Carl Jung on “God” – Quotations – Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Carl Jung on “God” – Anthology.

The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason. So much unreason / was in man that he needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the Logos: in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the One, the Powerful One, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280.

Man doesn’t only grow from within himself for he is also creative from within himself The God becomes revealed in him. Human nature is little skilled in divinity; and therefore man fluctuates between too much and too little. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.

Selfish desire ultimately desires itself. You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain. If you desire yourself you produce the divine son in your embrace with yourself. Your desire is the father of the God, your self is the mother of the God, but the son is the new God, your master. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The God of words is cold and dead and shines from afar like the moon, mysteriously and inaccessibly: Let the word return to its creator, to man, and thus the word will be heightened in man. Man should be light, limits, measure. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 271.

Man shall differentiate himself both from spirituality and sexuality. He shall call spirituality mother, and set her between Heaven and earth. He shall call sexuality Phallos, and set him between himself and earth. For the mother and the Phallos are superhuman daimons that reveal the world of the Gods. They affect us more than the Gods since they are closely akin to our essence. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Scrutinies; Page 352.

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.

We must presumably often go to ourselves to re-establish the connection with the self since it is torn apart all too often, not only by our vices but also by our virtues. For vices as well as virtues always want to live outside. But through constant outer life we forget the self and through this we also become secretly selfish in our best endeavors. What we neglect in ourselves blends itself secretly into our actions toward others. Through uniting with the self we reach God. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 338.

Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 354.

The prophet loved God, and this sanctified him. But Salome did not love God, and this profaned her. But the prophet did not love Salome, and this profaned him. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 248.

I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 284.

Into what mist and darkness does your path lead? … I limp after you on crutches of understanding. I am a man and you stride like a God. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.

I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard—are you God?” ~Carl Jung to his Soul, The Red Book, Page 233.

No one has my God, but my God has everyone. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245.

Your voice is too weak for those raging to be able to hear. Thus do not speak and do not show the God, but sit in a solitary place and sing incantations in the ancient manner. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 284.

You have the one God, and you become your one God in the innumerable number of Gods. ~Carl Jung’s Soul, The Red Book, Page 371.

You are the suffering heart of your one star God, who is Abraxas to his world. ~Carl Jung’s Soul, The Red Book, Page 371.

Who exhausts the mystery of love? … There are those who love men, and those who love the souls of men, and those who love their own soul. Such a one is Philemon, the host of the Gods. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 315.

You should call me if you want to live with men, but the one God if you want to rise above the human world to the divine and eternal solitude of the star. ~Carl Jung’s Soul, The Red Book, Page 371.

Here the soul drew near to my ear and whispered, “The Gods are even happy to turn a blind eye from time to time, since basically they know very well that it would be bad for life if there were no exception to eternal law. Hence their tolerance of the devil. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 359.

“One is the beginning, the Sun God.

“Two is Eros, for he binds two together and spreads himself out in brightness.

“Three is the Tree of Life, for it fills space with bodies.

“Four is the devil, for he opens all that is closed. He dissolves everything formed and physical; he is the destroyer in whom everything becomes nothing. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, 351.

On the night when I considered the essence of the God, I became aware of an image: I lay in a dark depth. An old man stood before me. He looked like one of the old prophets. A black serpent lay at his feet. Some distance away I saw a house with columns. A beautiful maiden steps out of the door. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 245.

In the renewed world you can have no outer possessions, unless you create them out of yourselves. You can enter only into your own mysteries. The spirit of the depths has other things to teach you than me. I only have to bring you tidings of the new God and of the ceremonies and mysteries of his service. But this is the way. It is the gate to darkness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, “Draft” Footnote 163, Page 246.

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.

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.

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.

The spirit of this time is ungodly; the spirit of the depths is ungodly; balance is godly. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.

But who can withstand fear when the divine intoxication and madness comes to him? Love, soul, and God are beautiful and terrible. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.

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.

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.

My soul is my supreme meaning, my image of God, neither God himself nor the supreme meaning. God becomes apparent in the supreme meaning of the human community. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 92, Page 240.

That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. The rain is the fructifying of the earth, it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, 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.

Thus I stand like Peter in worship before the miracle of the transformation and the becoming real of the God in me. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 250.

Although I am not the son of the God myself I represent him nevertheless as one who was a mother to the God, and one therefore to whom in the name of the God the freedom of the binding and loosing has been given. The binding and loosing take place in me. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 250.

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 other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.

The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.

Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light. The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.

But the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.

I resisted recognizing that the everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead. I fled this thought, I hid myself behind the highest and coldest stars. But the spirit of the depths caught up with me, and forced the bitter drink between my lips. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.

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, Liber Novus, Page 231.

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.

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.

The scarab is a classical rebirth symbol. According to the description in the ancient Egyptian book Am-Tuat, the dead sun God transforms himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and as such mounts the barge at the twelfth station, which raises the rejuvenated sun into the morning sky ~Carl Jung, CW 8, §843.

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.

Thus my God found salvation. He was saved precisely by what one would actually consider fatal, namely by declaring him a figment of the imagination. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 283.

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.

But I loved my God, and took him to the house of men, since I was convinced that he also really lived as a fantasy, and should therefore not be left behind, wounded and sick. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 283.

So long as we leave the God outside us apparent and tangible, he is unbearable and hopeless. But if we turn the God into fantasy, he is in us and is easy to bear. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 283.

The God outside us increases the weight of everything heavy, while the God within us lightens everything heavy: Hence all Christophers have stooped backs and short breath, since the world is heavy. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 283.

Many have wanted to get help for their sick God and were then devoured by the serpents and dragons lurking on the way to the land of the sun. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 283.

Take your God with you. Bear him down to your dark land where people live who rub their eyes each morning and yet always see only the same thing and never anything else. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 283.

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.

Since I love the God and do not want to leave him. Only he who loves the God can make him fall, and the God submits to his vanquisher and nestles in his hand and dies in the heart of him who loves him and promises him birth. ~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 had torn me apart terribly, he had drunk the juice of my life, he had drunk my highest power into him and became marvelous and strong like the sun, an unblemished God who bore no stigma or flaw. He had taken my wings from me, he had robbed me of the swelling force of my muscles, and the power of my will disappeared with him. He left me powerless and groaning. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 287.

When we have succeeded in making a God, and if through this creation our whole force has entered into this design, we are filled with an overwhelming desire to rise with the divine sun and to become a part of its magnificence. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 288.

When you have created a God whom you cannot see with your own eyes, then he is in the spiritual world that is no less valuable than the outer physical world. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 288.

Because I wanted to give birth to my God, I also wanted evil. He who wants to create an eternal fullness will also create eternal emptiness. You cannot undertake one without the other. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

But if you want to escape evil, you will create no God, everything that you do is tepid and gray. I wanted my God for the sake of grace and disgrace. Hence I also want my evil. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

If my God were not overpowering, neither would be my evil. But I want my God to be powerful and beyond all measure happy and lustrous. Only in this way do I love my God. And the luster of his beauty will also have me taste the very bottom of Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

But the way is my own self my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 292.

The ancients brought over some of the beauty of God into this world, and this world became so beautiful that it appeared to the spirit of the time to be fulfillment, and better than the bosom of the Godhead. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.

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.

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, Liber Novus, Page 241.

In that night my life was threatened since I had to kill my lord and God, not in single combat, since who among mortals could kill a God in a duel? You can reach your God only as an assassin, if you want to overcome him. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

Gods are unavoidable. The more you flee from the God, the more surely you fall into his hand. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

This new world appears weak and artificial to me. Artificial is a bad word, but the mustard seed that grew into a tree, the word that was conceived in the womb of a virgin, became a God to whom the earth was subject. ~Carl Jung to his Soul, Liber Novus, Pages 242-243.

When my prince had fallen, the spirit of the depths opened my vision and let me become aware of the birth of the new God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Pages 243.

I understood that the new God would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243.

But when the mother, my soul, was pregnant with the God, I did not know it. It even seemed to me as if my soul herself was the God, although he lived only in her body. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

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 Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no one is perfect, we need the Gods. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitators and no pupils. He forces men through himself The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

If we set a God outside of ourselves, he tears us loose from the self since the God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the God moves into the self he snatches us from what is outside us. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 245.

We should become reconciled to solitude in ourselves and to the God outside of us. If we enter into this solitude then the life of the God begins. If we are in ourselves, then the space around us is free, but filled by the God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 245.

Therefore the spirit foretold to me that the cold of outer space will spread across the earth. With this he showed me in an image that the God will step between men and drive every individual with the whip of icy cold to the warmth of his own monastic hearth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 245.

Opposing me, the God sank into my heart when I was confused by mockery and worship, by grief and laughter, by yes and no. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

If you embrace your self then it will appear to you as if the world has become cold and empty. The coming God moves into this emptiness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 245.

But now, if you are in solitude, your God leads you to the God of others, and through that to the true neighbor, to the neighbor of the self in others. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 245.

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.

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.

Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other, and that cruel Goddess of my interior, my womanly pleasure, my own other, the tormented tormentor, that which is to be tormented. I have interpreted these images, as best I can, with poor words. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 250.

On account of my thoughts, I had left myself; therefore my self became hungry and made God into a selfish thought. If I leave myself my hunger will drive me to find my self in my object, that is, in my thought. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 250.

Man doesn’t only grow from within himself for he is also creative from within himself. The God becomes revealed in him. Human nature is little skilled in divinity; and therefore man fluctuates between too much and too little. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253.

The God holds the separate principles in his power, he unites them. The God develops through the union of the principles in me. He is their union. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 254.

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.

I know how to dance. Yes, would we could do it by dancing! Dancing goes with the mating season. I know that there are those who are always in heat, and those who also want to dance for their Gods. Some are ridiculous and others enact Antiquity, instead of honestly admitting their utter incapacity for such expression. ~Carl Jung to The Red One, Liber Novus, Page 260.

The word becomes your God, since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic against the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 270.

He who breaks the wall of words overthrows Gods and defiles temples. The solitary is a murderer. He murders the people, because he thus thinks and thereby breaks down ancient sacred walls. He calls up the daimons of the boundless. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 270.

You are completely alone in this struggle, since your Gods have become deaf. You do not know which devils are greater, your vices, or your virtues. But of one thing you are certain, that virtues and vices are brothers. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274.

And while I struggled with God, the devil prepared himself for my reception, and tore me just as far to his side. There, too, I found no boundaries other than surfeit and disgust. I did not live, but was driven; I was a slave to my ideals. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274.

We had to swallow the poison of science. Otherwise we would have met the same fate as you have: we’d be completely lamed, if we encountered it unsuspecting and unprepared. This poison is so insurmountably strong that everyone, even the strongest, and even the eternal Gods, perish because of it. ~Carl Jung to Izdubar, Liber Novus, Page 279.

Alas, he is my dearest, most beautiful friend, he who rushes across, pursuing the sun and wanting to marry himself with the immeasurable mother as the sun does. How closely akin, indeed how completely one are the serpent and the God! The word which was our deliverer has become a deadly weapon, a serpent that secretly stabs. ~Carl Jung on Izdubar, Liber Novus, Page 280.

If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the Logos: in the end it poisons us all. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 280.

The world of the Gods is made manifest in spirituality and in sexuality. The celestial ones appear in spirituality, the earthly in sexuality. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 352

Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things you possess and encompass. Rather, they possess and encompass you, since they are powerful daimons, Manifestations of the Gods, and hence reach beyond you, existing in themselves. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 353.

Man remains the same, even if you create a new model of God for him. He remains an imitator. What was word, shall become man. The word created the world and came before the world. It lit up like a light in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 271.

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.

With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of God. The word is the greatest and the smallest that man created, just as what is created through man is the greatest and the smallest. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 299.

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. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Is there a suffering that would be too great to want to undergo for our God? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

When the God enters my life, I return to my poverty for the sake of the God. I accept the burden of poverty and bear all my ugliness and ridiculousness, and also everything reprehensible in me. I thus relieve the God of all the confusion and absurdity that would befall him if I did not accept it. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 303.

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.

You should be able to cast everything from you, otherwise you are a slave, even if you are the slave of a God. Life is free and chooses its way. It is limited enough, so do not pile up more limitation. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 307.

You can offer no more precious a sacrificial meal to your God than yourself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 310.

If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts: the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing. The human soul, living forever within you. The celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird. ~Carl Jung’s Soul to him, Black Books, Appendix C., Page 370.

But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the mind, as befits a God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.

There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is. Now you’ll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it’s all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 291.

The word is the God that rises out of the waters each morning and proclaims the guiding law to the people. Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, namely my daily law, my daily wisdom. The God renews himself each night. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.

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.

On emerging, the God calls me toward the right and the left, his voice calling out to me from both sides. Yet the God wants neither the one nor the other. He wants the middle way: But the middle is the beginning of the long road. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.

The devil is the sum of the darkness of human nature. He who lives in the light strives toward being the image of God; he who lives in the dark strives toward being the image of the devil. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 322.

No one besides you has your God. He is always with you, yet you see him in others, and thus he is never with you. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 329.

You strive to draw to yourself those who seem to possess your God. You will come to see that they do not possess him, and that you alone have him. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 329.

The God appears to us in a certain state of the soul. Therefore we reach the God through the self. Not the self is God, although we reach the God through the self. The God is behind the self above the self the self itself when he appears. But he appears as our sickness, from which we must heal ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 338.

We must heal ourselves from the God, since he is also our heaviest wound. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 338.

For in the first instance the God’s power resides entirely in the self since the self is completely in the God, because we were not with the self. We must draw the self to our side. Therefore we must wrestle with the God for the self Since the God is an unfathomable powerful movement that sweeps away the self into the boundless, into dissolution. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 338.

Yet we cannot remain in this state, since all the powers of our body are consumed like fat in the flames. Hence we must strive to free the self from the God, so that we can live. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

It is certainly possible and even quite easy for our reason to deny the God and to speak only of sickness. Thus we accept the sick part and can also heal it. But it will be a healing with loss. We lose a part of life. We go on living, but as ones lamed by the God. Where the fire blazed dead ashes lie. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

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.

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, Liber Novus, Page 339.

The service of the self is therefore divine service and the service of mankind. If I carry myself I relieve mankind of myself and heal my self from the God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

I must free my self from the God, since the God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is also the abomination, he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness, he is more than power, he is also powerlessness, he is more than omnipresence, he is also my creature. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

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.

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.

You are blessed, virgin soul, praised be your name. You are the chosen one among women. You are the God-bearer. Praise be to you! Honor and fame be yours in eternity. ~Philemon to Carl Jung’s Soul, Liber Novus, Page 344.

God is not dead. He is as alive as ever. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 348.

God is creation, for he is something definite, and therefore differentiated from the Pleroma. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 348.

God is a quality of the Pleroma, and everything I have said about creation also applies to him. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 348.

Moreover, God is the Pleroma itself, just as each smallest point in the created and uncreated is the Pleroma itself. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 348.

Everything that differentiation takes out of the Pleroma is a pair of opposites, therefore the devil always belongs to God. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 348.

Fullness and emptiness, generation and destruction, are what distinguish God and the devil. Effectiveness is common to both. Effectiveness joins them. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 349.

Effectiveness, therefore, stands above both, and is a God above God, since it unites fullness and emptiness through its effectuality. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 349.

I: “What my eyes see is exactly what I cannot grasp. You, Elijah, who are a prophet, the mouth of God, and she, a bloodthirsty horror. You are the symbol of the most extreme contradiction.”

This tangible and apparent world is one reality, but fantasy is the other reality: So long as we leave the God outside us apparent and tangible, he is unbearable and hopeless. ~ Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 283.

The will of the God, that is stronger than you, you slave, you vessel. You have fallen into the hands of the greater. He knows no pity. Your Christian shrouds have fallen, the veils that blinded your eyes. The God has become strong again. ~Unknown Woman to Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

The yoke of men is lighter than the yoke of the God; therefore everyone seeks to yoke the other out of mercy. But he who does not fall into the hands of men falls into those of the God. May he be well and may woe betide him! There is no escape. ~Unknown Woman to Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

Outrage? I laugh at your outrage. The God knows only power and creation. He commands and you act. Your anxieties are laughable. There is only one road, the military road of the Godhead. ~Unknown Woman to Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

Great is the need of the dead. But the God needs no sacrificial prayer. He has neither goodwill nor ill will. He is kind and fearful, though not actually so, but only seems to you thus. But the dead hear your prayers since they are still of human nature and not free of goodwill and ill will. ~Unknown woman to Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

I bow, my soul, before unknown forces- I’d like to consecrate an altar to each unknown God. I must submit. The black iron in my heart gives me secret power. It’s like defiance and like contempt for men. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 308.

What does power avail us? We do not want to rule. We want to live, we want light and warmth, and hence we need yours. Just as the greening earth and every living body needs the sun, so we as spirits need your light and your warmth. A sunless spirit becomes the parasite of the body. But the God feeds the spirit. ~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.

I do not doubt: I also want evil for the sake of my God. I enter the unequal battle, since it is always unequal and without doubt a lost cause. How terrible and despairing would this battle be otherwise? But precisely this is how it should and will be. ~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.

There is nothing the emptiness can sacrifice, since it always suffers lack Only fullness can sacrifice, since it has fullness. Emptiness cannot sacrifice its hunger for fullness, since it cannot deny its own essence. Therefore we also need evil. But I can sacrifice my will to evil, because I previously received fullness. All strength flows back to me again, since the evil one has destroyed the image I had of the formation of the God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

But the image of the God’s formation in me was not yet destroyed. I dread this destruction, since it is terrible, an unprecedented desecration of temples. Everything in me strives against this abysmal abomination. For I still did not know what it means to give birth to a 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.

We must regenerate ourselves. But as the creation of a God is a creative act of highest love, the restoration of our human life signifies an act of the Below. This is a great and dark mystery. Man cannot accomplish this act solely by himself but is assisted by evil, which does it instead of man. ~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.

When it bore and gave birth to the God, my soul was of human nature throughout; it possessed the primordial powers since time immemorial, but only in a dormant condition. They flowed into forming the God without my help. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 291.

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 262.

Could the longing for a god be a passion welling up from our darkest, instinctual nature, a passion unswayed by any outside influences, deeper and stronger perhaps than the love for a human person?” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, par 214.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

It is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of the God image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 47.

We must enter into our mind [mentem], which is the eternal spiritual image of God within us, and this is to enter into the truth of the Lord; we must pass beyond ourselves to the eternal and preeminently spiritual, and to that which is above us . . . this is the threefold illumination of the one day. ~St. Bonaventure; Cited in Carl Jung’s, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 505.

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.

Our mind is the scene upon which the gods perform their plays, and we don’t know the beginning and we don’t know the end. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1306.

God never was invented, it was always an occurrence, a psychological experience-and mind you, it is still the same experience today. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 916.

Until now it has not truly and fundamentally been noted that our time, despite the prevalence of irreligiosity, is so to speak congenitally charged with the attainment of the Christian epoch, namely with the supremacy of the word, that Logos which the central figure of Christian faith represents. The word has literally become our God and has remained so. ~Carl Jung; Present and Future, CW 10, §554.

The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room” ~Carl Jung; CW 13; §54.

The fourth, that’s the devil. He is the only metaphysical person outside of the gods. Without the fourth there is no meaning. ~C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff-A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 51-70.

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.

It might be said of her that she [Toni Wolff] was “Virgin” as defined for us by Esther Harding, meaning simply an unmarried woman who, since she belonged to no man, belonged to herself and to God in a special way. Toni Wolff to Sallie Nichols; C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 47-51

… 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

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 him… ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 384

I do know of a power of a very personal nature and an irresistible influence. I call it ‘God’. ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 274.

My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern. Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image. ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 154.

God is an immediate experience of a very primordial nature, one of the most natural products of our mental life,…” ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 253.

God is a universal experience which is obfuscated only by silly rationalism and an equally silly theology. ~Carl Jung, Jung, Letters, II, 525.

The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 68.

. . . inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by consciousness and is not under its control. In the mythology of earlier times, these forces were called mana, or spirits, demons, and gods. They are as active today as ever. If they go against us, then we say that it is just bad luck, or that certain people are against us. The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon “powers” that are beyond our control. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 71.

With the archetype of the anima, we enter the realm of the gods, or rather, the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Page 28

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

Analysts and mathematicians both consider themselves infallible; they live with invisible magic cloaks around them. They are both concerned with archetypes . Archetypes are living powers; they are the “thoughts of God.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 59.

Psychologically the God concept includes every idea of the ultimate, of the first or the last, of the highest or lowest. The name makes no difference. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 44.

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

One should make clear to one self, what it means, when God becomes man. ~ Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 401.

If we say “God”? we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. … ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 360.

But in omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or the divine nature of man. This realization is a millennial process. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 402.

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.

Instead of saying, “God is beyond good and evil,” we can say, “Life is both good and evil.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 40.

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.

A religious life presupposes a conscious connection of the inner and outer worlds and it requires a constant, meticulous attention to all circumstances to the best of our knowledge and our conscience. We must watch what the gods ordain for us in the outer world, but as well as waiting for developments in the outer world we must listen to the inner world; both worlds are expressions of God. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.

God has a longing for man and it seems there is provision for God to be created in man’s consciousness. Consciousness is the cradle of the birth of God in man. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 39

When we say “Our Father,” the Father also symbolizes that self which is hidden in Heaven, in the unconscious. The Son (Christ) is the consciously achieved self. The Holy Spirit is the Paraclete promised by Christ in the Words “Ye are as gods,” or “Greater things will be done by you.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.

The inner man has access to the sense organs of God. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 39.

We would call the self a multiple consciousness in God, or a spiritual Olympus, or an inner firmament. Paracelsus already knew this and wrote it for us. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.

The guilty man is eminently suitable and therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Answer to Job, Page 460.

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.

Instead of saying, “God is beyond good and evil,” we can say, “Life is both good and evil.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 40.

Attainment of consciousness is culture in the broadest sense, and self-knowledge is therefore the heart and essence of the process. The Oriental attributes unquestionably divine significance to the self, and according to the Christian view self-knowledge is the road to knowledge of God. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 324-325

Any theological treatment of the devil that is not related to God’s trinitarian consciousness is a falsification of the actual position. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 103.

One can easily throw dust into one’s own eyes with theories. ~Carl Jung; “Analyti 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; “Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”; CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Page 62.cal Psychology and Education”, 1924.

The dreams of redemption, whereby God descends into the human realm and man mounts up to the realm of divinity. ~Carl Jung; “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”, 1942.

Just as man was once revealed out of God, so, when the circle closes, God may be revealed out of man. ~Carl Jung; A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity, 1942.

We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 110.

Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself. ~Carl Jung; Book of Job; Para. 640.

Because of its unconscious component the self is so far removed from the conscious mind that it can only be partially expressed by human figures; the other part of it has to be expressed by objective, abstract symbols. The human figures are father and son, mother and daughter, king and queen, god and goddess…. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 314-315.

The sun… is the only truly ‘rational’ image of God, whether we adopt the standpoint of the primitive savage or of modern science. In either case the sun is the father-god from whom all living things draw life; he is the fructifier and creator, the source of energy for our world. The discord into which the human soul has fallen can be harmoniously resolved through the sun as a natural object which knows no inner conflict. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Symbols of Transformation; Para 176.

The Brahmans to look upon the fire both as the subject and the object of a sacrifice. The fire embraced the offering, and was thus a kind of priest; it carried it to the gods, and was thus a kind of mediator between gods and men. But the fire represented also something divine, a god to whom honour was due, and thus it became both the subject and the object of the sacrifice. Hence the idea that Agni sacrifices himself, that he offers a sacrifice to himself, and likewise that he offers himself as a sacrifice” ~Carl Jung; CW 5.

God of God […] one God, from whom you did not know, because people forgot about him. We call him by name Abraxas .He is still indefinite as God and Devil. ~Carl Jung; Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, 1916.

Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with—ism. ~Carl Jung; “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, 1928.

Conscience itself [asserts] that it is a voice of God. ~Carl Jung; “Civilization in Transition”, 1958.

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.

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

Therefore the sun is perfectly suited to represent the visible God of this world, i.e., the creative power of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to bring forth the useful and to bring forth the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Symbols of Transformation; para 176.

Numerous mythological and philosophical attempts have been made to formulate and visualize the creative force which man knows only by subjective experience. To give but a few examples, I would remind the reader of the cosmogonic significance of Eros in Hesiod, and also of the Orphic figure of Phanes, the ‘Shining One,’ the first-born, the ‘Father of Eros.’ In Orphic terms, Phanes also denotes Priapos, a god of love, androgynous, and equal to the Theban Dionysus Lysios. The Orphic meaning of Phanes is the same as that of the Indian Kama, the God of love, which is also a cosmogonic principle. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 198.

It was a familiar idea with the Brahmans to look upon the fire both as the subject and the object of a sacrifice. The fire embraced the offering, and was thus a kind of priest; it carried it to the gods, and was thus a kind of mediator between gods and men. But the fire represented also something divine, a god to whom honor was due, and thus it became both the subject and the object of the sacrifice. Hence the idea that Agni sacrifices himself, that he offers a sacrifice to himself, and likewise that he offers himself as a sacrifice. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Citing Max Mueller.

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; Symbols of Transformation; Para 176.

The application of the comparative method shows without a doubt that the quaternity is a more or less direct representation of the God who is manifest in his creation. We might, therefore, conclude that the symbol spontaneously produced in the dreams of modern people means something similar-the God within. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; para. 101

The procreative urge– which is how love must be regarded from the natural standpoint– remains the essential attribute of the God ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para 87.

The language of religion defines God as “love,” there is always the great danger of confusing the love which works in man with the workings of God. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 98.

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; CW8, para. 95-96.

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 which creates the attributes of divinity is the father-imago, while in the older religions it was the mother imago… In certain pagan conceptions of divinity the maternal element is strongly emphasized. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 89.

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.

The psychic fact “God” is a typical autonomism, a collective archetype…It is therefore characteristic not only of all higher forms of religion, but appears spontaneously in the dreams of individuals. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; fn 29.

Upon every gift that cometh from the god-sun the devil layeth his curse. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Appendix V; Septem Sermones ad Mortuos.

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.

The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self.

Nobody can say where man ends. That is the beauty of it. The unconscious of man can reach God knows where. There we are going to make discoveries. ~Four Filmed Interviews with Richard I. Evans” (1957). Conversations with Carl Jung.

If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one’s own vital force, the libido. It is a Seneca says: “god is near you, he is with you, in you.” God is our own longing to which we pay divine honors. ~Carl Jung; The Psychology of the Unconscious.

Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. ~Carl Jung; The Development of Personality.

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; Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; CW 9; Part I: Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Page 28.

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass. . . ? Is it what is commonly called vocation . . . [which] acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. ~Carl Jung; The Development of the Personality, CW 17, pars. 299f.

A remarkable instance of this can be found in the Eleusinian mysteries, which were finally suppressed in the beginning of the seventh century of the Christian era. They expressed, together with the Delphic oracle, the essence and spirit of ancient Greece. On a much greater scale, the Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth of ancient Egypt. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; P. 68.

God always speaks mythological. Carl Jung, Letters; vol.2; Page 9.

This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is the medium from which the religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such an experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self.

Because we cannot discover God’s throne in the sky with a radio telescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are “not true.” I would rather say that they are not “true” enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols

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.

This expression, “God’s world,” may sound sentimental to some ears. For me it did not have this character at all. To “God’s world” belonged everything superhuman dazzling light, the darkness of the abyss, the cold impassivity of infinite space and time, and the uncanny grotesqueness of the irrational world of chance. “God,” for me, was everything and anything but “edifying.” ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 72.

Christ cried out to the Jews, “You are the Gods” (John 10:34) but men were incapable of understanding what he meant. ~Carl Jung; Memories dreams and Reflections; Page 280

God is a psychic fact of immediate experience; otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved. ~Carl Jung

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

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 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 51.

You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self Page 63

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual’s faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 85

Myth is the revelation of divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather it speaks to us as a Word of God. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather it speaks to us as a Word of God. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 340.

From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted. That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was “there,” where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there. These talks with the “Other” were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 48.

If God wishes to be born as man and to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, He suffers the terrible torment of having to bear the world in its reality. It is a crux; indeed, He Himself is His own cross. The world is God’s suffering, and every individual human being who wishes even to approach his own wholeness knows very well that this means bearing his own cross. But the eternal promise for him who bears his own cross is the Paraclete. ~Carl Jung, A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,

Yesterday I had a marvellous dream: One bluish diamond-like star high in heaven, reflected in a round, quiet pool—heaven above, heaven below—. The imago Dei in the darkness of the Earth, this is myself. . . . It seems to me as if I were ready to die, although—as it looks to me—some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightning’s in a summer night. Yet they are not mine, they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning. Carl Jung, The Jung–White Letters, Page 60.

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.

You are light and life, like God the Father of whom Man was born. If therefore you learn to know yourself… you will return to life. ~Corpus Hermetical I, Pomanders, 21.

The myth of the necessary incarnation of God . . . can be understood as man’s creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality. . . . That is the goal . . . which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation and at the same time confers meaning upon it. –Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Page 338.

Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian. ~Carl Jung, Jung: A Biography (Hannah), Page 78.

In the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites “God” and “man” that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites within the God-image itself. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 338.

Whoever knows God has an effect on him. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, para. 617.

The future indwelling of the Holy Spirit amounts to a continuing incarnation of God. Christ, as the begotten son of God and pre-existing mediator, is a first-born and a divine paradigm which will be followed by further incarnations of the Holy Ghost in the empirical man. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Para. 693.

All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his ‘oppositeness’ has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 659.

I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page xi.

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.

We cannot receive the Holy Spirit unless we have accepted our own individual life as Christ accepted his. Thus we become the “sons of god” fated to experience the conflict of the divine opposites, represented by the crucifixion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, par. 1551.

It does not seem to fit God’s purpose to exempt man from conflict and hence from evil. ~Carl Jung, Answer to Job, Para 659.

Man’s suffering does not derive from his sins but from the maker of his imperfections, the paradoxical God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Par. 1681

Yahweh and Allah are unreflected God-images, whereas in the Clementine Homilies there is a psychological and reflective spirit at work. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 54n.

The ego participates in God’s suffering. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.

Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.

God is not blessed in his Godhead, he must be born in man forever. ~ Meister Eckhart

Suffering is the swiftest steed that bears you to perfection. ~Meister Eckhart cited in Edinger’s The New God Image, Page 162.

God needs man in to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space an earthly tabernacle. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Volume 1, Page 65.

With our human knowledge we always move in the human sphere, but in the things of God we should keep quiet and not make any arrogant assertions about what is greater than ourselves. ~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.

Neurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, ages 332-334

Spirit cannot be learned, it is given to us by God’s grace, which cannot be had by force or reason. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 293.

What happens when man introjects God? A superman psychosis, because every blockhead thinks that when he withdraws a projection its contents cease to exist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 407.

It seems to me as if I am ready to die, although as it looks to me some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine, they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 449-450.

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.

Well, Christ is in us and we in him! Why shouldn’t the workings of God and the presence of the “Son of Man” in us be real and experienceable? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 486-489.

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.

I only wish the theologians would accept the Kabbala and India and China as well, so as to proclaim still more clearly how God reveals himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 391-393.

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.

Like Wotan’s oaks, the gods were felled and a wholly incongruous Christianity, born of monotheism. The Germanic man is still suffering from this mutilation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 39-41.

Through my study of the early Christian writings I have gained a deep and indelible impression of how dreadfully serious an experience of God is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 39-41.

God as the greatest becomes in man the smallest and most invisible, otherwise man cannot endure him. Only in that form of the self does God dwell in the macrocosm (which he himself is, though in the most unconscious form). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 335-337.

In man God sees himself from “outside” and thus becomes conscious of himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 335-337.

The self must become as small as and yet smaller than the ego although it is the ocean of divinity: “God is as small as me,” says Angelus Silesius. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 335-337.

My further writing led me to the archetype of the God-man and to the phenomenon of synchronicity which adheres to the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 479-481.

Social welfare has replaced the kingdom of God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 534-537.

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

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.

“God imagined the world. The Trinity is imaged in the creature.” In spite of exhaustive inquiries the source remains unidentified. But cf. von Franz, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas, p. 186, n. 141: “God created all visible things through imagination and manifests himself in everything . . . . Thus the creative fantasy of God is contained in the visible. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 400, Footnote 6.

“For He [God] doth know that . . . ye shall be as gods.” Gen. 3:5. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 264-266.

The solitary man is either a beast or a god. ~Carl Jung citing Aristotle, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 490-493.

It happens sometimes that I must say to an older patient: “Your picture of God or your idea of immortality is atrophied, consequently your psychic metabolism is out of gear.” ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.

It is the goal of our psychological development and in metaphysical terms amounts to God’s incarnation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.

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.

I only wish the Christians of today could see for once that what they stand for is not Christianity at all but a god-awful legalistic religion from which the founder himself tried to free them by following his voice and his vocation to the bitter end. Had he not done so there would never have been a Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 518-522.

Spirit, like God, denotes an object of psychic experience which cannot be proved to exist in the external world and cannot be understood rationally. This is its meaning if we use the word “spirit” in its best sense. ~Carl Jung, Spirit and Life, CW 8, page 329, par. 626.

About God himself I have asserted nothing, because according to my premise nothing whatever can be asserted about God himself. All such assertions refer to the psychology of the God-image. Their validity is therefore never metaphysical but only psychological. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 293-294.

If you learn about yourself and if eventually you discover more or less who you are, you also learn about God, and who He is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 301.

We have all become “prisoners of God” miraculously without knowing it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 313-315.

It might be said of her [Toni Wolff] that she was “Virgin” as defined for us by Esther Harding , meaning simply an unmarried woman who, since she belonged to no man, belonged to herself and to God in a special way.~ Sallie Nichols, ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 47-51.

Beyond that I have had experiences which are, so to speak, “ineffable,” “secret” because they can never be told properly and because nobody can understand them (I don’t know whether I have even approximately understood them myself), “dangerous” because 99% of humanity would declare l was mad if they heard such things from me, “catastrophic” because the prejudices aroused by their telling might block other people’s way to a living and wondrous mystery, “taboo” because they are “Holy” protected by “Fear of the Gods” as faithfully described by Goethe:

Shelter gives deep cave.

Lions around us stray,

Silent and tame they rove, And sacred honors pay To the holy shrine of love. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 140-142.

A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but must grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper-only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 17-19.

I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 17-19.

Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. This is individuation. You are rejecting dreams and seeking action. Then the dreams come and thwart your actions. The dreams are a world, and the real is a world. You have to stand between the gods and men. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein January 21, 1918.

That with which we are concerned is not God, the creature is the image of the human mind, neither alive nor dead. ~Dorneus cited in ETH Lectures, Page 103.

These things are then lost to consciousness, and must be found again in the course of life, at the cost of infinite effort, if God is kind enough to send us a neurosis (that special gift of grace) to accompany us on life’s journey. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 119.

The spirit of God’s wisdom = the Holy Ghost. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 160.

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.

Mercury is the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and entered matter as an emanation of God, and since then it is concealed in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 180.

Apparently God the Father is thought of here as the soul, the anima mundi, which is the centre of the world, and which at the same time enfolds the whole world, or rather the universe including the starry heavens. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.

Consciousness thus is torn from its roots and no longer able to appeal to the authority of the archetypal images; it has Promethean freedom, it is true, but also a godless hybris. It does indeed soar above the earth, even above mankind, but the danger of an upset is there, not for every individual, to be sure, but collectively for the weak. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 85.

Mylius also calls it “perpetua” (perpetual). It is eternal and “susceptible”, that is, it receives the eternal images which God impresses on it, and therefore all living beings find their origin in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 210.

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.

If tendencies towards disassociation were not inherent in the human psyche, parts never would have been split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would ever have come to exist. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Pages 109-110.

That is the reason, too, that our time is so utterly godless and profane, for we lack knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 110.

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.

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.

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.

“No one provokes me with impunity.” The ancients knew how inexorable a god Eros is. ~Cited by Carl Jung in Freud/Jung Letters, Page 19.

The ego withdraws from its entanglement in the world, and after death remains alive because “interiorization” has prevented the wasting of the life-forces in the outer world. Instead of these being dissipated, they have made within the inner rotation of monad a centre of life which is independent of bodily existence. Such an ego is a god, deus, shen. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17.

God is an image and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Pages 276.

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.

There is indeed a meaning in suffering, it is a sort of divine secret, for it is less the human being and more the divine man that suffers. God humiliated himself to become man and thus necessarily fell a victim to human suffering. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 189.

We were all taught to depend on the walls of the Church, 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.

Not the human being, not the ego, is God but the Self is God in man, and it is superior to human consciousness, just as the whole is superior to a part. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

He [Neitzche] expressed it as “God is dead” and he did not realise that in saying this he was still standing within the dogma, for Christ’s death is one of the secret mysteries of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197.

The dogma claims that Christ was God who became man. In psychological language this means that the Self approached the consciousness of man, or that human consciousness began to realise the Self, as a real human fact. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 200.

The East, on the contrary, first realizes the Self as the thumbling in man’s heart, as the smaller than small which I contain. But the Self appears in western psychic experience as a divine figure, as something which contains me and faces me with the infinite power of a god. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 201.

We could say that western man became conscious of the fact that this man, this teacher Jesus, was the divine man, whose path had been prepared for thousands of years by Osiris in Egypt and as the idea of the coming of the Messiah in Israel. This was no human conspiracy, probably Christ had a convincing effect, there was something about him which carried the conviction that he was filled with the spirit of God, that he was a prophet. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 201.

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.

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.

As God is the union, the reconciliation, of all the opposites, it is natural that both the good and evil principles should be in him potentially, should originate in him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

Body and spirit, thought of as two poles, combine correctly with each other if man depends correctly upon God, because they are reconciled through His unity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 227.

Western man comes in from outside, so to speak, from the quaternity of the world into the unity of God, whereas eastern man goes out from the divine unity into the quaternity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XIV, Page 252.

“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.” ~Carl Jung, Citing an Alchemist, ETH Lecture V. Page 161.

The State consists of a mass of individuals and only the individual gives it meaning and value. What is collectivity without the individual? No god can be made out of such an idol. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 40.

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.

The eastern gods all have two aspects, Kwannon, the well-known goddess of kindness, is also the goddess of hell. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 57.

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 twenty gods have no special importance in the East, Eastern man has no liking for being born a god, for the gods have to become men and this they think would only make the process last longer. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

God made the horse and the tiger to be what they are, but to us it has become more important to be Mr. So and So than to fulfil the primitive task of being a human being. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XVI 1Mar1935, Page 197.

The ancients understood this far better than we do, they did not speak, therefore, of being in love but of being possessed or hit by a god. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 41.

In every case of very pronounced introversion, the three groups of phenomena, which I mentioned in the last lecture, occur: first, experience of the relative character of space and time; secondly, the autonomy of certain psychic contents and thirdly, the experience of symbols belonging to a centre which does not coincide with the centre of consciousness and which is equivalent to an experience of God. ~Carl Jung, Lecture X, 12Jan1934, Page 43.

My view comes very close to Koepgen’s lapidary formula, which moreover bears the ecclesiastical imprimatur: “The Trinity is a revelation not only of God but at the same time of man.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 74.

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 Chên-yên (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.

The individual must now consolidate himself by cutting himself off from God and becoming wholly himself Thereby and at the same time he also separates himself from society: Outwardly he plunges into solitude, but inwardly into Hell, distance from God” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, §1103.

What occurs between the lover and the beloved is the entire fullness of the Godhead. Both are unfathomable riddles to each other. For who understands the Godhead? / But the God is born in solitude, from the secret / mystery of the individual. / The separation between life and love is the contradiction between solitude and togetherness. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Feb. 23, 1920, Page 88.

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.

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.

The serpent owes his existence to God and by no means to man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 690.

Then our era will be a near replica of the first centuries a.d., when Caesar was the State and a god, and divine sacrifices were made to Caesar while the temples of the gods crumbled away. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 581.

The suffering God-Man may be at least five thousand years old and the Trinity is probably even older. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 46.

The Trinity is a revelation not only of God but at the same time of man. ~Carl Jung citing Koepgen, CW 11, Page 74.

Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 163.

Actually the word adhista in Elgonyi means sun as well as God, although they deny that the sun is God. Only the moment when it rises is mungu or adhista. Spittle and breath mean soul-substance. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 411.

A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but just grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god/ the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper-only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 18.

Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. That means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 408.

Only through the most extreme and menacing conflict does the Christian experience deliverance into divinity, always provided he doesn’t break, but accepts the burden of being marked by God. In this way alone can the imago Dei realize itself in him and God become man. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 417.

I only wish the theologians would accept the Kabbala and India and China as well so as to proclaim still more clearly how God reveals himself. If in the process Christianity should be relativized up to a point, this would be ad majorem Dei gloriam [for the greater glory of God] and would do no harm to Christian doctrine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 391-393.

We fear our serpent,” he said, ”as we also fear the numinosum – so we run from it. . . . All we have to give the world and God is ourselves as we are. But this is the hardest of all tasks. Most of us want others to do it for us, to carry us along.. . . ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 178.

Jazz and all that sort of stuff is silly and stultifying. But it is even worse when they play classics in such a place. Bach, for instance. Bach talks to God. I am gripped by Bach. But I could slay a man who plays Bach in banal surroundings. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.

Without knowing it man is always concerned with God. What some people call instinct or intuition is nothing other than God. God is that voice inside us which tells us what to do and what not to do. In other words, our conscience. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.

Man has come to be man’s worst enemy. It is a clash between man and God, in which man’s Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient god could. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 248.

God is nothing more than that superior force in our life. You can experience God every day. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.

That [Individuation] means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

If one can stay in the middle, know one is human, relate to both the god and the animal of the god, one is all right. One must remember, over the animal is the god, with the god is the god’s animal. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 112.

Up until the last moment Jung still seemed to be searching. Perhaps his was the road of the Magician who, unlike the Saint, did not yearn for fusion or for the peace of God, but preferred the eternal highway with all its unhappiness. But I cannot be certain of that. ~Michael Serrano, Two Friendships, Page 112.

When I last saw him [Jung] he had a vision. “I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth. But thank God it’s not the whole planet. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, “Jung”.

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. The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. ~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.

Why do I have to talk about God? Because He is everywhere! I am only the spoon in His kitchen. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 109.

People – event theologians- are embarrassed to talk about God. It is more polite to talk about sex. Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 7.

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 naïve 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 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.

“God must be born in man forever. . . the creator sees himself through the eyes of man’s consciousness.” ~Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 147.

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 act of becoming conscious happens to man in darkness. If he can grasp and handle consciousness then the fire brought from Heaven becomes a sacrificial flame, not the wrath of the gods. The acquisition of consciousness by force creates a sense of guilt. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.

Consciousness is only possible if a spark of the essence becomes detached from the unconscious, religiously one could say from God. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.

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.

If we say “God” we give expression to an image or a verbal concept, which has undergone many changes in the course of time. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 11.

But what, if the inferior and neglected function expresses the will of God? ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.

But who can be humble who has not sinned? This is why sin is so important; this is why it is said that God loves the sinner more than ninety-nine righteous men. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.

Consciousness is the cradle of the birth of God in man. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 39.

We must watch what the gods ordain for us in the outer world, but as well as waiting for developments in the outer world we must listen to the inner world; both worlds are expressions of God. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 39.

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.

Human consciousness is the second creator of the world. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 42.

God seems to be unconscious: He does not seem to know men. He tries to see them as He is Himself. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 42.

Man is also distinct from the angels because he can receive revelations, be disobedient, grow and change. God changes too and is therefore especially interested in man. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 42.

God the Father became the Son and His own soul, the Word that became flesh. Each son of God must awaken this new reality in himself. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 42.

I am a son of God when I do the simplest things; but how difficult it is to do what is absolutely unimportant when I feel I am so significant. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 42.

We must not forget that we are only ants … but that even an ant is an imago Dei. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 43.

Psychologically the God concept includes every idea of the ultimate, of the first or the last, of the highest or lowest. The name makes no difference. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 455.

One should make clear to one self, what it means, when God becomes man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 401.

But if we think that God were responsible for the original sin, there would be no more mystery about sin. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 48.

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.

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.

Nobody can say where man ends. That is the beauty of it, you know. It is very interesting. The unconscious of man can reach—God knows where. There we are going to make discoveries. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.

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.

If God is the highest good, why is the world, His creation, so imperfect, so corrupt, so pitiable? ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 59.

This is not to say that the idea of God derives from the loss of a lover and is nothing but a substitute for the human object. What is evidently in question here is the displacement of libido on to a symbolical object. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 83.

Individual existence is the crime against the gods, disobedience to God, the peccatum originale. Out of this projection of spiritual fire is born the anima. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32.

Christ… “An historical personage is uni-temporal and unique; is God, universal and eternal.” Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 116.

In Sahasrara there is no difference. The next conclusion could be that there is no object, no God, there is nothing but Brahman. There is no experience because it is One, without a second. It is asleep, it is not, and that is why it is nirvana. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Yoga, p. 59.

Our ambition is not to be the whole of ourselves, for that would be unpleasant. But the animals are themselves and they fulfil the will of God that is within them in a true and faithful manner. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Reflections, Pages 310-311.

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.

Hence the mathematician Kronecker could say: Man created mathematics, but God created whole numbers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 23.

Not in my livery, but “naked and bare I must go down to the grave,” fully aware of the outrage my nakedness will provoke. But what is that compared with the arrogance I had to summon up in order to be able to insult God? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.

God is an ailment man has to cure. For this purpose God penetrates into man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.

In order to reach man, God has to show himself in his true form, or man would be everlastingly praising his goodness and justice and so deny him admission. This can be effected only by Satan, a fact which should not be taken as a justification for Satanic actions, otherwise God would not be recognized for what he really is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.

We can’t remind God of anything or prescribe anything for him, except when he tries to force something on us that our human limitation cannot endure. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 120.

…for if God needs us as regulators of his incarnation and his coming to consciousness, it is because in his boundlessness he exceeds all the bounds that are necessary for becoming conscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 120.

The innermost self of every man and animal, of plants and crystals, is God, but infinitely diminished and approximated to his ultimate individual form. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 120.

I don’t do anything to God at all, how could I? I criticize merely our conceptions of God. I have no idea what God is in himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 129-131.

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.

I confess I am afraid of a long drawn-out suffering. It seems to me as if I am ready to die, although as it looks to me some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine, they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 449-450.

God is not a statistical truth, hence it is just as stupid to try to prove the existence of God as to deny him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.

What mankind has called “God” from time immemorial you experience every day. You only give him another, so-called “rational” name-for instance, you call him “affect.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.

Outer world and God are the two primordial experiences and the one is as great as the other, and both have a thousand names, which one and all do not alter the facts. The roots of both are unknown. The psyche mirrors both. It is perhaps the point where they touch. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.

God: an inner experience, not discussable as such but impressive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.

God always speaks mythologically. If he didn’t, he would reveal reason and science. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 9-10.

The way in which opposites are reconciled or united in God we just don’t know. Nor do we understand how they are united in the self. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 52-53.

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

Ideas of God are first of all myths, statements about things that are philosophically and scientifically indeterminable; that is, they are psychological objects which are amenable to discussion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 65-68.

I share your opinion entirely that man lives wholly when, and only when, he is related to God, to that which steps up to him and determines his destiny. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 65-68.

I do not know, for example, how God could ever be experienced apart from human experience. If I do not experience him, how can I say that he exists? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71

When I say “God” the dual aspect of the ens absolutum and the hydrogen atom (or particle + wave) is already implicit in it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71

Were I not old and ill I would take the trouble to explain to you personally why human ideas of God are not necessarily right. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 86-87.

God is something unknowable. An old German mystic has said: “God is a sigh in our souls.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 86-87.

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.

As the result of a dream I completely laid off smoking five days ago. …At present I’m still in a foul mood. What would the gods do without smoke offerings? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 109-110

Man confuses himself with God, is identical with the demiurge and begins to usurp cosmic powers of destruction, i .e., to arrange a second Deluge. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 111-112.

It is really not easy to talk with theologians: they don’t listen to the other person (who is wrong from the start) but only to themselves (and call this the Word of God). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 113-114.

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.

Though Christ was God, as Man he was detached from God and he watched the devil falling out of heaven, removed from God as he (Christ) was separated from God inasmuch as he was human. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138

The Godhead has a double aspect, and as Master Eckhart says: God is not blissful in his mere Godhead, and that is the reason for his incarnation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138

Our society cannot afford the luxury of cutting itself loose from the imitatio Christi, even if it should know that the conflict with the shadow, i.e., Christ versus Satan, is only the first step on the way to the far-away goal of the unity of the self in God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138

When a theologian says “God,” then God has to be, and be just as the magician wants, without the latter feeling in any way impelled to make clear to himself and his public exactly which concept he is using. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 147.

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.

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.

My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern. Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.

The attribute “coarse” is mild in comparison to what you feel when God dislocates your hip or when he slays the firstborn. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 155-157

In a tract of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the remarkable idea is developed that man is destined to become God’s helper in the attempt to restore the vessels which were broken when God thought to create a world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 155-157

In between I am writing a long letter to Pater White. He has-thanks be to God-chosen the better course of facing his difficulties with complete honesty. I now see clearly what a fatal challenge my psychology is for a theologian but, it seems, not only for him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 162-163.

I have never claimed f.i. to know much about the nature of archetypes, how they originated or whether they originated at all, whether they are inherited or planted by the grace of God in every individual anew. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 184-187.

It was an enormous step forward when Yahweh revealed himself as a jealous God, letting his chosen people feel that he was after them with blessings and with punishments, and that God’s goal was man. Not knowing better, they cheated him by obeying his Law literally. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

But it is possible that the Christian symbolism expresses man’s mental condition in the aeon of Pisces, as the ram and the bull gods do for the ages of Aries and Taurus. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

This is a formidable secret and difficult to understand, because it means that man will be essentially God and God man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

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

If there was ever a truly apocalyptic era, it is ours. God has put the means for a universal holocaust into the hands of men. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.

In other words: the essence of Christian tradition is by no means the simple man Jesus whom we seek in vain in the Gospels, but the lore of the God-man and his cosmic drama. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 201-208

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.

The dignitas humani generis has swollen into a truly diabolical grandeur. What answer will the genius of mankind give? Or what will God do about it? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 225-226.

I find that all my thoughts circle round God like the planets round the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by him. I would feel it the most heinous sin were I to offer any resistance to this compelling force. I feel it is God’s will that I should exercise the gift of thinking that has been vouchsafed me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.

As we have not yet reached the state of eternal bliss, we are still suspended on the Cross between ascent and descent, not only for our own but for God’s sake and mankind’s. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.

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.

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.

There is no comfort and no consolation anywhere except in the submission to and the Acceptance of the self, or you may call it the God that suffers in His own creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Pages 238-243.

It seems to me one more proof of the overweening gnostic tendency in philosophical thinking to ascribe to God qualities which are the product of our own anthropomorphic formulations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

If we describe God as “evolving,” we must bear in mind at the same time that perhaps he is so vast that the process of cognition only moves along his contours, as it were, so that the attribute “evolving” applies more to it than to him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

For me “God” is on the one hand a mystery that cannot be unveiled, and to which I must attribute only one quality: that it exists in the form of a particular psychic event which I feel to be numinous and cannot trace back to any sufficient cause lying within my field of experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

On the other hand “God” is a verbal image, a predicate or mythologem founded on archetypal premises which underlie the structure of the psyche as images of the instincts (“instinctual patterns”). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

“God” in this sense is a biological, instinctual and elemental “model,” an archetypal “arrangement” of individual, contemporary and historical contents, which, despite its numinosity, is and must be exposed to intellectual and moral criticism, just like the image of the “evolving” God or of Yahweh or the Summum Bonum or the Trinity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

Mythology as a vital psychic phenomenon is as necessary as it is unavoidable. In this discussion, it seems to me, the gnostic danger of ousting the unknowable and incomprehensible and unutterable God by philosophems and mythologems must be clearly recognized, so that nothing is shoved in between human consciousness and the primordial numinous experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.

As the Chinese would say, the archetype is only the name of Tao, not Tao itself. Just as the Jesuits translated Tao as “God,” so we can describe the “emptiness” of the centre as “God.” Emptiness in this sense doesn’t mean “absence” or “vacancy,” but something unknowable which is endowed with the highest intensity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

The ego has to acknowledge many gods before it attains the centre where no god helps it any longer against another god. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

The up surging archetypal material is the stuff of which mental illnesses are made. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

All statements about and beyond the “ultimate” are anthropomorphisms and, if anyone should think that when he says “God” he has also predicated God, he is endowing his words with magical power. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

I have in all conscience never supposed that in discussing the psychic structure of the God-image I have taken God himself in hand. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

If theologians think that whenever they say “God” then God is, they are deifying anthropomorphisms, psychic structures and myths. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

It is not God who is insulted by the worm but the theologian, who can’t or won’t admit that his concept is anthropomorphic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

If God were to reveal himself to us we have nothing except our psychic organs to register his revelation and could not express it except in the images of our everyday speech. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.

Individuation is ultimately a religious process which requires a corresponding religious attitude = the ego-will submits to God’s will. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 265.

Without error and sin there is no experience of grace, that is, no union of God and man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 267-268.

The psychological criterion of the “Will of God” is forever the dynamic superiority. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 300-301

Whole numbers may well be the discovery of God’s “primal thoughts,” as for instance the significant number four, which has distinctive qualities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 301-302

After all, man cannot dissect God’s primal thoughts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 301-302

Your dream seems to me a genuine revelation: God and Number as the principle of order belong together. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 301-302

Number, like Meaning, inheres in the nature of all things as an expression of God’s dissolution in the world of appearances. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 301-302

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.

Though the suffering of the Creation which God left imperfect cannot be done away with by the revelation of the good God’s will to man, yet it can be mitigated and made meaningful. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 310-311.

Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God the Creator. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 312-316.

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.

God is an immediate experience of a very primordial nature, one of the most natural products of our mental life, as the birds sing, as the wind whistles, like the thunder of the surf. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 252-253.

We cannot speak of “God” but only of a God-image which appears to us or which we make. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

If, for instance, we were to create a myth, we would say that “God” has two aspects, spiritual and chthonic, or rather: material. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

He [God] appears to us as the world-moving spirit (= wind) and as the material of the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

We can only project a conception of him that corresponds to our own constitution: a body perceived by the senses and a spirit (= psyche) directly conscious of itself. After this model we build our God-image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

Coming now to cosmogony, we can assert nothing except that the body of the world and its psyche are a reflection of the God we imagine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

As regards the Incarnation, the idea of God’s descent into human nature is a true mythologem. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

The unconscious itself characterizes this “Man” with the same symbols it applies to God, from which we can conclude that this figure corresponds to the Anthropos, in other words God’s son, or God represented in the form of a man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

The self becomes only a determining factor, and it is not bounded by its apparent entry into consciousness; in spite of this it remains an ideal, i.e., purely imagined, entity dwelling essentially in the background, just as we also imagine God existing in his original boundless totality in spite of the Creation and Incarnation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

I am concerned with the world as it is today, namely godless and spiritually disoriented. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 346.

Everyone insists on his standpoint and imagines he possesses the sole truth; therefore I counsel modesty, or rather the willingness to suppose that God can express himself in different languages. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 367-368

Unlike me, you torment yourself with the ethical problem. I am tormented by it. It is a problem that cannot be caught in any formula, twist and turn it as I may; for what we are dealing with here is the living will of God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 379-380

I am dependent on God’s verdict, not he on mine. God presents me with facts I have to get along with. If he doesn’t reject them, I cannot. I can only modify them the tiniest bit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 379-380

We are men and not gods. The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life is rich enough in marvels and not in detachment from this world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381.

Yet in the archetypal unimaginable event that forms the basis of conscious apperception, a is b, stench is perfume, sex is amor Dei, as inevitably as the conclusion that God is the complexio oppositorum. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396

There is not God alone but also His creation, i.e., the will of God in Christian terminology. Homo sapiens has to envisage both. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396

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

Our Christian theology is obviously not based “on the total religious experience.” It does not even consider the ambivalent experience of the Old Testament God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 422-423.

The underlying scheme, the quaternio, i.e., the psychological equation of primordial dynamis (prima causa) with gods and their mythology, time and space, is a psychological problem of the first order. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 426-427

From such discussions we see what awaits me once I have become posthumous. Then everything that was once fire and wind will be bottled in spirit and reduced to dead nostrums. Thus are the gods interred in gold and marble and ordinary mortals like me in paper. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 468-469

How do you explain f.i. the fact of a little child dreaming that God is partitioned into four? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451

[The Self]…might equally be called the God within us. Carl Jung, CW 7, Par. 399

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

To the psychologist it is a most noteworthy fact that the religious emphasis has shifted from the triune pater panton [Father of Everything] to the Son and Soter [Savior] and historical man, who was originally one third of the Godhead and is now the central and almost unique feature of the Protestant’s religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473

Owing to His human nature, Christ is the accessible part of the Godhead, and His empirical essence expresses the aforesaid experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473

Yahweh gives life and death. Christ gives life, even eternal life and no death. He is a definite improvement on Yahweh. He owes this to the fact that He is suffering man as well as God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473

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

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

The distance between God and man is so great that Yahweh sees himself obliged to set up an embassy among men-the ambassador is his own son-and to deliver a missive to them (the gospel). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

The Jewish conception of the religious relationship with God as a legal contract (covenant!) gives way in the Christian conception to a love relationship, which is equally an aspect of the marriage with God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

As a contrast to this Judaeo-Christian conception we have the totally alien views current in pagan antiquity: the gods are exalted men and embodiments of ever-present powers whose will and whose moods must be complied with. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

Materia is in the end simply a chthonic mother goddess, and the late Pope seems to have had an inkling of this. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

Now whether these archetypes, as I have called these pre-existent and pre-forming psychic factors, are regarded as “mere” instincts or as daemons and gods makes no difference at all to their dynamic effect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

But it often makes a mighty difference whether they [Archetypes] are undervalued as “mere” instincts or overvalued as gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

According to my view, one should rather say that the term “God” should only be applied in case of numinous inconceivability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 511-512

In dealing with space man has produced-since time immemorial -the circle and the square, which are connected with the idea of shelter and protection, place of the hearth, concentration of the family and small animals, and on a higher level the symbol of the quadratura circuli, as the dwelling place of the “inner man,” the abode of the gods, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 509-510

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

If God is only good, everything is good. There is not a shadow anywhere. Evil just would not exist, even man would be good and could not produce anything evil. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 518-519

Thus when we try to form an image of the fact one calls “God” we depend largely upon innate, pre-existent ways of perceiving, all the more so as it is a perception from within, unaided by the observation of physical facts which might lend their visible forms to our God-image (though there are plenty cases of the sort). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520-523

“God” therefore is in the first place a mental image equipped with instinctual “numinosity,” i.e., an emotional value bestowing the characteristic autonomy of the affect on the image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520-523

The mind is neither the world in itself nor does it reproduce its accurate image. The fact that we have an image of the world does not mean that there is only an image and no world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520-523

The God-image is the expression of an underlying experience of something which I cannot attain to by intellectual means, i.e., by scientific cognition, unless I commit an unwarrantable transgression. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520-523

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

But why should you call this something “God”? I would ask: “Why not?” It has always been called “God.” An excellent and very suitable name indeed. ~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

I commit the impertinence neither of a hypostasis nor of an arrogant qualification such as: “God can only be good.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 525-526

Thus God’s omniscience means really a perfect presence of mind, and then only it becomes a blatant contradiction that He does not consult it or seems to be unaware of it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 526-527

This is the point which is regularly misunderstood: people assume that I am talking about God himself. In reality I am talking about human representations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 526-527

Let us hope that by the Grace of God and the aid of a human physician the ordeal of his passing away will be mitigated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 536-537

“My dear Dr. Jung, Father Victor’s beloved soul has returned to God. He died this morning between 11- 12 a .m . from a sudden thrombosis . He was fully awake, and praying before he became unconscious, and they say he had no great pain . . .” ~The Mother Prioress, 8 May 1960.

It was always my fear that he would have to spend his last days in the professional chill of a hospital or in the atmosphere of a monastery cell. Thank God that was spared him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563

Good and bad must always be united first if the symbol is to be created. The symbol can neither be thought up nor found; it becomes. Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb. Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation. It goes on through willing attention. But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the mind, as befits a God. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.

Take the goodness expressed in Christianity, for instance. That is apparent to us, but get outside of your own skin and into that of a Polynesian native, and Christianity looks very black indeed. Or ask the Spanish heretics who have been burned for the glory of God what they think of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 119

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

Mental possessions are just as good as ghosts, demons, and gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

We would say one got strength from God through prayer, but the primitive gets strength from God by work. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 32

By the way: I must call your attention to the fact that I have no theory that God is a Quaternity. The whole question of quaternity is not a theory at all. It is a phenomenon. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 584-585.

Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 592-597

Don’t try to better than you are, otherwise the devil gets angry. Don’t try to be worse because God gets angry. Try to be what you are, that is acrobatics enough. ~C.G. Jung, Visions Seminars, Vol.1, page 235

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 archetype of the individual is the Self. The Self is all embracing. God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

Jung stated that, at the birth of Christ, Saturn the maleficent god and Jupiter the beneficent god were so near to each other that they were almost one star, that is, the star of Bethlehem, when the new self, Christ, good and evil, was born. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 156-163

It is a clash between man and God, in which man’s Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient god could. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

One must see what the underlying trend is—what the will of God is. You are damned if you don’t follow it. It will ruin your life, your health. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

“Called or uncalled, God is present!” It is a Delphic oracle. The translation is by Erasmus. You ask whether the oracle is my motto. In a way, you see, it contains the entire reality of the psyche. “Oh God!” is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love. “On Creative Achievement” (1946), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 164.

One can never know in what form a man will experience God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 482.

God is not human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him. He is kind and terrible— both at once— and is therefore a great peril from which everyone naturally tries to save himself. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Pages 55-56.

You may have, say, a religious attitude, which means an attitude of great totality, so that you receive the next leaf that falls from the tree as a message from God, and it works. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.

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.

I want to love my God, the defenseless and helpless one. I want to care for him, like a child. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.

What does God want? To act or not to act? I must find out what God wants with Me, and I must find out right away. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 38.

The fact of God’s “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.

In the least the greatest will appear— such is your expectation. And that is the numen, the hint of the god. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.

My God, I love you as a mother loves the unborn whom she carries in her heart. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.

But woe unto you, who replace this incompatible multiplicity with a single God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 351.

Happy am I who can recognize the multiplicity and diversity of the Gods. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 351.

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

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.

I understood that the God whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation, humanity or even in godliness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243

How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attests only to one-half of him? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243

In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 299

Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it. If he does it from love or in the spirit of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234

And what if this has no roots in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 64-66

One must be able to suffer God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 64-66

One must be able to suffer God. That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 64-66

God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 64-66

The term self is often mixed up with the idea of God. I would not do that. I would say that the term self should be reserved for that sphere which is within the reach of human experience, and we should be very careful not to use the word God too often. ~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 doesn’t deserve to be called “God.” ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978

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

The term self is often mixed up with the idea of God. I would not do that. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.

Man’s greatest triumph was that God himself incarnated in man in order to illumine the world; that was a tremendous increase of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 967

To ascribe infinite evil to man and all the good to God would make man much too important: he would be as big as God, because light and the absence of light are equal, they belong together in order to make the whole. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 929

Is there any more beautiful love story than the love story of Mary? Wonderfully secret, divine, it is the only love affair of God that we know about. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 492

Therefore individuation is a sin; it is an assertion of one particle against the gods, and when that happens even the world of the gods is upset, then there is turmoil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263

In the least the greatest will appear—such is your expectation. And that is the numen, the hint of the god. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.

It is tremendously important that people should be able to accept themselves; otherwise the will of God cannot be lived. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 391.

Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention man would have been lost. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114

Thus I saw that the lover survives, and that he is the one who unwittingly grants hospitality to the Gods. ~Carl Jung to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 315

God changes too and is therefore especially interested in man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 36.

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 “relativity of God,” as I understand it, denotes a point of view that does not conceive of God as “absolute,” i.e., wholly “cut off” from man and existing outside and beyond all human conditions, but as in a certain sense dependent on him; it also implies a reciprocal and essential relation between man and God, whereby man can be understood as a function of God, and God as a psychological function of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 412

The renewed God signifies a regenerated attitude, a renewed possibility of life, a recovery of vitality, because, psychologically speaking, God always denotes the highest value, the maximum sum of libido, the fullest intensity of life, the optimum of psychological vitality. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 301

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

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

It is quite understandable that we should seek to hold the truth at arm’s length, because it seems impossible to give oneself up to a God who doesn’t even respect his own laws when he falls victim to one of his fits of rage or forgets his solemn oath. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

We take flight into the Christian collectivity where we can forget even the will of God, for in society we lose the feeling of personal responsibility and can swim with the current. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

He who can risk himself wholly to it finds himself directly in the hands of God, and is there confronted with a situation which makes “simple faith” a vital necessity; in other words, the situation becomes so full of risk or overtly dangerous that the deepest instincts are aroused. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

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

Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440

Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 564

When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe. People were influenced by it not because he said so, but because it stated a widespread psychological fact. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 145.

Yet it [Nietzche’s “God is Dead”] has, for some ears, the same eerie sound as that ancient cry which came echoing over the sea to mark the end of the nature gods: “Great Pan is dead.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 145.

All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his “oppositeness” has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.

It is quite right, therefore, that fear of God should be considered the beginning of all wisdom. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.

Both are justified, the fear of God as well as the love of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.

With us, man is incommensurably small and the grace of God is everything; but in the East, man is God and he redeems himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 768.

We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757

I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148.

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.

God has a terrible double aspect: a sea of grace is met by a seething lake of fire, and the light of love glows with a fierce dark heat which it is said, ‘ardet non lucet’—it burns but gives no light. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, § 733.

That is the eternal, as distinct from the temporal, gospel: one can love God but must fear him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, § 733.

The paradoxical nature of God has a like effect on man: it tears him asunder into opposites and delivers him over to a seemingly insoluble conflict. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 738

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 579

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 740

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 740

The conflict in his [God’s] 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

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 darkness—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.

He [God] fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.

He [Man] must know something of God’s nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.

One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means more or less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.

At the time of the Creation he [God] revealed himself in Nature; now he wants to be more specific and become man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631

For, when those other human beings, who had evidently been created before Adam, appeared on the scene along with the higher mammals, Yahweh created on the following day, by a special act of creation, a man who was the image of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631

But in omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or of the divine nature of man. That is why, long before Genesis was written, we find corresponding testimonies in the ancient Egyptian records. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631

It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, that we are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least —man. This realization is a millennial process. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631

The goal of Eastern religious practice is the same as that of Western mysticism: the shifting of the center of gravity from the ego to the self, from man to God. This means that the ego disappears in the self, and man in God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 958

Religion appears to me to be a peculiar attitude of mind which could be formulated in accordance with the original use of the word religio, which means a careful consideration and observation of certain dynamic factors that are conceived as “powers”: spirits, daemons, gods, laws, ideas, ideals, or whatever name man has given to such factors in his world as he has found powerful, dangerous, or helpful enough to be taken into careful consideration, or grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to be devoutly worshipped and loved. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 8.

I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148.

His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 82

Consequently, the work of salvation is intended to save man from the fear of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.

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.

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

Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 302

We find numberless images of God, but we cannot produce the original. There is no doubt in my mind that there is an original behind our images, but it is inaccessible. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589

“Oh God!” is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 64.

Without knowing it man is always concerned with God. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249

If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 98

God has never spoken to man except in and through the psyche, and the psyche understands it and we experience it as something psychic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 98

God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no roots in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 65-66

One must be able to suffer God. That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth. God will take care of himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 65-66

God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space, an earthly tabernacle. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 65-66

I don’t 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

This psychological definition of God has nothing to do with Christian dogma, but it does describe the experience of the Other, often a very uncanny opponent, which coincides in the most impressive way with the historical “experiences of God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 271-272

His [God’s] moral quality depends upon individuals. That is why He incarnates. Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God the Creator. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 314.

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 will in us will be our form of worship and commerce with God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

Let us hope that God’s good spirit will guide him in his decisions, because it will depend upon man’s decision whether God’s creation will continue. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.

The idea that God is necessarily good and spiritual is simply a prejudice made by man. We wish it were so, we wish that the good and spiritual might be supreme, but it is not. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Pages 512-513.

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

This privatio boni business is odious to me on account of its dangerous consequences: it causes a negative inflation of man, who can’t help imagining himself, if not as a source of the [Evil], at least as a great destroyer, capable of devastating God’s beautiful creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 539-541

God is the mystery of all mysteries, a real Tremendum. Good and Evil are psychological relativities And as such quite real, yet one does not know what they are. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 539-541

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

You have hit the mark absolutely: all of a sudden and with terror it became clear to me that I have taken over Faust as my heritage, and moreover as the advocate and avenger of Philemon and Baucis, who, unlike Faust the superman, are the hosts of the gods in a ruthless and godforsaken age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 309-310

This bi-sexuality of Christ is called androgynous, from aner (man) and gyne (woman). This is not only a Christian idea, the gods in most religions have an androgynous nature ascribed to them in some form orother. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

We have our bete noire and say with the old Pharisee: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are.” We don’t want to know that we are the “other men.” ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27 Jan 1939

No, the Virgin was the archetypal figure of the soul of man, the anima, and it is only in the soul of man that God can be born, where else could it be? ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 32

We can have ideas about God; but whether they are ‘true’ or not, or whether they are ‘absolute’, cannot be answered. ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 305.

A mathematician once remarked that everything in science was man-made except numbers, which had been created by God himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, ¶356, note 24.

Myth is the revelation of divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather it speaks to us as a Word of God. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 340.

No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 340.

It is not we who invent myth; rather it speaks to us as a Word of God. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 340.

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

So it is not the case at all that I begin by classifying my patients into types and then give them the corresponding advice, as a colleague of mine whom God has endowed with a peculiar wit once asserted. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 186-187

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

Instead of these being dissipated, they have made within the inner rotation of monad a center of life which is independent of bodily existence. Such an ego is a god, deus, shen. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17

The beauty of the ritual action is one of its essential properties, for man has not served God rightly unless he has also served him in beauty. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 379.

[Carl Jung on “ThePath to God” – Anthology]

For thousands of years the mind of man has worried about the sick soul, perhaps even earlier than it did about the sick body.

The propitiation of gods, the perils of the soul and its salvation, these are not yesterday’s problems.

Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale.

They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul’s nature.

From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off; only the individual consciousness that has lost its connection with the psychic totality remains caught in the illusion that the soul is a small circumscribed area, a fit subject for “scientific” theorizing.

The loss of this great relationship is the prime evil of neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 10 Para 367

The very absurdity and impossibility of [religious] statements . . . [are] the real ground for belief, as was formulated most brilliantly in Tertullian’s “prorsus credible, quia ineptum.”* (The audacity of Tertullian’s argument is undeniable, and so is its danger, but that does not detract from its psychological truth.) An improbable opinion has to submit sooner or later to correction. But the statements of religion are the most improbable of all and yet they persist for thousands of years. Their wholly unexpected vitality proves the existence of a sufficient cause which has so far eluded scientific investigation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 379

The ways and customs of childhood, once so sublimely good, can hardly be laid aside even when their harmful-ness has long since been proved. The same, only on a gigantic scale, is true of historical changes of attitude. A collective attitude is equivalent to a religion, and changes of religion constitute one of the most painful chapters in the world’s history.In this respect our age is afflicted with a blindness that has no parallel. We think we have only to declare an accepted article of faith incorrect and invalid, and we shall be psychologically rid of all the traditional effects of Christianity or Judaism. We believe in enlightenment, as if an intellectual change somehow had a profounder influence on the emotional processes or even on the unconscious. We entirely forget that the religion of the last two thousand years is a psychological attitude, a definite form and manner of adaptation to the world without and within, that lays down a definite cultural pattern and creates an atmosphere which remains wholly uninfluenced by any intellectual denials. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 313

Everything to do with religion, everything it is and asserts, touches the human soul so closely that psychology least of all can afford to overlook it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 172

If Christian doctrine is able to assimilate the fateful impact of psychology, that is a sign of vitality, for life is assimilation.

Anything that ceases to assimilate dies. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 455

It would be a regrettable mistake if anybody should take my observations as a kind of proof of the existence of God.

They prove only the existence of an archetypal God-image, which to my mind is the most we can assert about God psychologically. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 102

The competence of psychology as an empirical science only goes so far as to establish, on the basis of comparative research, whether for instance the imprint found in the psyche can or cannot reasonably be termed a “God-image.” Nothing positive or negative has thereby been asserted about the possible existence of God, any more than the archetype of the “hero” proves the actual existence of a hero. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 15

It is, in fact, impossible to demonstrate God’s reality to oneself except by using images which have arisen spontaneously or are sanctified by tradition, and whose psychic nature and effects the naive-minded person has never separated from their unknowable metaphysical background. He instantly equates the effective image with the transcendental X to which it points. The seeming justification for this procedure appears self-evident and is not considered a problem so long as the statements of religion are not seriously questioned. But if there is occasion for criticism, then it must be remembered that the image and the statement are psychic processes which are different from their transcendental object: they do not posit it, they merely point to it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 558

If, for instance, we say “God,” we give expression to an image or verbal concept that has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty—unless it be by faith—whether these changes afTect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 555

In religious matters it is a well-known fact that we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 15

It is in the inward experience that the connection between the psyche and the outward image or creed is first revealed as a relationship or correspondence like that of sponsus and sponsa. Accordingly when I say as a psychologist that God is an archetype, I mean by that the “type” in the psyche. The word “type” is, as we know, derived from the Greek TVTToq, “blow” or “imprint”; thus an “archetype” presupposes an imprinter. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 15

The ideas of the moral order and of God belong to the ineradicable substrate of the human soul. That is why any honest psychology, which is not blinded by the garish conceits of enlightenment, must come to terms with these facts. They cannot be explained away and killed with irony. In physics we can do without a God-image, but in psychology it is a definite fact that has got to be reckoned with, just as we have to reckon with “affect,” “instinct,” “mother,” etc. It is the fault of the everlasting contamination of object and image that people can make no conceptual distinction between “God” and “God-image,” and therefore think that when one speaks of the “God-image” one is speaking of God and offering “theological” explanations. It is not for psychology, as a science, to demand a hypostatization of the God-image. But the facts being what they are, it does have to reckon with the existence of a God-image. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 528

The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God’s existence. The human intellect can never answer this question, still less give any proof of God. Moreover such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 110

If we consider the fact that the idea of God is an “unscientific” hypothesis, we can easily explain why people have forgotten to think along such lines. and even if they do cherish a certain belief in God they would be deterred from the idea of a God within by their religious education. which has always depreciated this idea as “mystical.” Yet it is precisely this “mystical” idea which is forced upon the conscious mind by dreams and visions. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 101

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

The materialistic error was probably unavoidable at first. Since the throne of God could not be discovered among the galactic systems, the inference was that God had never existed. The second unavoidable error is psychologism: if God is anything, he must be an illusion derived from certain motives—from will to power, for instance, or from repressed sexuality. These arguments are not new. Much the same thing was said by the Christian missionaries who overthrew the idols of heathen gods. But whereas the early missionaries were conscious of serving a new God by combatting the old ones, modern iconoclasts are unconscious of the one in whose name they are destroying old values. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 142

I have been asked so often whether I believe in the existence of God that I am somewhat concerned lest I be taken for an adherent of “psychologism” far more commonly than I suspect. What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. They believe only in physical facts, and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb. That is no less absurd than the assumption that a non-real psyche is responsible for it. God is an obvious psychic and nonphysical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 751

Owing to the undervaluation of the psyche that everywhere prevails, every attempt at psychological understanding is immediately suspected of psychologism. … If, in physics, one seeks to explain the nature of light, nobody expects that as a result there will be no light. But in the case of psychology everybody believes that what is explained is explained away. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 749

At a time when all available energy is spent in the investigation of nature, very little attention is paid to the essence of man, which is his psyche, although many researches are made into its conscious functions. But the really unknown part, which produces symbols, is still virtually unexplored. We receive signals from it every night, yet deciphering these communications seems to be such an odious task that very few people in the whole civilized world can be bothered with it. Man’s greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, if not actually mistrusted and despised. “It’s only psychological” too often means: it is nothing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 102

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

All of us who have had a religious education are deeply impressed by the idea that Christianity entered into history without an historical past, like a stroke of lightning out of a clear sky. This attitude was necessary, but I am convinced it is not true. 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

To the degree that the modern mind is passionately concerned with anything and everything rather than religion, religion and its prime object—original sin—have mostly vanished into the unconscious. That is why, today, nobody believes in either. People accuse psychology of dealing in squalid fantasies, and yet even a cursory glance at ancient religions and the history of morals should be sufficient to convince them of the demons hidden in the human soul. This disbelief in the devilishness of human nature goes hand in hand with a blank incomprehension of religion and its meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 106

Between the religion of a people and its actual mode of life there is always a compensatory relation, otherwise religion would have no practical significance at all. Beginning with the highly moral religion of the Persians and the notorious dubiousness—even in antiquity—of Persian habits of life, right down to our “Christian” epoch, when the religion of love assisted at the greatest blood-bath in the world’s history—wherever we turn this rule holds true. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 229

In the same measure as the conscious attitude may pride itself on a certain godlikeness by reason of its lofty and absolute standpoint, an unconscious attitude develops with a godlikeness oriented downwards to an archaic god whose nature is sensual and brutal. The enantiodromia of Heraclitus ensures that the time will come when this deus ahsconditus shall rise to the surface and press the God of our ideals to the wall. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 150

The pagan religions met this danger by giving drunken ecstasy a place within their cult. Heraclitus doubtless saw what was at the back of it when he said, “But Hades is that same Dionysos in whose honour they go mad and keep the feast of the wine-vat.” For this very reason orgies were granted religious licence, so as to exorcise the danger that threatened from Hades. Our solution, however, has served to throw the gates of hell wide open. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 182

At a time when a large part of mankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it may be worth our while to try to understand why it was accepted in the first place. It was accepted as a means of escape from the brutality and unconsciousness of the ancient world. As soon as we discard it, the old brutality returns in force, as has been made overwhelmingly clear by contemporary events. . . . We have had bitter experience of what happens when a whole nation finds the moral mask too stupid to keep up. The beast breaks loose, and a frenzy of demoralization sweeps over the civilized world. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 341

The tremendous compulsion towards goodness and the immense moral force of Christianity are not merely an argument in the latter’s favour, they are also a proof of the strength of its suppressed and repressed counterpart —the antichristian, barbarian element. The existence within us of something that can turn against us, that can become a serious matter for us, I regard not merely as a dangerous peculiarity, but as a valuable and congenial asset as well. It is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 20

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. It would be hard to say what the essential difference is between this state and the soul of an animal. 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

With the methods employed hitherto we have not succeeded in Christianizing the soul to the point where even the most elementary demands of Christian ethics can exert any decisive influence on the main concerns of the Christian European. 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, CW 12, Para 13

Christian education has done all that is humanly possible; but it has not been enough. Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 12

No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must therefore take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps to make life healthier, more beautiful, more complete, and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: “This was the grace of God.”No transcendental truth is thereby demonstrated, and we must confess in all humility that religious experience is extra ecclesiam, subjective, and liable to boundless error. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 167

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 nenominations 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

I am convinced that the growing impoverishment of symbols has a meaning. It is a development that has an inner consistency. Everything that we have not thought about, and that has therefore been deprived of a meaningful connection with our developing consciousness, has got lost.If we now try to cover our nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the theosophists do, we would be playing our own history false. A man does not sink down to beggary only to pose afterwards as an Indian potentate.It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness, instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate heirs at all. We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 28

The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean. That the gods die from time to time is due to man’s sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone. In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his images at all. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 22

Religious sentimentality instead of the numinosum of divine experience: this is the well-known characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery. It is readily understandable that such a religion is incapable of giving help or having any other moral effect. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 52

This whole development is fate. I would not lay the blame either on Protestantism or on the Renaissance. But one thing is certain—that modern man, Protestant or otherwise, has lost the protection of the ecclesiastical walls erected and reinforced so carefully since Roman days, and because of this loss has approached the zone of world destroying and world-creating fire. Life has become quickened and intensified. Our world is shot through with waves of uneasiness and fear. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 4

Thus, the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth.Not without reason do we date our era from the age of Augustus, for that epoch saw the birth of the symbolical figure of Christ, who was invoked by the early Christians as the Fish, the Ruler of the aeon of Pisces which had just begun. He became the ruling spirit of the next two thousand years. Like the teacher of wisdom in Babylonian legend, Cannes, he rose up from the sea, from the primeval darkness, and brought a world-period to an end. It is true that he said, “I am come not to bring peace but a sword.” But that which brings division ultimately creates union. Therefore his teaching was one of all-uniting love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 293

“God” is a primordial experience of man, and from the remotest times humanity has taken inconceivable pains either to portray this baffling experience, to assimilate it by means of interpretation, speculation, and dogma, or else to deny it. And again and again it has happened, and still happens, that one hears too much about the “good” God and knows him too well, so that one confuses him with one’s own ideas and regards them as sacred because they can be traced back a couple of thousand years. This is a superstition and an idolatry every bit as bad as the Bolshevist delusion that “God” can be educated out of existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 480

The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them.Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes.Such allegories would be an idle amusement for an unscientific intellect. Myths, on the contrary, have a vital meaning. Not merely do they represent, they are the mental life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul.A tribe’s mythology is its living religion, whose loss is always and everywhere, even among the civilized, a moral catastrophe.But religion is a vital link with psychic processes independent of and beyond consciousness, in the dark hinterland of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 261

What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything at all, precisely that function which links us back to the eternal myth? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 647

Religious experience is absolute; it cannot be disputed. You can only say that you have never had such an experience, whereupon your opponent will reply: “Sorry, I have.” And there your discussion will come to an end. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 167

No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendour to the world and to mankind. He has pistis and peace. Where is the criterion by which you could say that such a life is not legitimate, that such an experience is not valid, and that such pistis is mere illusion? Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about the ultimate things than the one that helps you to live? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 167

Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us—that is, trust and loyalty. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 521

Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505

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. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. 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

Theology does not help those who are looking for the key, because theology demands faith, and faith cannot be made: it is in the truest sense a gift of grace. We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves.It is the only way in which to break the spell that binds us to the cycle of biological events. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 780

The world is not a garden of God the Father, it is also a place of horror. Not only is heaven no father and earth no mother and men are not brothers, but they represent as many hostile destructive forces to which we are the more surely delivered over the more confidently and thoughtlessly we entrust ourselves to the so-called fatherly hand of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 224

But God himself cannot flourish if man’s soul is starved. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 275

The more highly developed men of our time do not want to be guided by a creed or a dogma; they want to understand. So it is not surprising if they throw aside everything they do not understand; and religious symbols, being the least intelligible of all, are generally the first to go overboard. The sacrifice of the intellect demanded by a positive belief is a violation against which the conscience of the more highly developed individual rebels. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 434

The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down. Instead, dogma is “believed”; it is hypostatized, as the Protestants hypostatize the Bible, illegitimately making it the supreme authority, regardless of its contradictions and controversial interpretations. (As we know, anything can be authorized out of the Bible.) Dogma no longer formulates anything, no longer expresses anything; it has become a tenet to be accepted in and for itself, with no basis in any experience that would demonstrate its truth. Indeed, faith has itself become that experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 276

The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I }{now a thing, and then I know it—I don’t need to believe it. ~Carl Jung, Face to Face Interview Para 51

What is needed are a few illuminating truths, but not articles of faith. Where an intelligible truth works, it finds in faith a willing ally; for faith has always helped when thinking and understanding could not quite make the grade. Understanding is never the handmaiden of faith —on the contrary, faith completes understanding.to educate men to a faith they do not understand is certainly a well-meant undertaking, but one runs the risk of creating an attitude that believes everything it does not understand. Dogmas fail on deaf ears, because nothing in our known world responds to such assertions. But if we understand these things for what they are, as symbols, then we can only marvel at the unfathomable wisdom that is in them and be grateful to the institution which has not only conserved them, but developed them dogmatically. The man of today lacks the very understanding that would help him to believe. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 293

It is not ethical principles, however lofty, or creeds, however orthodox, that lay the foundations for the freedom and autonomy of the individual, but simply and solely the empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the “world” and its “reason.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 509

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

The more unconscious we are of the religious problem in the future, the greater the danger of our putting the divine germ within us to some ridiculous or demoniacal use, puffing ourselves up with it instead of remaining conscious that we are no more than the stable in which the Lord is born. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 267

Being “very man” means being at an extreme remove and utterly different from God. “De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine”—this cry demonstrates both, the remoteness and the nearness, the outermost darkness and the dazzling spark of the Divine. God in his humanity is presumably so far from himself that he has to seek himself through absolute self-surrender.And where would God’s wholeness be if he could not be the “wholly other”? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 380

People who merely believe and don’t think always forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worst enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping-stone to better knowledge.People who can believe should be a little more tolerant with those of their fellows who are only capable of thinking.Belief has already conquered the summit which thinking tries to win by toilsome climbing. The believer ought not to project his habitual enemy, doubt, upon the thinker, thereby suspecting him of destructive designs. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 170

Although the actual moment of conversion often seems quite sudden and unexpected, we know from experience that such a fundamental upheaval always requires a long period of incubation. It is only when this preparation is complete, that is to say when the individual is ripe for conversion, that the new insight breaks through with violent emotion. Saul, as he was then called, had unconsciously been a Christian for a long time, and this would explain his fanatical hatred of the Christians, because fanaticism is always found in those who have to stifle a secret doubt.That is why converts are always the worst fanatics. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 582

A Christian of today no longer ought to cling obstinately to a one-sided credo, but should face the fact that Christianity has been in a state of schism for four hundred years, with the result that every single Christian has a split in his psyche. Naturally this lesion cannot be treated or healed if everyone insists on his own standpoint.Behind those barriers he can rejoice in his absolute and consistent convictions and deem himself above the conflict, but outside them he keeps the conflict alive by his intransigence and continues to deplore the pig-headedness and stiff-neckedness of everybody else. It seems as if Christianity had been from the outset the religion of chronic squabblers, and even now it does everything in its power never to let the squabbles rest. Remarkably enough, it never stops preaching the gospel of neighbourly love. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 257

One cannot and may not think about an object held to be indisputable. One can only assert it, and for this reason there can be no reconciliation between the divergent assertions.Thus Christianity, the religion of brotherly love, offers the lamentable spectacle of one great and many small schisms, each faction helplessly caught in the toils of its own unique rightness. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 786

The physical world and the perceptual world are two very different things.Knowing this we have no encouragement whatever to think that our metaphysical picture of the world corresponds to the transcendental reality.Moreover, the statements made about the latter are so boundlessly varied that with the best of intentions we cannot know who is right. The denominational religions recognized this long ago and in consequence each of them claims that it is the only true one and, on top of this, that it is not merely a human truth but the truth directly inspired and revealed by God. Every theologian speaks simply of “God,” by which he intends it to be understood that his “god” is the God. But one speaks of the paradoxical God of the Old Testament, another of the incarnate God of Love, a third of the God who has a heavenly bride, and so on, and each criticizes the other but never himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 781

This objectivity is just what my psychology is most blamed for: it is said not to decide in favour of this or that religious doctrine.Without prejudice to my own subjective convictions I should like to raise the question: Is it not thinkable that when one refrains from setting oneself up as an arbiter mundi and, deliberately renouncing all subjectivism, cherishes on the contrary the belief, for instance, that God has expressed himself in many languages and appeared in divers forms and that all these statements are true—is it not thinkable, I say, that this too is a decision? The objection raised, more particularly by Christians, that it is impossible for contradictory statements to be true, must permit itself to be politely asked: Does one equal three? How can three be one? Can a mother be a virgin? And so on. 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 essence of religious assertion? ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 18

When psychology speaks of the motif of the virgin birth, it is only concerned with the fact that there is such an idea, but it is not concerned with the question whether such an idea is true or false in any other sense.The idea is psychologically true inasmuch as it exists. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 4

Religious statements without exception have to do with the reality of the psyche and not with the reality of physis. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 752

Oddly enough the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. 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. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 18

Unequivocal statements can be made only in regard to immanent objects; transcendental ones can be expressed only by paradox. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 715

The mystery of the Virgin Birth, or the homoousia of the Son with the Father, or the Trinity which is nevertheless not a triad—these no longer lend wings to any philosophical fancy. They have stiffened into mere objects of belief. So it is not surprising if the religious need, the believing mind, and the philosophical speculations of the educated European are attracted by the symbols of the East—those grandiose conceptions of divinity in India and the abysms of Taoist philosophy in China—just as once before the heart and mind of the men of antiquity were gripped by Christian ideas. There are many Europeans who began by surrendering completely to the influence of the Christian symbol until they landed themselves in a Kierkegaardian neurosis, or whose relation to God, owing to the progressive impoverishment of symbolism, developed into an unbearably sophisticated I-You relationship—only to fall victims in their turn to the magic and novelty of Eastern symbols. This surrender is not necessarily a defeat; rather it proves the receptiveness and vitality of the religious sense. We can observe much the same thing in the educated Oriental, who not infrequently feels drawn to the Christian symbol or to the science that is so unsuited to the Oriental mind, and even develops an enviable understanding of them. That people should succumb to these eternal images is entirely normal, in fact it is what these images are for.They are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower.They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation and reflect the ever-unique experience of divinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para II

Agnosticism maintains that it does not possess any knowledge of God or of anything metaphysical, overlooking the fact that one never possesses a metaphysical belief but is possessed by it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 18

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

Dogmas are spiritual structures of supreme beauty, and they possess a wonderful meaning which I have sought to fathom in my fashion. Compared with them our scientific endeavours to devise models of the objective psyche are unsightly in the extreme.They are bound to earth and reality, full of contradictions, logically and aesthetically unsatisfying. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 663

The beauty of the ritual action is one of its essential properties, for man has not served God rightly unless he has also served him in beauty. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 379

If the spiritual adventure of our time is the exposure of human consciousness to the undefined and indefinable, there would seem to be good reasons for thinking that even the Boundless is pervaded by psychic laws, which no man invented, but of which he has “gnosis” in the symbolism of Christian dogma. Only heedless fools will wish to destroy this; the lover of the soul, never. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 168

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. Why this fear of psychology? Or is, in complete contradiction to dogma, the soul itself a hell from which only demons gibber.” Even if this were really so it would not be any the less convincing; for as we all know the horrified perception of the reality of evil has led to at least as many conversions as the experience of good. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 19

If I have ventured to submit old dogmas, now grown stale, to psychological scrutiny, I have certainly not done so in the priggish conceit that I knew better than others, but in the sincere conviction that a dogma which has been such a bone of contention for so many centuries cannot possibly be an empty fantasy. I felt it was too much in line with the consensus omnium, with the archetype, for that. It was only when I realized this that I was able to establish any relationship with the dogma at all. As a metaphysical “truth” it remained wholly inaccessible to me, and I suspect that I am by no means the only one to find himself in that position. A knowledge of the universal archetypal background was, in itself, sufficient to give me the courage to treat “that which is believed always, everywhere, by everybody” as a psychological fad which extends far beyond the confines of Christianity, and to approach it as an object of scientific study, as a phenomenon pure and simple, regardless of the “metaphysical” significance that may have been attached to it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 294

That a psychological approach to these matters draws man more into the centre of the picture as the measure of all things cannot be denied. But this gives him a significance which is not without justification. The two great world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, have, each in its own way, accorded man a central place, and Christianity has stressed this tendency still further by the dogma that God became very man. No psychology in the world could vie with the dignity that God himself has accorded to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 789

There can be no doubt that man’s importance is enormously enhanced if God himself deigns to become one. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 650

-*-For thousands of years, rites of initiation have been teaching rebirth from the spirit; yet, strangely enough, man forgets again and again the meaning of divine procreation. Though this may be poor testimony to the strength of the spirit, the penalty for misunderstanding is neurotic decay, embitterment, atrophy, and sterility. It is easy enough to drive the spirit out of the door, but when we have done so the meal has lost its savour—the salt of the earth. Fortunately, we have proof that the spirit always renews its strength in the fact that the essential teaching of the initiations is handed on from generation to generation. Ever and again there are human beings who understand what it means that God is their father.The equal balance of the flesh and the spirit is not lost to the world. ~Carl Jung, CW4, Para 783

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

Although it is generally assumed that Christ’s unique sacrifice broke the curse of original sin and finally placated God, Christ nevertheless seems to have had certain misgivings in this respect. What will happen to man, and especially to his own followers, when the sheep have lost their shepherd, and when they miss the one who interceded for Them with the father? He assures his disciples that he will always be with them, nay more, that he himself abides within them. Nevertheless this does not seem to satisfy him completely, for in addition he promises to send them from the father another paracletos (advocate, “Counsellor”) in his stead, who will assist them by word and deed and remain with them forever. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 691

Despite the fact that he is potentially redeemed, the Christian is given over to moral suffering, and in his suffering he needs the Comforter, the Paraclete.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. Looked at from a quaternary standpoint, the Holy Ghost is a reconciliation of opposites and hence the answer to the suffering in the God-head which Christ personifies. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 260

The sending of the Paraclete has still another aspect. This Spirit of Truth and Wisdom is the Holy Ghost by whom Christ was begotten. He is the spirit of physical and spiritual procreation who from now on shall make his abode in creaturely man. Since he is the Third Person of the Deity, this is as much as to say that God will be begotten in creaturely man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 692

For that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darkness—the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels. The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 746

God has a terrible double aspect: a sea of grace is met by a seething lake of fire, and the light of love glows with a fierce dark heat of which it is said “ardet non lucet”—it burns but gives no light. That is the eternal, as distinct from the temporal, gospel: one can love God but must fear him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 733

Since the Apocalypse we now know again that God is not only to be loved, but also to be feared. He fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. This involves man in a new responsibility.He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures. Since he has been granted an almost godlike power, he can no longer remain blind and unconscious. He must know something of God’s nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747

The fact that Christian ethics leads to collisions of duty speaks in its favour. By engendering insoluble conflicts and consequently an afflictio animae, it brings man nearer to a knowledge of God. All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his “oppositeness” has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 59

The light God bestrides the bridge—Man—from the dayside; God’s shadow, from the night side. What will be the outcome of this fearful dilemma, which threatens to shatter the frail human vessel with unknown storms and intoxications? It may well be the revelation of the Holy Ghost out of man himself. Just as man was once revealed out of God, so, when the circle closes, God may be revealed out of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 267

A living example of the mystery drama representing the permanence as well as the transformation of life is the Mass. If we observe the congregation during this sacred rite we note all degrees of participation, from mere indifferent attendance to the profoundest emotion. The groups of men standing about near the exit, who are obviously engaged in every sort of worldly conversation, crossing themselves and genuflecting in a purely mechanical way—even they, despite their inattention, participate in the sacral action by their mere presence in this place where grace abounds. The Mass is an extramundane and extratemporal act in which Christ is sacrificed and then resurrected in the transformed substances; and this rite of his sacrificial death is not a repetition of the historical event but the original, unique, and eternal act. The experience of the Mass is therefore a participation in the transcendence of life, which overcomes all bounds of space and time. It is a moment of eternity in time. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 209

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

What the Christian sacrament of baptism purports to do is a landmark of the utmost significance in the psychic development of mankind. Baptism endows the individual with a living soul. I do not mean that the baptismal rite in itself does this, by a unique and magical act. I mean that the idea of baptism lifts man out of his archaic identification with the world and transforms him into a being who stands above it. The fact that mankind has risen to the level of this idea is baptism in the deepest sense, for it means the birth of the spiritual man who transcends nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 136

If God is born as a man and wants to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, he must suffer the terrible torture of having to endure the world in all its reality. This is the cross he has to bear, and he himself is a cross. The whole world is God’s suffering, and every individual man who wants to get anywhere near his own wholeness knows that this is the way of the cross. But the eternal promise for him who bears his own cross is the Paraclete. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 265

Carl Jung Depth Psychology

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Carl Jung on “God” – Quotations

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