but as for the sum total of personality, one has to admit the impossibility of a complete description or definition. In other words, there is bound to be an illimitable and indefinable addition to every personality, because the latter consists of a conscious and observable part which does not contain certain factors whose existence, however, we are forced to assume in order to explain certain observable facts. The unknown factors form what we call the unconscious part of the personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 66.

What does man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defenselessness against the Almighty, he possesses, as we have already suggested, a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection; he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. God has no need of this circumspection, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 579

Yahweh’s decision to become man is a symbol of the development that had to supervene when man becomes conscious of the sort of God-image he is confronted with. God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him to harmonize and unite the opposing influences to which his mind is exposed from the unconscious. The unconscious wants both: to divide and to unite. In his striving for unity, therefore, man may always count on the help of a metaphysical advocate, as Job clearly recognized. The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite. The conflict in his nature is so great that the incarnation can only be bought by an expiatory self-sacrifice offered up to the wrath of God’s dark side. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 740

Carl Jung on “Complexes” – Anthology.

Since, psychologically speaking, the God-image is a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature, it must necessarily be regarded as representing a certain sum of energy (libido) which appears in projection ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89

By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” ~Carl Jung; CW 6, par. 797

Complexes are focal or nodal points of psychic life which we would not wish to do without; indeed, they should not be missing, for otherwise psychic activity would come to a fatal standstill. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 925

SOUL. [psyche, personality, persona, anima,] I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” In order to make clear what I mean by this, I must introduce some further points of view. It is, in particular, the phenomena of somnambulism, double consciousness, split personality, etc., whose investigation we owe primarily to the French school, that have enabled us to accept the possibility of a plurality of personalities in one and the same individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 6. Para 797

The God-concept coincides with the particular ideational complex which concentrates in itself the maximum amount of libido, or psychic energy ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 67

I call every interpretation which equates the dream images with real objects an interpretation on the objective level… Interpretation on the objective level is analytic, because it breaks down the dream content into memory-complexes that refer to external situations. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, para. 131.

In contrast to this is the interpretation which refers every part of the dream and all the actors in it back to the dreamer himself. This I call interpretation on the subjective level…. Interpretation on the subjective level is synthetic, because it detaches the underlying memory-complexes from their external causes, regards them as tendencies or components of the subject, and reunites them with that subject. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, para. 131.

I call every interpretation which equates the dream images with real objects an interpretation on the objective level. In contrast to this is the interpretation which refers every part of the dream and all the actors in it back to the dreamer himself. This I call interpretation on the subjective level. Interpretation on the objective level is analytic, because it breaks down the dream content into memory complexes that refer to external situations. Interpretation on the subjective level is synthetic, because it detaches the underlying memory-complexes from their external causes, regards them as tendencies or components of the subject, and reunites them with that subject. … In this case, therefore, all the contents of the dream are treated as symbols for subjective contents. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 130

These words belonged to the autonomous complex. When excited by an external stimulus, complexes can produce sudden confusions, or violent affects, depressions, anxiety-states, etc., or they may express themselves in hallucinations. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 313.

Complexes are in truth the living units of the unconscious psyche, and it is only through them that we are able to deduce its existence and its constitution. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 210

Where the realm of the complexes begins the freedom of the ego comes to an end, for complexes are psychic agencies whose deepest nature is still unfathomed. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 216.

From the psychological point of view, the phenomenon of spirit, like every autonomous complex, appears as an intention of the unconscious superior to, or at least on a par with, intentions of the ego. If we are to do justice to the essence of the thing we call spirit, we should really speak of a “higher” consciousness rather than of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, para 643.

Psychologically we would say: every affect tends to become an autonomous complex, to break away from the hierarchy of consciousness and, if possible, to drag the ego after it ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 628

The more absolute and compelling the ruling idea, the more it has the nature of an autonomous complex that confronts the ego-consciousness as an unshakable fact ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 633

Spirit that can be translated into a definite concept is a psychic complex lying within the orbit of our ego-consciousness. It will not bring forth anything, nor will it achieve anything more than we have put into it ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 644

But spirit that demands a symbol for its expression is a psychic complex that contains the seeds of incalculable possibilities. The most obvious and best example of this is the effectiveness of the Christian symbols, whose power changed the face of history. If one looks without prejudice at the way the spirit of early Christianity worked on the mind of the average man of the second century, one can only be amazed. But then, no spirit was ever as creative as this. No wonder it was felt to be of godlike superiority ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 644

Spirits are complexes of the collective unconscious which appear when the individual loses his adaptation to reality, or which seek to replace the inadequate attitude of a whole people by a new one. They are therefore either pathological fantasies or new but as yet unknown ideas ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 597

As in our waking state, real people and things enter our field of vision, so the dream-images enter like another kind of reality into the field of consciousness of the dream-ego. We do not feel as if we were producing the dreams, it is rather as if the dreams came to us. They are not subject to our control but obey their own laws. They are obviously autonomous psychic complexes which form them selves out of their own material. We do not know the source of their motives, and we therefore say that dreams come from the unconscious. In saying this, we assume that there are independent psychic complexes which elude our conscious control and come and go according to their own laws. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 580

A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 184

A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience “Mother” into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in our cradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents—the “god”- father and “god”-mother of the newborn child—so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 172

Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 62

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.

We psychologists have learned, through long and painful experience, that you deprive a man of his best resource when you help him to get rid of his complexes. You can only help him to become sufficiently aware of them and to start a conscious conflict within himself. In this way the complex becomes a focus of life. Anything that disappears from your psychological inventory is apt to turn up in the guise of a hostile neighbour, who will inevitably arouse your anger and make you aggressive. It is surely better to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 456

Each of us is equipped with a psychic disposition that limits our freedom in high degree and makes it practically illusory. Not only is “freedom of the will” an incalculable problem philosophically, it is also a misnomer in the practical sense, for we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshipped, not only by the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 143

The ego, ostensibly the thing we know most about, is in fact a highly complex affair full of unfathomable obscurities. Indeed, one could even define it as a relatively constant personification of the unconscious itself, or as the Schopenhauerian mirror in which the unconscious becomes aware of its own face ~ Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 129.

All the worlds that have ever existed before man were physically there. But they were a nameless happening, not a definite actuality, for there did not yet exist that minimal concentration of the psychic factor, which was also present, to speak the word that outweighed the whole of Creation That is the world, and this is I! That was the first morning of the world, the first sunrise after the primal darkness, when that inchoately conscious complex, the ego, knowingly sundered subject and object, and thus precipitated the world and itself into definite existence, giving it and itself a voice and a name. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 129

Although I was the first to demand that the analyst should himself be analysed, we are largely indebted to Freud for the invaluable discovery that analysts too have their complexes and consequently one or two blind spots which act as so many prejudices. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 8

In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 125

The possession of complexes does not in itself signify neurosis, for complexes are the normal foci of psychic happenings, and the fact that they are painful is no proof of pathological disturbance. Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness. A complex becomes pathological only when we think we have not got it. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 179

That is to say, by means of “free” association you will always get at your complexes, but this does not mean at all that they are the material dreamt about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 294.

As a Swiss, my situation is such that by nature my heart is divided into four and because of the smallness of our country I can count on coming into contact at least with the four surrounding nations or cultural complexes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 430.

Very early on, at the time of my association experiments, I became interested in tuberculosis as a possible psychic disease having observed that reactions due to complexes frequently cause a long-lasting reduction in the volume of breathing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 533.

I also observed that a large number of my neurotic patients who were tubercular were “freed” from their complexes under psychotherapeutic treatment, learnt to breathe properly again and in the end were cured. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 533.

My ambitions are not soaring to theological heights. I am merely concerned with the practical and theoretical problem of how-do-complexes-behave? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 571.

He [Jung] mentioned that in free association tests breathing was restricted when a complex was touched and that this could be related to TB. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 74

Finally and in confidence: Pfister is now in analysis with Riklin. He has obviously had enough of being roasted over a slow fire by his complexes. ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Pages 424-425

Please forgive me for the delay in answering. The break with Bleuler has not left me unscathed. Once again I underestimated my father complex. ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Pages 328-331

The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites . . . day and night . . . birth and death . . . happiness and misery . . . good and evil. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 75.

Perhaps certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as complexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin to dominate the whole mind. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.

When I dream of a patient, it is usually a sign that one of my complexes has been touched. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

His [Freud] is the honour of having discovered the first archetype, the Oedipus complex. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 525

The Jewish Christ-complex is a very remarkable business. – Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 46

The existence of this complex predisposes to a somewhat hystericized general mental attitude, which has become especially clear to me in the course of the present anti-Christian agitation against me. – Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 46

The fact that the Jews repressed their Jewishness during the era of assimilation explains – besides the Christ-complex – also the psychological break of personalities like Heine, as well as the soulless materialism of such inspiring but destructive individuals as Marx and Freud. ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 52

We [Jews] made a vital mistake by rejecting Christ. Christ is the repressed complex of the Jew. ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 43

During my afternoon with you, I was able to rid myself of my projection of the “mana” personality on you to such an extent that my inferiority-complexes are no longer obstructing my path, and I can tell you that I would be very pleased if you would come. ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 125

He was evidently hit in his guilt-complex by your article in the “Schweizer Weltwoche.” ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 109

As an example of this, I see a lot of astounding cures of tuberculosis—chronic tuberculosis—effected by analysts; people learn to breathe again. The understanding of what their complexes were—that has helped them. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 34.

You see, you have that lie detector in the United States, and that’s like an association test I have worked out with the psycho-galvanic phenomenon. Also, we have done a lot of work on the Pneumograph which will show the decrease of volume of breathing under the influence of a complex. You know, one of the reasons for tuberculosis is the anifestation of a complex. People have very shallow breathing; don’t ventilate the aspices of their lungs anymore, and get tuberculosis. Half of tuberculosis cases are psychic. ~C.G. Jung – Richard Evans interviews Transcript of the 1957 films.

Thus, when I said that God is a complex, I meant to say: whatever He is, he is at least a very tangible complex. You can say, He is an illusion, but He is at least a psychological fact. I surely never intended to say: He is nothing else but a complex. . . . ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945

One cn easily throw dust into one’s own eyes with theories. ~Carl Jung; “Analytical Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 62.

One can easily throw dust into one’s own eyes with theories. ~Carl Jung; “Analytical Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 62.

Actually I had a good personal relationship with my father, and thus no “father complex” of the usual sort. To be sure I was not fond of theology, especially because it gave my father problems which he could not solve and which I felt were unjustified. Carl Jung, Jung: A Biography, Page 50

Every affective event becomes a complex.” ~C.G. Jung, CW 3, par. 140

Was Freud a modern-day Galileo? There is much to be said for this idea, at least as far as the stance of those in authority once the church, now the scientific community-is concerned, but Wilhelm Weygandt, a professor of psychiatry and private consulting physician, expressed it perfectly on the occasion of a medical convention in Hamburg in 1910: “Freud’s theories have nothing to do with science; they are more a matter for the police.” (Three years earlier Jung had said of this “scholar”: “I know Weygandt personally, he is a hysteric par excellence, stuffed with complexes from top to bottom, so that he can’t get a genuine word out of his throat …. I would never have thought German scholarship could have produced such meanness.” Carl Jung, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 100

I think I deserve this much, if only from the standpoint of expediency, for the psychoanalytic movement is indebted to me for its promotion more than Rank, Stekel, Adler, and the rest of them put together. I can only assure you that there is no resistance on my part, unless it be that I refuse to be judged as a complex-laden idiot … , Carl Jung, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 148

There are two quotations that mention “Feeling-Toned.”: Love is, psychologically considered, a function of relationship on the one hand and a feeling-toned psychic condition on the other, which, as we have seen, practically coincides with the God-image ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 97

From this standpoint, religious ideas are an artificial aid that benefits the unconscious by endowing its compensatory function which, if disregarded, would remain ineffective with a higher value for consciousness. Faith, superstition, or any strongly feeling-toned idea gives the unconscious content a value which ordinary ly it does not possess, but which it might in time attain, though in a very unpleasant form. When, therefore, unconscious contents accumulate as a result of being consistently ignored, they are bound to exert an influence that is pathological ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 26

Carl Jung on “Creative Living.” – Anthology

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but on error also. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 74

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

I do not call the man who admits his ignorance an obscurantist; I think it is much rather the man whose consciousness is not sufficiently developed to be aware of his ignorance. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 564

I do not take kindly to the argument that because certain working hypotheses may not possess eternal validity or may possibly be erroneous, they must be withheld from the public. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 685

One of the greatest obstacles to psychological understanding is the inquisitive desire to know whether the psychological factor adduced is “true” or “correct.” If the description of it is not erroneous or false, then the factor is valid in itself and proves its validity by its very existence. One might just as well ask if the duck-billed platypus is a “true” or “correct” invention of the Creator’s will. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 192

The ideal and aim of science do not consist in giving the most exact possible description of the facts—science cannot compete as a recording instrument with the camera and the gramophone—but in establishing certain laws, which are merely abbreviated expressions for many diverse processes that are yet conceived to be somehow correlated. This aim goes beyond the purely empirical realm by means of the concept, which, though it may have general and proved validity, will always be a product of the subjective psychological constellation of the investigator. In the making of scientific theories and concepts many personal and accidental factors are involved. There is also a personal equation that is psychological and not merely psychophysical. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 9

We see colours but not wave-lengths. This well-known fact must nowhere be taken to heart more seriously than in psychology. The effect of the personal equation begins already in the act of observation. One sees what one can best see oneself. Thus, first and foremost, one sees the mote in one’s brother’s eye. No doubt the mote is there, but the beam sits in one’s own—and may considerably hamper the act of seeing. I mistrust the principle of “pure observation” in so-called objective psychology unless one confines oneself to the eyepieces of chronoscopes and tachistoscopes and suchlike “psychological” apparatus. With such methods one also guards against too embarrassing a yield of empirical psychological facts. But the personal equation asserts itself even more in the presentation and communication of one’s own observations, to say nothing of the interpretation and abstract exposition of the empirical material. Nowhere is the basic requirement so indispensable as in psychology that the observer should be adequate to his object, in the sense of being able to see not only subjectively but also objectively. The demand that he should see only objectively is quite out of the question, for it is impossible. We must be satisfied if he does not see too subjectively. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 9

Never in any circumstances should one indulge in the unscientific illusion that one’s own subjective prejudice is a universal and fundamental psychological truth. No true science can spring from this, only a faith whose shadow is intolerance and fanaticism. Contradictory views are necessary for the evolution of any science, only they must not be set up in rigid opposition to each other but should strive for the earliest possible synthesis. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 639

Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page xiv

Today we are convinced that in all fields of knowledge psychological premises exist which exert a decisive influence upon the choice of material, the method of investigation, the nature of the conclusions, and the formulation of hypotheses and theories. We have even come to believe that Kant’s personality was a decisive conditioning factor of his Critique of Pure Reason. Not only our philosophers, but our own predilections in philosophy, and even what we are fond of calling our “best” truths are affected, if not dangerously undermined, by this recognition of a personal premise. All creative freedom, we cry out, is taken away from us! What? Can it be possible that a man only thinks or says or does what he himself is} ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 150

What to the causal view is fact to the final view is symbol, and vice versa. Everything that is real and essential to the one is unreal and inessential to the other. We are therefore forced to resort to the antinomian postulate and must view the world, too, as a psychic phenomenon. Certainly it is necessary for science to know how things are “in themselves,” but even science cannot escape the psychological conditions of knowledge, and psychology must be peculiarly alive to these conditions. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Paras 54-45

I am an empiricist, not a philosopher; I cannot let myself presuppose that my peculiar temperament, my own attitude to intellectual problems, is universally valid. Apparently this is an assumption in which only the philosopher may indulge, who always takes it for granted that his own disposition and attitude are universal, and will not recognize the fact, if he can avoid it, that his “personal equation” conditions his philosophy. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i Para 49

The tragic thing is that psychology has no self-consistent mathematics at its disposal, but only a calculus of subjective prejudices. Also, it lacks the immense advantage of an Archimedean point such as physics enjoys. The latter observes the physical world from the psychic standpoint and can translate it into psychic terms. The psyche, on the other hand, observes itself and can only translate the psychic back into the psychic. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 421

The latest developments in psychology show with ever increasing clarity not only that there are no simple formulas from which the world of the psyche might be derived, but that we have never yet succeeded in defining the field of psychic experience with sufficient exactitude. Despite the immense area it covers on the surface, scientific psychology has not even begun to demolish the mountain of prejudices that permanently block the way to the psyche as it really is. Psychology is the youngest of the sciences and is suffering from all those childhood ailments which afflicted the adolescence of other sciences in the late Middle Ages. Psychologies still exist which limit the field of psychic experience to consciousness and its contents, or understand the psyche as a purely reactive phenomenon without any trace of autonomy. The idea of an unconscious psyche has not yet gained undisputed currency, despite the existence of an overwhelming mass of empirical material which proves beyond all doubt that there can be no psychology of consciousness without a recognition of the unconscious. Lacking this foundation, it is impossible to deal with any psychological datum that is in any way complex, and the actual psyche we have to deal with in real life is complexity itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para ix

It is really high time academic psychologists came down to earth and wanted to hear about the human psyche as it really is and not merely about laboratory experiments. It is insufferable that professors should forbid their students to have anything to do with analytical psychology, that they should prohibit the use of analytical concepts and accuse our psychology of taking account, in an unscientific manner, of “everyday experiences.” I know that psychology in general could derive the greatest benefit from a serious study of the dream problem once it could rid itself of the unjustified lay prejudice that dreams are caused solely by somatic stimuli. This overrating of the somatic factor in psychiatry is one of the basic reasons why psychopathology has made no advances unless directly fertilized by analytical procedures. The dogma that “mental diseases are diseases of the brain” is a hangover from the materialism of the 1870’s. It has become a prejudice which hinders all progress. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 529

However indignant people may get about “metaphysical phantoms” when cell-processes are explained vitalistically, they nevertheless continue to regard the physical hypothesis as “scientific,” although it is no less fantastic. But it fits in with the materialistic prejudice, and therefore every bit of nonsense, provided only that it turns the psychic into the physical, becomes scientifically sacrosanct. Let us hope that the time is not far off when this antiquated relic of ingrained and thoughtless materialism will be eradicated from the minds of our scientists. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 529

Only those who regard the happenings in this world as a concatenation of errors and accidents, and who therefore believe that the pedagogic hand of the rationalist is constantly needed to guide us, can ever imagine that this path [of psychoanalysis] was an aberration from which we should have been warned off with a signboard. Besides the deeper insight into psychological determination, we owe to this “error” a method of inquiry of incalculable importance. It is for us to rejoice and be thankful that Freud had the courage to let himself be guided along this path. Not thus is the progress of science hindered, but rather by blind adherence to insights once gained, by the typical conservatism of authority, by the childish vanity of the savant and his fear of making mistakes. This lack of courage is considerably more injurious to the name of science than an honest error. When will there be an end to the incessant squabbling about who is right? One has only to look at the history of science: how many have been right, and how few have remained right! ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 302

Every victory contains the germ of future defeat. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 150

Nothing is more vulnerable and ephemeral than scientific theories, which are mere tools and not everlasting truths. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 92

Theories in psychology are the very devil. It is true that we need certain points of view for their orienting and heuristic value; but they should always be regarded as mere auxiliary concepts that can be laid aside at any time. We still know so very little about the psyche that it is positively grotesque to think we are far enough advanced to frame general theories. We have not even established the empirical extent of the psyche’s phenomenology: how then can we dream of general theories? No doubt theory is the best cloak for lack of experience and ignorance, but the consequences are depressing: bigotedness, superficiality, and scientific sectarianism. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 7

Psychology, as one of the many expressions of psychic life, operates with ideas which in their turn are derived from archetypal structures and thus generate a somewhat more abstract kind of myth. Psychology therefore translates the archaic speech of myth into a modern mythologem not yet, of course, recognized as such—which constitutes one element of the myth “science.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 302

It is impossible to derive any philosophical system from the fundamental thoughts of primitive man. They provide only antinomies, but it is just these that are the inexhaustible source of all spiritual problems in all times and in all civilizations. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 144

We have to learn to think in antinomies, constantly bearing in mind that every truth turns into an antinomy if it is thought out to the end. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 14

Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.” Here we find the true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163

Science comes to a stop at the frontiers of logic, but nature does not—she thrives on ground as yet untrodden by theory. Venerabilis natura does not halt at the opposites; she uses them to create, out of opposition, a new birth. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 524

A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transforming the primitive and wholly natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation. . . . The personal value lies entirely in the philosophical achievement, not in the primary vision. To the philosopher this vision comes as so much increment, and is simply a part of the common property of mankind, in which, in principle, everyone has a share. The golden apples drop from the same tree, whether they be gathered by an imbecile locksmith’s apprentice or by a Schopenhauer. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 229

I do not regard the pursuit of science as a bickering about who is right, but as an endeavour to augment and deepen human knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 685

Our psychology is a science that can at most be accused of having discovered the dynamite terrorists work with. What the moralist and the general practitioner do with it is none of our business and we have no intention of interfering. Plenty of unqualified persons are sure to push their way in and commit the greatest follies, but that too does not concern us. Our aim is simply and solely scientific knowledge, and we do not have to bother with all the uproar it has provoked. If religion and morality are blown to pieces in the process, so much the worse for them for not having more stamina. Knowledge is a force of nature that goes its way irresistibly from inner necessity. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 314

Until recently psychology was a special branch of philosophy, but now we are coming to something which Nietzsche foresaw—the rise of psychology in its own right, so much so that it is even threatening to swallow philosophy. The inner resemblance between the two disciplines consists in this, that both are systems of opinion about objects which cannot be fully experienced and therefore cannot be adequately comprehended by a purely empirical approach. Both fields of study thus encourage speculation, with the result that opinions are formed in such variety and profusion that many heavy volumes are needed to contain them all. Neither discipline can do without the other, and the one invariably furnishes the unspoken—and generally unconscious—assumptions of the other. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 659

There is not one modern psychology—there are dozens of them. This is curious enough when we remember that there is only one science of mathematics, of geology, zoology, botany, and so forth. But there are so many psychologies that an American university was able to publish a thick volume under the title Psychologies of 1930. I believe there are as many psychologies as philosophies, for there is also no single philosophy, but many. I mention this for the reason that philosophy and psychology are linked by indissoluble bonds which are kept in being by the interrelation of their subject-matters. Psychology takes the psyche for its subject, and philosophy—to put it briefly —takes the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 659

It should not be forgotten that science is not the summa of life, that it is actually only one of the psychological attitudes, only one of the forms of human thought. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 60

Has it ever—except in the most benighted periods of history—been observed that a scientific truth needed to be elevated to the rank of a dogma? Truth can stand on its own feet, only shaky opinions require the support of dogmatization. Fanaticism is ever the brother of doubt, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 335

Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, CW 737

Dogma and science are incommensurable quantities which damage one another by mutual contamination. Dogma as a factor in religion is of inestimable value precisely because of its absolute standpoint. But when science dispenses with criticism and scepticism it degenerates into a sickly hot-house plant. One of the elements necessary to science is extreme uncertainty. Whenever science inclines towards dogma and shows a tendency to be impatient and fanatical, it is concealing a doubt which in all probability is justified and explaining away an uncertainty which is only too well founded. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 746

Doubt alone is the mother of scientific truth. Whoever fights against dogma in high places falls victim, tragically enough, to the tyranny of a partial truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 70

Not all are vouchsafed the grace of a faith that anticipates all solutions, nor is it given to all to rest content with the sun of revealed truth. The light that is lighted in the heart by the grace of the Holy Spirit, that same light of nature, however feeble it may be, is more important to them than the great light which shines in the darkness and which the darkness comprehended not.

They discover that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 197

One-sidedness appears over and over again in the history of science. I am not saying this as a reproach: on the contrary, we must be glad that there are people who are courageous enough to be immoderate and one-sided. It is to them that we owe our discoveries. What is regrettable is that each should defend his one-sidedness so passionately. Scientific theories are merely suggestions as to how things might be observed. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 241

Science qua science has no boundaries, and there is no specialty whatever that can boast of complete self-sufficiency. Any specialty is bound to spill over its borders and to encroach on adjoining territory if it is to lay serious claim to the status of a science. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 212

When one unconsciously works against oneself, the result is impatience, irritability, and an impotent longing to get one’s opponent down whatever the means. Generally certain symptoms appear, among them a peculiar use of language: one wants to speak forcefully in order to impress one’s opponent, so one employs a special, “bombastic” style full of neologisms which might be described as “power words.” This symptom is observable not only in the psychiatric clinic but also among certain modern philosophers, and, above all, whenever anything unworthy of belief has to be insisted on in the teeth of inner resistance: the language swells up, overreaches itself, sprouts grotesque words distinguished only by their needless complexity. The word is charged with the task of achieving what cannot be done by honest means. It is the old word magic, and sometimes it can degenerate into a regular disease. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 155

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like—and is then amazed that cowsheds “smell,” because the dictionary didn’t say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 882

Science as an end in itself is assuredly a high ideal, yet its consistent fulfilment brings about as many “ends in themselves” as there are sciences and arts. Naturally this leads to a high differentiation and specialization of the particular functions concerned, but also to their detachment from the world and from life, as well as to a multiplication of specialized fields which gradually lose all connection with one another. The result is an impoverishment and desiccation not merely in the specialized fields but also in the psyche of every man who has differentiated himself up or sunk down to the specialist level. Science must prove her value for life; it is not enough that she be the mistress, she must also be the maid. By so serving she in no way dishonors herself. 69:84

Science is not indeed a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when it is taken as an end in itself. Science must serve; it errs when it usurps the throne. It must be ready to serve all its branches, for each, because of its insufficiency, has need of support from the others. Science is the tool of the Western mind, and with it one can open more doors than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our understanding, and it obscures our insight only when it claims that the understanding it conveys is the only kind there is. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 2

Anyone who belittles the merits of Western science is undermining the foundations of the Western mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 2

All the worlds that have ever existed before man were physically there. But they were a nameless happening, not a definite actuality, for there did not yet exist that minimal concentration of the psychic factor, which was also present, to speak the word that outweighed the whole of Creation: That is the world, and this is I! That was the first morning of the world, the first sunrise after the primal darkness, when that inchoately conscious complex, the ego, knowingly sundered subject and object, and thus precipitated the world and itself into definite existence, giving it and itself a voice and a name. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 129

When I speak of the relation of psychology to art we are outside [art’s] sphere, and it is impossible for us not to speculate. We must interpret, we must find meanings in things, otherwise we would be quite unable to think about them. We have to break down life and events, which are self-contained processes, into meanings, images, concepts, well knowing that in doing so we are getting further away from the living mystery. As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition. But for the purpose of cognitive understanding we must detach ourselves from the creative process and look at it from the outside; only then does it become an image that expresses what we are bound to call “meaning.” ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 121

Perhaps art has no “meaning,” at least not as we understand meaning. Perhaps it is like nature, which simply is and “means” nothing beyond that. Is “meaning” necessarily more than mere interpretation—an interpretation secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning Art, it has been said, is beauty, and “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 121

A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is always ambiguous. A dream never says “you ought” or “this is the truth.” It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means he is either too much given to fear or too exempt from it; if he dreams of a wise old man, it means he is either too much of a pedant or else in need of a teacher. In a subtle way both meanings come to the same thing, as we realize when we let a work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist. To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it shaped him. Then we also understand the nature of his primordial experience. He has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the collective psyche, where man is not lost in the isolation of consciousness and its errors and sufferings, but where all men are caught in a common rhythm which allows the individual to communicate his feelings and strivings to mankind as a whole. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 161

The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment. We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 115

Only that aspect of art which consists in the process of artistic creation can be a subject for psychological study, but not that which constitutes its essential nature. The question of what art is in itself can never be answered by the psychologist, but must be approached from the side of aesthetics. ~~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 97

Personal causes have as much or as little to do with a work of art as the soil with the plant that springs from it. We can certainly learn to understand some of the plant’s peculiarities by getting to know its habitat, and for the botanist this is an important part of his equipment. But nobody will maintain that everything essential has then been discovered about the plant itself.

The personal orientation which the doctor needs when confronted with the question of aetiology in medicine is quite out of place in dealing with a work of art, just because a work of art is not a human being, but is something supra-personal. It is a thing and not a personality; hence it cannot be judged by personal criteria. Indeed, the special significance of a true work of art resides in the fact that it has escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of its creator. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 107

The essence of a work of art is not to be found in the personal idiosyncrasies that creep into it—indeed, the more there are of them, the less it is a work of art—but in its rising above the personal and speaking from the mind and heart of the artist to the mind and heart of mankind.

The personal aspect of art is a limitation and even a vice. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 156

The creative process has a feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths—we might truly say from the realm of the Mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, life is ruled and shaped by the unconscious rather than by the conscious will, and the ego is swept along on an underground current, becoming nothing more than a helpless observer of events. The progress of the work becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychology. It is not Goethe that creates Faust, but Faust that creates Goethe. And what is Faust} Faust is essentially a symbol. By this I do not mean that it is an allegory pointing to something all too familiar, but the expression of something profoundly alive in the soul of every German, which Goethe helped to bring to birth. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para159

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we never stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals. Nothing would be more mistaken than to suppose that the poet is working with second-hand material. On the contrary, the primordial experience is the source of his creativeness, but it is so dark and amorphous that it requires the related mythological imagery to give it form. In itself it is wordless and imageless, for it is a vision seen “as in a glass, darkly.” It is nothing but a tremendous intuition striving for expression. It is like a whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and assumes visible form as it swirls upward. Since the expression can never match the richness of the vision and can never exhaust its possibilities, the poet must have at his disposal a huge store of material if he is tocommunicate even a fraction of what he has glimpsed, and must make use of difficult and contradictory images in order to express the strange paradoxes of his vision. Dante decks out his experience in all the imagery of heaven, purgatory, and hell; Goethe brings in the Blocksberg and the Greek underworld; Wagner needs the whole corpus of Nordic myth, including the Parsifal saga; Nietzsche resorts to the hieratic style of the bard and legendary seer; Blake presses into his service the phantasmagoric world of India, the Old Testament, and the Apocalypse; and Spitteler borrows old names for the new figures that pour in alarming profusion from his muse’s cornucopia. Nothing is missing in the whole gamut that ranges from the ineffably sublime to the perversely grotesque. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 151

If psychology remains for us only a science, we do not penetrate into life—we merely serve the absolute aim of science. It leads us, certainly, to a knowledge of the objective situation, but it always opposes every other aim but its own. The intellect remains imprisoned in itself just so long as it does not willingly sacrifice its supremacy by acknowledging the value of other aims. It shrinks from the step which takes it out of itself and which denies its universal validity, since from the standpoint of the intellect everything else is nothing but fantasy. But what great thing ever came into existence that was not first fantasy? ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 86

We know that every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination, and have their source in what one is pleased to call infantile fantasy. Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore shortsighted to treat fantasy, on account of its daring or objectionable nature, as a thing of little worth. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 93

Fantasy is not a sickness but a natural and vital activity which helps the seeds of psychic development to grow. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para viii

Why do we always forget that there is nothing majestic or beautiful in the wide domain of human culture that did not grow originally from a lucky idea? What would become of mankind if nobody had lucky ideas anymore? It would be far truer to say that our consciousness is a sack which has nothing in it except what chances to fall into it. We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas—until we find to our distress that they will not come. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

Out of a playful movement of elements whose interrelations are not immediately apparent, patterns arise which an observant and critical intellect can only evaluate afterwards. The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 197

Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 180

Fantasy is the maternally creative side of the masculine mind. When all is said and done, we can never rise above fantasy. It is true that there are unprofitable, futile, morbid, and unsatisfying fantasies whose sterile nature is immediately recognized by every person endowed with common sense; but the faulty performance proves nothing against the normal performance. All the works of man have their origin in creative imagination. What right, then, have we to disparage fantasy? In the normal course of things, fantasy does not easily go astray; it is too deep for that and too closely bound up with the tap-root of human and animal instinct. It has a surprising way of always coming out right in the end. The creative activity of imagination frees man from his bondage to the “nothing but” and raises him to the status of one who plays. As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is at play. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 98

Concepts are coined and negotiable values; images are life. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 226

Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice, and its psychic malaise. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious when a poet or seer lends expression to the unspoken desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to its fulfilment—regardless whether this blind collective need results in good or evil, in the salvation of an epoch or its destruction. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 153

Re-immersion in the state of participation mystique is the secret of artistic creation and of the effect which great art has upon us, for at that level of experience it is no longer the weal or woe of the individual that counts, but the life of the collective. That is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, and yet profoundly moving. And that is also why the personal life of the artist is at most a help or a hindrance, but is never essential to his creative task. He may go the way of the Philistine, a good citizen, a fool, or a criminal. His personal career may be interesting and inevitable, but it does not explain his art. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 162

The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1004

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 129

There are no inborn ideas, but there are inborn possibilities of ideas that set bounds to even the boldest fantasy and keep our fantasy activity within certain categories: a priori ideas, as it were, the existence of which cannot be ascertained except from their effects. They appear only in the shaped material of art as the regulative principles that shape it. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 126

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted, by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130

Being essentially the instrument of his work, [the artist] is subordinate to it, and we have no right to expect him to interpret it for us. He has done his utmost by giving it form, and must leave the interpretation to others and to the future. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 161

That is his office, and it is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

A gift develops in inverse ratio to the maturation of the personality as a whole, and often one has the impression that a creative personality grows at the expense of the human being. Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better. What after all is great talent beside moral inferiority? There are not a few gifted persons whose usefulness is paralyzed, not to say perverted, by their human shortcomings. A gift is not an absolute value, or rather, it is such a value only when the rest of the personality keeps pace with it. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 244

Nature, as we know, is not so lavish with her boons that she joins to a high intelligence the gifts of the heart also. As a rule, where one is present the other is missing, and where one capacity is present in perfection it is generally at the cost of all the others. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 569

The “best” can be produced only by the best in man, by his conscientiousness and devotion. Cultural products can therefore easily stand for the psychological conditions of their production, that is, for those human virtues which alone make man capable of civilization. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 383

The genius will come through despite everything, for there is something absolute and indomitable in his nature. The so-called “misunderstood genius” is rather a doubtful phenomenon. Generally he turns out to be a good-for-nothing who is forever seeking a soothing explanation of himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 248

Talent, on the other hand, can either be hampered, crippled, and perverted, or fostered, developed, and improved. The genius is as rare a bird as the phoenix, an apparition not to be counted upon. Consciously or unconsciously, genius is something that by God’s grace is there from the start, in full strength. But talent is a statistical regularity and does not always have a dynamism to match. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 248

To rush ahead is to invite blows, and if you don’t get them from the teacher, you will get them from fate, and generally from both. The gifted child will do well to accustom himself early to the fact that any excellence puts him in an exceptional position and exposes him to a great many risks, the chief of which is an exaggerated self-confidence. Against this the only protection is humility and obedience, and even these do not always work. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 246

The artist’s relative lack of adaptation turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path, and to discover what it is that would meet the unconscious needs of his age. Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 131

To be “normal” is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work—for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes—deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 161

The greatness of historical personalities has never lain in their abject submission to convention, but, on the contrary, in their deliverance from convention. They towered up like mountain peaks above the mass that still clung to its collective fears, its beliefs, laws, and systems, and boldly chose their own way. To the man in the street it has always seemed miraculous that anyone should turn aside from the beaten track with its known destinations, and strike out on the steep and narrow path leading into the unknown. Hence it was always believed that such a man, if not actually crazy, was possessed by a daemon or a god; for the miracle of a man being able to act otherwise than as humanity has always acted could only be explained by the gift of daemonic power or divine spirit. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 298

Only the mystics bring creativity into religion. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 530

Creative life always stands outside convention. That is why, when the mere routine of life predominates in the form of convention and tradition, there is bound to be a destructive outbreak of creative energy. This outbreak is a catastrophe only when it is a mass phenomenon, but never in the individual who consciously submits to these higher powers and serves them with all his strength. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 305

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory qualities. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other he is an impersonal creative process. As a human being he may be sound or morbid, and his personal psychology can and should be explained in personal terms. But he can be understood as an artist only in terms of his creative achievement. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

The distortion of beauty and meaning by grotesque objectivity or equally grotesque irreality is, in the insane, a consequence of the destruction of the personality; in the artist it has a creative purpose. Far from his work being an expression of the destruction of his personality, the modern artist finds the unity of his artistic personality in destructiveness. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 175

What the artist and the insane have in common is common also to every human being—a restless creative fantasy which is constantly engaged in smoothing away the hard edges of reality. Anyone who observes himself, carefully and unsparingly, will know that there is something within him which would gladly hide and cover up all that is difficult and questionable in life, in order to smooth a path for itself. Insanity gives it a free hand. And once it has gained the ascendency, reality is veiled, more quickly or less; it becomes a distant dream, but the dream becomes a reality which holds the patient enchained wholly or in part, often for the rest of his life. We healthy people, who stand with both feet in reality, see only the ruin of the patient in this world, but not the richness of that side of the psyche which is turned away from us. ~Carl Jung, CW 3, Para 385

If the meaning of a poetic work can be exhausted through the application of a theory of neurosis, then it was nothing but a pathological product in the first place, to which I would never concede the dignity of a work of art. Today, it is true, our taste has become so uncertain that often we no longer know whether a thing is art or a disease. A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire. It is as though each of us was born with a limited store of energy. In the artist, the strongest force in his make-up, that is, his creativeness, will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. The creative impulse can drain him of his humanity to such a degree that the personal ego can exist only on a primitive or inferior level and is driven to develop all sorts of defects—ruthlessness, selfishness (“autoeroticism”), vanity, and other infantile traits. These inferiorities are the only means by which it can maintain its vitality and prevent itself from being wholly depleted. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 158

The genius, too, has to bear the brunt of an outsize psychic complex; if he can cope with it, he does so with joy, if he can’t, he must painfully perform the “symptomatic actions” which his gift lays upon him: he writes, paints, or composes what he suffers. ~Carl Jung, CW 1, Para 176

Great gifts are the fairest, and often the most dangerous, fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang on the weakest branches, which easily break. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 244

Carl Jung Depth Psychology

For Educational Purposes Only

Carl Jung Anthologies “Absolute Knowledge” – “Dreams” [Part 1]

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