Carl Jung on being Alone. Anthology.
[Carl Jung on being “Alone.”] Anthology.
My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you; therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you. The touchstone is being alone with oneself. This is the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 330.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
To the extent that he does live in reality the whole range of his particular life, the individual is . . . an alchemical retort, in which the elements present in the collective are melted down and refashioned to form a new synthesis, which is then offered to the collective.
But the predigestion of evil which he carried out as part of the process of assimilating his shadow makes him, at the same time, an agent for the immunization of the collective. An individual’s shadow is invariably bound up with the collective shadow of his group, and as he digests his own evil, a fragment of the collective evil is invariably co-digested at the same time. ~Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, p. 130.
The highest and most decisive experience of all . . . is to be alone with . . . [one’s] own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 32.
[The philosophers] called their stone animate because, at the final operations, by virtue of the power of this most noble fiery mystery, a dark red liquid, like blood, sweats out drop by drop from their material and their vessel.
And for this reason they have prophesied that in the last days a most pure [or genuine] man, through whom the world will be freed, will come to earth and will sweat bloody drops of a rosy or red hue, whereby the world will be redeemed from its Fall. In like manner, too, the blood of their stone will free the leprous metals a ~and also men from their diseases. . . . and that is the reason why the stone is called animate.
For in the blood of this stone is hidden its soul. . . . For a like reason they have called it their microcosm, because it contains the similitude of all things of this word, and therefore again they say that it is animate, as Plato calls the macrocosm animate. ~Gerhard Dorn, Quoted in Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 381.
Since the stone represents the homo totus, it is only logical for Dorn to speak of the “putissimus homo” [most true man] when discussing the arcane substance and its bloody sweat, for this is what it is all about. He is the arcanum, and the stone and its parallel or prefiguration is Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. This “most pure” or “most true” man must be no other than what he is, just as “argentum putum” is unalloyed silver; he must be entirely man, a man who knows and possesses everything human and is not adulterated by any influence or admixture from without.
This man will appear on earth only “in the last days.” He cannot be Christ, for Christ by his blood has already redeemed the world from the consequences of the Fall. . . . On no account is it a question here of a future Christ and salvator microcosmi, but rather of the alchemical servator cosmi (preserver of the cosmos), representing the still unconscious idea of the whole and complete man, who shall bring about what the sacrificial death of Christ has obviously left unfinished, namely the deliverance of the world from evil.
Like Christ he will sweat a redeeming blood, but . . . it is “rose-colored”; not natural or ordinary blood, but symbolic blood, a psychic substance, the manifestation of a certain kind of Eros which unifies the individual as well as the multitude in the sign of the rose and makes them whole. ~Gerhard Dorn, Quoted in Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 390.
As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. I cannot presume to pass judgment on his final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion-be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion-ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with his own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche.
The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12: Page 32.
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.
What is meant is, that you should be with yourself, not alone but with yourself, and you can be with yourself even in a crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1484.
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