What is the myth you are living?
Besides the obvious personal sources, creative fantasy also draws upon the forgotten and long buried primitive mind with
its host of images, which are to be found in the mythologies of all ages and all peoples.
The sum of these images constitutes the collective unconscious, a heritage which is potentially present in every individual.
It is the psychic correlate of the differentiation of the human brain.
This is the reason why mythological image are able to arise spontaneously over and over again, and to agree with one another not only in all the corners of the wide earth, but at all times.
As they are present always and everywhere, it is an entirely natural proceeding to relate mythologems, which may be very far apart both temporally and ethnically, to an individual fantasy system.
The creative substratum is everywhere this same human psyche and this same human brain, which, with relatively minor variations, functions everywhere in the same way. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Page xxix
I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?”
I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud
of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust.
I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge.
So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks, for—so I told myself—how
could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it?
I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me, from what rhizome I sprang.
This resolve led me to devote many years of my life to investigating the subjective contents which are the products of unconscious processes, and to work out methods which would enable us, or at any rate help us, to explore the manifestations of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Pages xxiv-xxv
