~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time – Quotations
Jung and the Story of our Time
Some of the most “normal” of people he had ever seen had come to him as patients and so appalled him by the abnormality lying underneath their worldly attitude that he refused to treat them, knowing that any attempt at healing could release vast forces of abnormality already mobilised below appearances and overwhelm them. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 131
Yet Freud in this particular work of his was so truly on the scent of a new truth, or rather the rediscovery of an ancient one, and so much more advanced on the trail than anyone else that Jung warmed to him instantly. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 136
Adler, as Jung himself said in a letter to R. H. Loeb, was always a sidelight, however important. Freud by contrast was the exponent of a real view. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 140
What of his [Jung] emphasis that “two thousand years of Christianity can only be replaced by something equivalent” and the addition of a great poetic statement of a fundamental element in Jung’s spirit: “An ethical fraternity, with its mythical Nothing, … is a pure vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal power which drives the migrating bird across the sea.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 141
“I found,” he [Jung] told me in a voice resonant with awe, “that the more I looked into my own spirit and the spirit of my patienti, I saw stretched out before me an infinite objective mystery within as great and wonderful as a sky full of stars stretched out above us on a clear and moonless winter’s night.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 146
To me it is miraculous that Jung could have got so far and retained not just his sanity but maintained his appetite for pressing on more deeply. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 150
As a boy Jung had read Froissart, Malory, and their Germanic and Wagnerian equivalents on the Holy Grail, and they had had a profound impact on him. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 152
Somewhere in Emma Jung’s remote ancestral background there was a family legend of a knight of her own kin who had failed the Quest and she felt called upon to set the failure right even in so late a day. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 153
The moment her special duties as mother [Emma] to five children were discharged she began a vast, imaginative research in the origin and meaning of the legend [Grail] and Jung felt he had to respect her sense of responsibility and not intrude upon a theme of unique meaning to her. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 153
Jung had been impressed by the fact that invariably, among the hundreds who swarmed towards him as patients, he found at the core of their neuroses a sense of insecurity and unease that came from a loss of faith, a loss of the quintessential requisites of personal religious experience. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 153
He [Jung] found that he never succeeded in what for want of a better word is called a cure, without enabling the patients to recover their lost capacity for religious experience. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 153
It was a nuance of Jung’s greatness that he did not hesitate to use his experience as a psychologist as a mirror for himself and set the task of knowing the averted face of his own nature reflected in this mirror before anything else. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 154
One thinks, of course, of Dante, who “midway through life found himself in a dark wood.” Jung himself at that moment was approaching the halfway mark of his own life and in a season of himself to which Dante’s metaphor was just as applicable. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 158
Yet this journey down of Jung’s too was essentially a Dante-esque journey, although the vehicle was not poetry and the object scientific, however religious the intent. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 159
One finds, for instance, at moments whenever Virgil, who was his immediate guide on the descent into Hell, was full of fear, Dante could declare without a tremour of doubt, “I have no fear because there is a noble lady in Heaven who takes care of me.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 159
Because the law of life in these matters is as timeless as it is impartial, Jung also was guided in this going down as he had been up to the edge of the abyss by a spirit that was essentially feminine. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 160
But the feminine spirits that led Jung on his first essays were not beautiful at all: We have seen one representative already described by Freud as a “phenomenally ugly female” and she was by no means the only one. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 160
The psalm which spoke of the stone that the builders refused becoming the head-stone in the corner, which as one has already. pointed out could serve as text for the main theme of Jung’s life and work, is rooted in the same earth as this story of Cinderella. Jung’s imagination was obsessed with Cinderella aspects of the mind and Spirit. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 162
Already in the course of his work in his asylum and even more in his vast private practice, Jung had rescued many a Cinderella spirit from 1some ignominious and dishonoured state of itself and transformed it into a personality once more capable of walking, enlarged and reintegrated, in a way of its own. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 162
Jung clearly had the capacity both to see and to act as a catalyst of transubstantiation and transformation, which are the magic the godmother possesses in the parable of Cinderella. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 162
But only Jung in our day possessed the extraordinary capacity to see in advance beyond the dirt, the triviality, and even the banality of appearance and make it his most immediate and urgent task to reveal the vast potential of beauty suppressed and hidden underneath. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 162-163
Greece, not Rome, was the natural earth of Jung’s mind and it is significant that with all that immense interest of his in antiquity, and Rome, as it were, almost next door, he never went to it although he was to come close to it, twice by visiting Ravenna and once on a visit to Pompeii. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 164
As Jung let go” and fell, he came to an area of his spirit so dark and so deep that he stood where the source of all life gushed out as a fountain of blood, vivid, dazzling, red as the fire with which he was compelled later to paint it. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 164
Siegfried had represented too archaic a concept of the heroic.in man and not at all the illuminated modern one Jung’s imagination was after. He represented the German hubris whose maxim was, “Where there is a will there is a way.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 165
Above all, Jung had the clarity and honesty of spirit to recognis that Siegfried’s hubris had been his own too in regard to all this strange new material coming at him. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 165
Jung had painfully taught himself to give freedom to his imagination to go wherever it felt it had to. go on this December descent in o his own netherworld. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 165
From him [Philemon], Jung says, he was to learn real psychic objectivity. It was he who taught Jung how there was a dream, as it were, dreaming him, and that what he had regarded as his own thoughts were no more his own than tables and chairs encountered in a strange room. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 167
Just as Jung would not think of claiming that he had manufactured such pieces of furniture, Philemon would tell him, he could not claim that he had made, unaided and alone out of his own conscious self, the thoughts that were in his mind. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 167
It is the moment of the greatest danger in Jung’s encounter with his unconscious, the danger which accompanies all opportunities of renewal to such an extent that it explains why ancient Chinese uses the same symbolic ideogram for “crisis” and “opportunity.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 168
All our yesterdays contrived to determine that when Jung set out on this journey, it was in a context of life where what woman personifies was twice rejected, first in the shape of the feminine in man and then in her own masculine creative self. ~Carl Jung; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 178
I have known men and women who were hosts to Jung and Toni Wolff when they travelled on psychological missions outside Switzerland and these people have spoken of their dismay when in the intimacy of their homes they observed Toni Wolff repeatedly in the grip of great distress. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 17
Throughout these long years Toni Wolff stood fast and in the process not only sustained the full weight of Jung’s undiscovered feminine self, enabling him thereby to live it out through her into maturity, but inevitably became also the vulnerable intermediary between himself and his embattled shadow. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 176
An imperative of underground logic seems to have demanded that Jung should begin with something black if he were to proceed on his journey accurately. He had no choice in the matter. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 179
It is no accident that round about this time, in this netherworld of his imagination, Jung should have a vision of a fountain of blood rising up and spurting high and wide through the earth. For blood too is red and both fire and furnace, where new meaning is forged in the smithy of ourselves. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 180
One longs for the Red Book to be published in facsimile. It is Jung’s first and most immediate testament, and infinitely evocative. When I first saw it, my eyes were stung by its beauty. I thought there was something numinous about it. A kind of Merlinesque gift seemed to have determined the deep colour and grave proportions. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 180
Also, I knew that nothing Jung ever did ultimately was private or personal in any egotistical or formal collective sense. All that he did in this regard was on behalf of a gift which demanded that he should be one of the foremost servants of meaning in the life of his time. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 180-181
All in the Black Book is dark, and such light as there is dwells in the words. But in the Red Book all is light and colour and in the smouldering beauty the glow of new meaning caught and made visible. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 181
It does not matter whether the material was stone, which Jung was to use again later, the word, colour, or even more mysteriously some movement or sound not seen or heard before, combining to produce an effect that rings out like some kind of trumpet call of Reveille to sleeping senses. . ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 181
Jung, of course, had never thought of himself as a painter and any voice within himself suggesting that he should become an artist was regarded as the voice of temptation from which he devoutly sought to be delivered. Yet the painting of dreams and visions in the Red Book are not unworthy of comparison with William Blake. ~. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 182
Nothing to my mind shows as this Red Book does how in the confrontation of Jung with the great unknown in himself and the life of his time, the strangest of material yielded progressively to more and more significant form. ~. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 182
Last of all there is a painting of a castle, four-square, as in a green-gold haze of space and time. It is of a design Jung was later to recognise from the Chinese material brought to him from the lonely Wilhelm as another imprint of the abiding theme of their yellow castle.. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 182
The last page of the Red Book is finally turned and Jung, fortified, returns to the world of recorded history and time, to put his journey in the context of his own increasingly desperate day and produce facts anp evaluations of his achievement in an idiom contemporary man can understand. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 183
Jung’s too was a prodigal return but to both the masculine and feminine in man, strengthened by trial as few have. been tried. ~~ Laurens van der Post,; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 187
There had been also temptations of siren song like that of the lady posing as anima who tried to lure Jung from science into art. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 187-188
Instead he [Jung] said gravely that he often did not even have the comfort of two or three in his far less exalted role on the journey behind him but had to find his solace from the saying referred to in the Apocryphal New Testament, “And where there is one alone, I say I am with him ~ Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 189
He [Jung] was unusually depressed and had upon him one of those moments of self-denigration which came to him from time to time. He complained with heart-rending conviction that he. had done nothing, absolutely nothing of his essential task in life and with each “nothing” he would hit a rut of snow beside him with that stout English country walking-stick of his. ~ Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 190
This difficult and much neglected book [CW 6] of Jung is a turning point in the art of human communications about which we hear so much and do so little these days. It is a discovery, as it were, of a fool-proof technology of mind for making communication intelligible between all men, no matter what their differences. ~ Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 190
Human beings are forever killing one another over words, whereas if they had only understood what the words were trying to say, they would have embraced one another. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 192
After Jung’s Psychological Types, l am convinced, we no longer have any valid excuse for not· realising that were all ultimately trying to say the same things and express the same longings in terms of our own unique natures. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 192
“I am an increasingly lonely old man writing for other lonely men,” ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 192
And I chose Goethe also because of his significance in this regard to Jung, and in particular for his orchestration of this drama of what Jung was to call the “shadow” in the human spirit. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 193
One of Jung’s main tasks, therefore, was to enable modern man to allow these two elements of Philemon and Baucis to be reborn and grow in his spirit and once more open himself and all others to the experience of the ultimate urge and resurge of life. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 193
Best of all, one should read Aniela Jaffe’s analysis of the whole affair as set out in her masterly essay “Der Nationalsozialismus,” which she wrote largely at my sustained pleading over several years, because I was so dismayed by the way this unwarranted charge continued to be raised against Jung. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 196
Evidence of his [Jung] admiration for the inspired concern of the Jews for all things of the spirit is to be found in the fact that of the three literary trustees appointed by him, two are Jews; the other one, his beloved daughter Marianne Niehus-Jung, alas, is dead. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 197
In fact, Jung had nothing but pity for the spiritually impoverished European who went, as it. were, to beg for spirit in the East. One did not do one’s best by beggars, he would say in their regard, in giving them all they ask for as alms. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 204
Yet even so, despite the warning, the road to Katmandu is still crowded with young European beggars of spirit and pirates after this fashion, despite their possession of a key of their own to all they seek in Jung. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 204
Not the least of Jung’s services to his time was his demonstration of how the dreaming process in man, far from being archaic and redundant, was more relevant than ever. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 205
For years Jung had observed a sort of circular movement of awareness, dreams, visions, and new inner material round an as yet undefined centre like planets and moons around a sun. It was· a strange rediscovery of what had once been called the “magic circle.” ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 205
Some of Jung’s women patients who could not describe it in words or paintings would even dance the magic circle for him. And, as I was able to tell him also, the Stone Age man of Africa to this day does as well. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 205
Jung found this circular pattern such a compulsive, one is inclined to say transcendental, constant in himself and others that he started to paint it and to derive such comfort and meaning from it that for years he hardly drew anything else. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 205
He [Jung] instantly told me how important a piece of evidence the -discovery of the famous “sun-wheel” in Rhodesia had been to him, since it was perhaps the oldest visual representation of this pattern. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 205
One called Window on Eternity, though painted long before his [Jung] meeting with Wilhelm, is included in the “examples of · European mandalas” accompanying The Secret of the Golden Flower, of which the· dream magnolia was obviously an example. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 205
Jung uncovers much of this “delicate magic of life” and shows that it is not dead but· relevant and alive in the symbolism of our imagination and continues to be of great concern to our well-being in the present. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 206
This new and revolutionary view of an unconscious was set out by Jung with an immense wealth of empirical detail, drawn not only from his work in the mental asylums and in his practice but from history, art, literature, and the mythologies and religions of the world. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 209
Jung himself in his Red Book, in the mural paintings he did so magnetically on the walls of his tower at Bollingen, and in his carvings on stone, gave visual expression to his own personifications and abstractions of some of these greatest archetypal images and powers. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 210
Embattled as he was, Jung was moved to go on painting and repainting his portrait at Bollingen in a manner which is so decisive and electric that no imagination can look at the painting and doubt his validity. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 211
The vision came to him in kingfisher-blue wings. Jung painted it with an electric-blue immediacy that to this day is quite startling. Some hours afterwards, walking in his garden by the lake, he found a dead kingfisher lying there. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 211
Wherever Jung looked he saw a world sickening more and more because of a loss of soul, and because of a loss of soul deprived of meaning. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 212
From that moment on, Jung’s concern became more and more a religious concern, however scientific and empiric the instruments chosen for the service. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 212
The moment Jung could direct his patients to see, a meaning in their own suffering, the suffering, even if it did not go, became endurable. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 213
He [Jung] knew, he protested over and over again, that only religion could replace religion. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 213
Jung’s task was to make religion once more credible to unbelieving men and women for whom belief and exhortation were useless if not insulting. ~Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 213
“You tell me you have had many dreams lately but have been too busy with your writing to pay attention to them. You have got it the wrong way round. Your writing can wait but your dreams cannot because they come unsolicited from within and point urgently to the way you must go.” ~Carl Jung, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 214
“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. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern in his collective unconscious.” ~Carl Jung, Jung and the Story of our Time, 216-217
So in the final analysis Jung’s life was of a profoundly religious person, religiously lived to a truly religious end, however scientific the manner. His last years were spent almost entirely in exploring this relationship between individual man and the pattern of God in the human spirit. He was convinced that our spent selves and worn-out societies ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 217
The answer, as Jung saw it, was to abolish tyranny, to enthrone, as it were, two opposites side by side in the service of the master pattern, not opposing or resisting evil but transforming and redeeming it. ~Laurens Van Der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 218
So this role of the shadow in the life of the individual, the life of civilisation, and the reality of religion, not surprisingly, was one of Jung’s closest concerns. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 218
Jung revealed in great detail how the individual imposed his quarrel with his own shadow onto his neighbour, in the process outlining scientifically why men inevitably saw the mote in the eye of their neighbour. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 219
It was typical of Jung that he did not make any attempt to establish the shadow as a great universal, projected outwards from the collective unconscious, before he had sorted it all out scientifically within his own nature and in the individual problems of his own patients. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 220
I myself have often been taken to task for not speaking more about Jung’s shadow. But I cannot speak of what I did not experience. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 220
The important thing to me is not what Jung’s shadow was but that he never ceased to work on it and never was unaware of it. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 220
It was talk of his in this regard that inspired H. G. Wells to write what Job meant to him in his The Undying Fire, just as Well’s Christina Alberta’s Father was an elaboration of something Jung told him one night in his home in Regents Park in London. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 221
It is not surprising, therefore, that nothing made Jung more impatient and at times angrier than the conventional and stubborn religious insistence that evil was only the absence of good, a fault in man alone, and a result of indulgence in the seven deadly sins. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, 222
His [Jung] language, which could be just as earthy as it was poetic, when he was roused in this profound. regard was worthy of an inspired peasant and words like “shitbags” and “pisspots” would roll from his lips in sentences of crushing correction. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, 222
Fear and love were mysteriously joined to enable both man and God to achieve greater meaning. From that moment on, Jung saw the relationship between man and God in a way it has never been perceived, however mystically and intuitively it may have been pre-experienced. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, 225
Jung found man and his unconscious self, man in all four aspects of himself, the man and his feminine self, the woman and her masculine self, joined with God in a task of transcendental meaning. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, 225
But even in his most miserable state, man was not alone, because Jung had clearly demonstrated that where man and God were encountered face to face, a vital, indescribable element of the greatest transforming energies at the disposal of this master pattern was delegated to intercede for man. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, 225
Indeed, Jung could not have worked to reduce the mystery of life half as well had he not done so utterly in a spirit of reverence and love. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, 226
The man who is the keeper of the rational conscious self in man-the Logos principle as Jung called it, or the Word as Saint John had it-needs a clear progression towards conviction by way of ideas and logic before he can see it. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 228
But an even more potent factor than this was the fact that Jung was working ceaselessly to bring back into equal partnership with the man all that was feminine in life. So it was naturally right that the modern woman rather than the modern man should be· the first .to recognise what he was essentially doing. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 228
As I saw her, often at the end of a day or after a weekend spent with Jung at Bollingen, refreshed and uplifted, he was a stimulating and spiritual companion, in full command of the ceremonies of the house. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 230
She [Toni] died suddenly and without ostensible physical warning. Jung saw her only two days before she died. Although he had had no conscious idea that her end was so near he himself was far from well at the time-a dream of Hades some months before had made him uneasy in her regard. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 230
I found her [Barbara Hannah] laughing, saying, “You know, I dreamt about Neptune last night and would you believe it, I have just come back from a car accident in the Neptunestrasse. When will one ever learn?” ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 231
A great natural scholar [Marie Louise Von Franz] by instinct as well as by training, she has been able to carry on Jung’s work now to an historical and archetypal depth unsurpassed by any co-worker of her sex. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 231
Unafraid of the world and completely at peace with a fate which had so violently uprooted her [Jolande Jacobi] from a culture she loved, she performed an invaluable service in establishing Jung’s psychology in terms an extroverted world could understand. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 232
I remember how everywhere negative men prophesied that when Jung died Zurich would see such a dire harvest of feminine suicides as no city had ever experienced. Yet after Jung’s death on the terrible blank morning after the afternoon of storm wherein he died, not one of those ladies cancelled an appointment but each and every one reported for duty as usual to their patients and students. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 234
I came to know Dr. Meier well over the years and to this day count him as a close friend. I have not once heard him complain or utter criticism of Jung about whatever it was that caused them to separate. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 236
Women like Frances G. Wickes, who tragically was deprived of her son in a fateful yachting accident and came to write with such profound insight about the psychology of the young, took over where the men left off for the moment. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 237
She [Frances Wickes] was a most impressive old lady when I met her, totally unembittered by loss of her son and by blindness, and went on working until her death in her nineties. She was indeed a great, rare, and perhaps the most charismatic of the women to follow Jung. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 237
Close beside her was Dr. Eleanor Bertine-I speak only of those I knew personally-and many others like Elined Kotschnig and the gallant Martha Jaeger, both Quakers who laboured to carry Jung into the Society of Friends and make those indomitable “children and servants of the light” realise that the clearer the light the more precise the shadow. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 238
I clearly remember him saying to me that the individual who withdraws his shadow from his neighbour and finds it in himself and is reconciled to it as to an estranged brother is doing a task of great universal importance. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 238
He added quickly that the future of mankind depended on the speed and extent to which individuals learnt to ‘withdraw their shadows from others and reintegrate them honourably within themselves. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 238
Jung turned away when I told him of the dream and was silent a long while for him before he said, as if from far away, “Ach, ja! There is no end to dreams and their meaning;” And then, I think because it meant so much, .he. teased himself and me, saying with a smile, “The dream iif like a woman. It will have the last word as it had the first.” ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 226
I went regularly to her lectures on the myth and legend of the Holy Grail. She was an immensely sensitive, shy, solicitous, circumspect, and introverted spirit, and must have found public exposition of a task o.f such intimate concern extremely difficult ifnot painful. Yet she was dauntless as she was enduring and delivered her meaning with great precision, erudition, and understanding. At the same time, she was working as a lay analyst herself., I knew four of her pupils, all men, and even in the short time I was at Zurich I was amazed at the change in them. I gathered from them that she had a very
“re-creative” way with men who had lost their own way with themselves. ~Laurens Van Der Post, the Story of our Time, Page 228
“In the Pauline Christ symbol,” he wrote, “the supreme religious experiences of West and East confront one another: Christ, the sorrow-laden hero, and the Golden Flower that blooms in the purple hall of the city of jade. What a contrast, what an unfathomable difference what an/ abyss of history!” Yet he was to show that although they started poles· apart in the transcendental symbol of their final seeking they· were one, as .the spirit of East and West should work at one. ·From that moment, Jung· felt no further need for proof of the hypothesis of the collective unconscious; his brief contact with Indians in America, and above all the Elgonyi in Africa, had demonstrated how it held good for the primitive ·as well as the “civilised”; his contact with Wilhelm proved in a much more complex and evolved manner how another great civilisation like China, without any tangible connection with his own, had come to the same conclusion. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 202-203
This privatio boni business [the Catholic doctrine that evil is· a privation of good] is odious to me on account of its dangerous consequences: it causes a negative inflation [ overvaluation] 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. This doctrine produces Luciferian vanity and it is also greatlyresponsible for the fatal underrating of the human soul being the original abode of Evil. It gives a monstrous importance . to the soul and not a word about on whose account the presence of the Serpent in Paradise belongs! The question of Good and Evil, so far as I am concerned with it, has nothing to do with metaphysics; it is· only a concern of psychology. As long as Evil is a μ~ ov [ non-being], nobody will take his own shadow seriouily. Hitler and· ·Stalin will go on representing a mere “accidental lack of perfection.”· The future of mankind very much depends upon the recognition of the shadow. Evil is-psychologically speaking-terribly real. It is a fatal mistake to diminish its power and reality even merely metaphysically. I am sorry, this goes to the very roots of Christianity. Evil verily does not decrease by being hushed up as a non-reality or as mere negligence of man. It was there before him, when he could not possibly have a hand in it. God is the mystery of all mysteries, a real. Tremendum. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 223-224
The letter seems to me to gain in point because it was written during the dark night of the Western spirit we call the Second World War. “You should come up to the level of such understanding whose vehicle is love and not the mind. This love is not transference [ a psychological state of projection frequent between patient and psychiatrist and which Jung always guarded against] and it is no ordinary friendship or sympathy. It is more primitive, more primeval and more spiritual, than anything we can describe. . . . That upper floor is no more you or I, it means many,_ including yourself and anybody whose heart you touch. There is no distance, but immediate presence. It is an eternal secret-how shall I ever explain it?”
And , yet one wonders if at that moment of what appears to an outsider a great victory for the human spirit, Toni Wolff did not feel herself to be declared redundant, to use one of the most sinister euphemisms of our day, and condemned to unemployment for the rest of her life. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 176
What she meant to Jung on that perilous journey can perhaps be summed up best in something he told me towards the end of his life. He was carving in stone~ which had become his favourite visual medium, some sort of memorial of what Emma Jung and Toni Wolff had brought to his life. On the stone for his wife he was cutting the Chinese symbols meaning “She was the foundation of my house.” On the stone intended for Toni Wolff, who had died first, he wanted to inscribe another Chinese character to the effect that she was the fragrance of the house. The imagery of meaning of which this ancient Chinese ideogram is a direct visual expression is clearly saying thereby that. she was the “scent,” which represents . the faculty of intuition I have mentioned. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 177
The dream is a little hidden door in the · innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousness extends. . . . All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial nighr. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of an egohood. -It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, \and immoral. This gap, this silence, then is the guiding and the bridging that was Toni Wolff in Jung’s hour of trial and peril, the most significant outside aid that brought him to total emancipation from the negations personified by a blind Salome. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 177
I shocked a great scientific Excellency once by telling him that when cases seemed to warrant it I had no compunction in speaking to them of spirits instead of complexes and archetypes, with the reservation, of course, that what appeared to them as spirits could merely be personifications of something unconscious in them and sooner or later, when truly made conscious, might vanish. I was compelled always in the beginning to respect my patients’ own truth and idiom and never treated two patients exactly alike.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 58-59
Jung’s breakthrough and going down into this Dante-esque underworld was a result of his overriding concern for consciousness in man or, to make a metaphor of the subject of conversation at the beginning of our meeting, of kindling more fire -for greater light on the darkness of our mind, and, to determine, among other things, what it was in man that so often arose to extinguish such little light as he possessed. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 61
It is odd, or perhaps not odd, that Jung’s family had had at one time a phoenix in its coat of arms and that he was so young, both in person and name, the youngest, and most childlike wise, old man one could meet, as if to leave no doubt that he was uniquely charged to make what was oldest in life young and new again. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 62
I myself remember a beautiful, unusually sensitive girl not yet in her twenties whom Jung at the age of over seventy, at a time when he was trying hard to put analytical treatment well behind him, had reluctantly taken on as a patient. I still recall vividly the wonder in her voice when she talked of how in all the years she worked with Jung, he never once took her outside the range of what she could understand, how always he respected her own limitations and capacity for experience. Through his own respect for what she was she recentred herself and thereon followed, as a plant grown from a small seed, an· enlargement of herself out of her own desire and volition. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 58
Finally, I knew a remarkable woman who was so terrified of herself and of Jung, so ignorant of analytical psychology, although she was a person of. great culture, that she went to see him three times a week for six months without being able. to speak. Yet on each occasion he just talked to her about all the thing; he thought could matter to her as much as they mattered to him, and suddenly at the end of six months she found her own voice within her ·arid spoke out more and more confidently. Soon her isolation from a vital part of herself, and therefore from others too, vanished, and she became what she is today, a person with a unique creative voice and meaning all her own. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 58
It was when this feeling was at its height that I came back from a journey to the interior of Africa to find my wife studying at the newly formed C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, working in particular with Toni Wolff, without whom the great confrontation of Jung with his own unconscious could perhaps not have been carried to so great and creative a conclusion, and Dr. C. A. Meier, who had become Jung’s principal male collaborator and to this day holds Jung’s former professorship at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 37
I was amazed to notice how his face possessed what I think is permitted to the faces only of those who are naturally and permanently filled with wonder and reverence for all the multitudinous detail of life, however drab, for whom there is no frontier between what is ordinary and extraordinary, great and small, but where all are equally charged with their ration of universal wonder. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 42
Finally, to turn to an axiom which bothered Jung particularly, the statement that parallel straight lines met only in infinity. It was not only .a religious but a great psychological truth, for the great opposites in life, man, things, and even inanimate matter where body and antibody, through their. opposition if not contradiction of each other, form a common substance did steer a strange parallel and irreconcilable course until forced to join each other by some transcendental agency which was an expression of infinite meaning. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 86-87
No one has portrayed the Swiss’s relationship with his history and earth better than Jung. For instance, in an address on Paracelsus, the strange, early sixteenth-century physician and philosopher who had a prophetic vision, however clouded, of where Jung was to stand some four hundred years later, he defines all this with a poetic intensity which seized his pen far more often than those who read him only in translation can conceive. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 96
“Zurich taught me a valuable lesson,” he would tell me. “If you waited for ideal human material in my business, you would never start. Always you must take what is nearest at hand, no matter how unpromising, and accept it as the only and therefore the best thing you can do and by sheer hard work transform it into the thing you need. You would be as surprised as I was in Zurich what can come out of the most unpromising human earth when you really try, and keep at it.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 98
One of the outstanding characteristics of the Jung I came to know was that indifferent as his attitude was to the externals of his past, obedient as he was to the natural law of remembrance to which we are all subject and which compels us to recall before all else what we value most, his memory of his own dreams and fantasies was as circumspect, fastidious, and reliable as it was well-nigh incredible. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 98
The vision, I believe, is a dream of the unconscious so charged and powerful that it breaks with startling clarity through the watchful barriers of our waking state to become a dream experienced consciously. Somehow Jung knew this, or rather allowed it to know more for him than his upbringing allowed him to know for himself, so that both vision and dream could, with an extraordinary accuracy, combine to keep his imagination in its own natural way which the whole trend of the age and all its organised knowledge not merely rejected but refused even to investigate. 1~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 101
For just as the instinct of the physicist was compelling men to explore the nature and nuclear tensions. of the atom as a gateway into the mystery of matter, Jung was propelled into walking an untrodden way towards the meaning of which the science and religion of his day appeared so deprived, just by a hunch that it might be found in the tensions and disturbances of the rejected and despised atoms of humanity locked out from so-called normality of life jn the lunatic asylums of his day. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 105
“You see,” Jung was to say to me many years later of this painting, “there is the eternally feminine ·soul of man where it belongs in the dark feminine earth and see ho~ tenderly and confidently she holds· in her arms the child-our greater future self. But make no mistake, · Leonardo saw her there not only in her Christian role but also joined to her pagan aboriginal version. That is why the painting is so meaningful. She is not just Mary the Mother of Jesus but the feminine soul of man, the everlasting Ariadne, her immediate uses fulfilled, forgotten and abandoned on the rocks. Rediscovered as she was briefly in the Renaissance, Leonardo’s prophetic self foresaw already that she was about to be abandoned again, and the wonder, the really new element about her is that, unlike Ariadne, she is not in tears. She is content, confident, and unresentful because she is also the love that endureth and beareth all things and beyond faith and hope knows that in the end the child will grow and all will be well.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 160
According to Jung, the old man called himself Elijah and was, I believe, another personification. of the wise old man in the human spirit; the girl, who called herself Salome and turned out to be blind, was a visualisation of the feminine element in man he was to term “anima” in his delineation still to come of the patterns in this objective world of the collective unconscious within himself; to these he was to give the name of “archetypes.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 166
“I had to face seriously the chances of being mad,” he told me. “I argued with myself day after day whether it would be right to -go, and whether by going I would not merely spread among a world · audience what could be a mental contagion in myself. But I went despite my doubts, delivered my paper, and on the way back, in Holland, heard that the war had broken out. Tragic as it was, I felt immensely relieved in the sense that it came as some sort of outward explanation of the terrible visions of a tide of blood that had been inflicted on me, and confirmed a feeling that nothing had happened to me which was not in a sense also happening to the life of my time, and that more than ever I was to investigate the link between the · two levels of experience.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 158
But at this blind Salome moment in Jung there were two who stood out far and above the rest. There was, of course, his own beautiful and extraordinarily gifted wife Einma. Engaged as she was at this moment not only with the bringing up of a family of five, but wife also to a great man involved in the battle of a lifetime with himself, she hardly had the space of time and mind to give Jung the kind of help he needed at this point. And even if she had possessed the time at that specific moment, she did not as yet possess the necessary qualifications. She had never been a patient of his nor did she ever need to be of him or any other man. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 169
I find confirmation in the fact that when the Nazi explosion threatened Freud’s life in Vienna, it was to one of Jung’s close friends, also a friend of mine, that Freud’s family turned for help and not, significantly, to his Freudian disciples in London. Dr. E. A. (Eddy) Bennet, a close friend of Jung and his family and a distinguished pioneer of analytical psychology himself, helped to organize his escape, found a home, and prepared a welcome for him in Hampstead in London. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 148
The snake, since it appeared in many an heroic myth as counterpart of the hero, was a symbolic confirmation of the fact that the dream was concerned with an heroic mythological content, although Jung hastens to add that such explanations would be excessively intellectual, arid that it would be more meaningful to let those profound personifications be what they were for him at the time-namely, events and experiences. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 165
Salome, as we know, was a dancing girl too and the story and the legends surrounding her so familiar to Jung that he could not have failed to see the obvious personal associations involved. For him to say that Salome was blind, because the anima is incapable of seeing the meaning of things, is really another way of confessing that he himself could not see the meaning of Salome. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 168
One of the most significant facts that Jung brought back from this journey was that man and woman are not merely a biological twosome joined through sex, to carry as best they can the burdens and mysteries of life. They are a foursome, the man and this feminine self personified by ‘the Beatrices, Ariadnes, and ultimately Sophias of history and legend, the woman and a masculine self not yet so accessible to understanding because, due to the heavy duties imposed on her by her own ‘ biological nature and her exploitation by man, she has not up to now been allowed, except vicariously, to articulate it for herself. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 178
