Carl Jung on Endurance. – Anthology
The opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.
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.
I was grieved for him. Now he has vanished and stepped outside time, as all of us will do after him. Life, so- called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one. I cannot mourn the dead. They endure, but we pass over. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 485.
Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one. I cannot mourn the dead. They endure, but we pass over. .. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 483.
Please give X. my best greetings and tell him-because his love is all too easily injured-he should meditate on Paul’s words in the Epistle to the Corinthians: “Love endureth all things.” Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 120-121.
Marriage is indeed a brutal reality, yet the experimentum crucis of life. I hope you learn to endure and not to struggle against the suppressing necessities of fate. Only thus you remain in the centre. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 172-173.
What you think of as a few days of spiritual communion would be unendurable for me with anyone, even my closest friends. The rest is silence! This realization becomes clearer every day as the need to communicate dwindles. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 363.
Jaffe reports “a penchant for Negro spirituals” along with Bach, Handel Mozart, and early music. A string quar- tet of Schubert had to be turned off because “it moved him too much,” while Beethoven’s late quartets “churned him up almost beyond endurance.” C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.
The sensitiveness to noise persists. I always seek silence. I am a bundle of opposites and can only endure my- self when I observe myself as an objective phenomenon. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 78.
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.
The boon of increased self-awareness is the sufficient answer even to life’s suffering, otherwise it would be meaningless and unendurable. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 310-311.
Everything that is necessary can be lived if only you will stand by yourself and endure things as they are with- out grumbling. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.
Death is more enduring of all things, that which can never be cancelled out. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 323
Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore. A philosophical or religious view of the world enables him to do this, and such views prove to be, at the very least, psychic methods of healing if not of salvation. Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1578
It is submission enough, amply enough, if we subjugate ourselves to our self. The work of redemption is al- ways first to be done on ourselves, if one dare utter such a great word. This work cannot be done without love for ourselves.
Must it be done at all? Certainly not, if one can endure our given condition and does not feeling need of redemption. The tiresome feeling of needing redemption can finally become too much for one. Then one seeks to rid oneself of it and thus enters into the work of redemption. Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 338
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.
It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible. Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 192.
It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence. Carl Jung; “The Philosophical Tree” (1945); CW 13: Alchemical Studies; Page 307.
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhi- zome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 4.
Love “bears all things” and “endures all things’* (i Cor. 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic “love.” Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 354
If the projected conflict is to be healed, it must return into the psyche of the individual, where it had its un- conscious beginnings. He must celebrate a Last Supper with himself, and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood; which means that he must recognize and accept the other in himself. . . . Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ’s teaching, that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to rend others also? Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis
When I started analyzing I could usually endure only two cases a day because it was too much of a strain for me. Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 204.
Man has to cope with the problem of suffering. The Oriental wants to get rid of suffering by casting it off. Western man tries to suppress suffering with drugs. But suffering has to be overcome, and the only way to overcome it is to endure it. We learn that only from him.” [And here he pointed to the Crucified.] Carl Jung, Letters, Volume 1, Page 236.
To Olga Frobe-Kapteyn
Dear Frau Frobe, Bollingen, 20 August 1945
The opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. •
Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role.
Your present situation is the result of pressure of circumstances which are unavoidable.
It is conflicts of duty that make endurance and action so difficult.
Your life’s work for Eranos was unavoidable and right.
Nevertheless it conflicts with maternal duties which are equally unavoidable and right.
The one must exist, and so must the other.
There can be no resolution, only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature.
You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life.
Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly.
We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the “reconciling third” takes shape.
Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you, and let whatever may happen, happen.
Admit that your daughter is right in saying you are a bad mother, and defend your duty as a mother towards Eranos.
But never forget that Eranos is also the right thing and was latent within you from the beginning.
The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life.
A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels.
But God loves human beings more than the angels.
With kindest regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung, ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375
