1. Carl Jung On The “Soul.” - Anthology - Carl Jung Depth Psychology

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Carl Jung on the “Soul.” – Anthology

Above all, we know desperately little about the possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.

Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof would be just as impossible as the proof of God.

Hence we may cautiously accept the idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word.

Psychic heredity does exist —that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845

For when the soul vanished at death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counterpole to the state of death in this world. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 493

The souls or spirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of the living; they merely continue it.

The view that the psyche is a spirit is implicit in this.

When therefore something psychic happens in the individual which he feels as belonging to himself, that something is his own spirit.

But if anything psychic happens which seems to him strange, then it is somebody else’s spirit, and it may be causing a
possession.

The spirit in the first case corresponds to the subjective attitude, in the latter case to public opinion, to the time-spirit,
or to the original, not yet human, anthropoid disposition which we also call the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 38

The synchronicity principle possesses properties that may help to clear up the body-soul problem.

Above all it is a fact of causeless order, or rather, of meaningful orderedness, that may throw light on psychophysical parallelism.

The “absolute knowledge” which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self-subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence.

Such a form of existence can only be transcendental, since, as the knowledge of future or spatially distant events shows, it is contained in a psychically relative space and time, that is to say in an irrepresentable space-time continuum. ~Carl Jung, CW, Para 948.

The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.

But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.

For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.

It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than myself experiences me. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 45.

Neurosis—let there be no doubt about this—may be any number of things, but never a “nothing but.”

It is the agony of a human soul in all its vast complexity—so vast, indeed, that any and every theory of neurosis is little better than a worthless sketch, unless it be a gigantic picture of the psyche which not even a hundred Fausts could conceive. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 357

A neurosis is by no means merely a negative thing, it is also something positive.

Only a soulless rationalism reinforced by a narrow materialistic outlook could possibly have overlooked this fact.

In reality the neurosis contains the patient’s psyche, or at least an essential part of it; and if, as the rationalist pretends, the neurosis could be plucked from him like a bad tooth, he would have gained nothing but would have lost something very essential to him.

That is to say, he would have lost as much as the thinker deprived of his doubt, or the moralist deprived of his temptation, or the brave man deprived of his fear.

To lose a neurosis is to find oneself without an object; life loses its point and hence its meaning.

This would not be a cure, it would be a regular amputation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355

This image is “My Lady Soul,” as Spitteler called her. I have suggested instead the term “anima,” as indicating something specific, for which the expression “soul” is too general and too vague. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 25

The woman, like the man, becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 32

The imago Dei imprinted on the soul, not on the body, is an image of an image, “for my soul is not directly the image of God, but is made after the likeness of the former image.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 70

“The Word,” he [St. Augustine] says, “took on complete manhood, as it were in its fulness: the soul and body of a man. And if you would have me put it more exactly—since even a beast of the field has a ‘soul’ and a body—when I say a human soul and human flesh, I mean he took upon him a complete human soul.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 17

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 descensus ad inferos, the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 72

You must not look upon God as the author of the existence of evil, nor consider that evil has any subsistence in itself. For evil does not subsist as a living being does, nor can we set before our eyes any substantial essence thereof. For evil is the privation of good. . . . And thus evil does not inhere in its own substance, but arises from the mutilation of the soul. Neither is it uncreated, as the wicked say who set up evil for the equal of good . . . nor is it created. For if all things are of God, how can evil arise from good? ~Carl Jung [citing St. Basil], CW 9ii, Para 82

If the devil fell away from God of his own free will, this proves firstly that evil was in the world before man, and therefore that man cannot be the sole author of it, and secondly that the devil already had a “mutilated” soul for which we must hold a real cause responsible. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 85

I have gone into the doctrine of the privatio boni at such length because it is in a sense responsible for a too optimistic conception of the evil in human nature and for a too pessimistic view of the human soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 113

But there is still another reason why I must lay such critical stress on the privatio boni. As early as Basil we meet with the tendency to attribute evil to the disposition of the soul, and at the same time to give it a “non-existent” character. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114

This picture of the third sonship has certain analogies with the medieval filius philosophorum and the filius macrocosmi, who also symbolize the world-soul slumbering in matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 120

Barbels were sacred to Typhon, who is “that part of the soul which is passionate, impulsive, irrational, and truculent.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 187

The centering of the image on hell, which at the same time is God, is grounded on the experience that highest and lowest both come from the depths

of the soul, and either bring the frail vessel of consciousness to shipwreck or carry it safely to port, with little or no assistance from us. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 209

Ever since the Timaeus it has been repeatedly stated that the soul is a sphere. As the anima mundi, the soul revolves with the world wheel, whose hub is the Pole. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 212

The world-soul or, in this case, the world-spirit is a projection of the unconscious, there being no method or apparatus which could provide an objective experience of this kind and thus furnish objective proof of the world’s animation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 219

This idea is nothing more than an analogy of the animating principle in man which inspires his thoughts and acts of cognition. “Soul” and “spirit,” or psyche as such, is in itself totally unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 219

He who does not understand how to free the “truth” in his own soul from its fetters will never make a success of the physical opus, and he who knows how to make the stone can only do so on the basis of right doctrine, through which he himself is transformed, or which he creates through his own transformation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 248

This recalls the impressive opening sentence of Ignatius Loyola’s “Foundation”: “Man was created to praise, do reverence to, and serve God our Lord, and thereby to save his soul.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 252

Thus, in the course of the eighteenth century, there arose that notorious rift between faith and knowledge. Faith lacked experience and science missed out the soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 268

The connecting link here is the archetype of the God- man, which on the one hand became historical reality in Christ, and on the other, being eternally present, reigns over the soul in the form of a supraordinate totality, the self. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 283

Through this doctrine Jesus is related to the Original Man (Christ as second Adam). His soul is “of three parts and (yet) one”—a Trinity. As examples of the Original Man the text mentions the Cabiros and Oannes. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 313

Meister Eckhart, using a different formulation, says that “God is born from the soul,” and when we come to the Cherubinic Wanderer of Angelus Silesius, God and the self coincide absolutely. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 321

The times have undergone a profound change: the procreative power no longer proceeds from God, rather is God born from the soul. The mythologem of the young dying god has taken on psychological form—a sign of further assimilation and conscious realization. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 321

Hermes is a conjurer of spirits, a guide of souls, and a begetter of souls. But the souls were “brought down from the blessed Man on high, the archman Adamas, . . . into the form of clay, that they might serve the demiurge of this creation, Esaldaios, a fiery god, the fourth by number.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 325

The Archanthropos is the Logos, whom the souls follow “twittering,” as the bats follow Hermes in the nekyia. He leads them to Oceanus and—in the immortal words of Homer—to “the doors of Helios and the land of dreams.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 327

He [Plotinus] says in the Enneads: “Self-knowledge reveals the fact that the soul’s natural movement is not in a straight line, unless indeed it have undergone some deviation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 342

Here the point is the centre of a circle that is created, so to speak, by the circumambulation of the soul. But this point is the “centre of all things,” a God-image. This is an idea that still underlies the mandala-symbols in modern dreams. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 343

From various hints dropped by Hippolytus, it is clear beyond a doubt that many of the Gnostics were nothing other than psychologists. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 347

Thus he [Hippolytus] reports them [Gnostics] as saying that “the soul is very hard to find and to comprehend,” x and that knowledge of the whole man is just as difficult. “For knowledge of man is the beginning of wholeness, but knowledge of God is perfect wholeness.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 347

And Monoimos, in his letter to Theophrastus, writes: “Seek him from out thyself, and learn who it is that taketh possession of everything in thee, saying: my god, my spirit, my understanding, my soul, my body; and learn whence is sorrow and joy, and love and hate, and waking though one would not, and sleeping though one would not, and getting angry though one would not, and falling in love though one would not. And if thou shouldst closely investigate these things, thou wilt find Him in thyself, the One and the Many, like to that little point, for it is in thee that he hath his origin and his deliverance.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 347

This primary substance is round (massa globosa, rotundum, world and the world-soul; it is in fact the world-soul and the world-substance in one. It is the “stone that has a spirit,” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 376

According to the old view the soul is round and the vessel must be round too, like the heavens or the world. The form of the Original Man is round. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 377

Accordingly Dorn says that the vessel “should be made from a kind of squaring of the circle, so that the spirit and the soul of our material, separated from its body, may raise the body with them to the height of their own heaven.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 377