[Carl Jung on the…………Esoteric.]
In the course of our discussion we heard the word “esoteric.” It is said, for instance, that the psychology of the unconscious leads to an esoteric form of ethics. Be we have to be careful in using such a word.
Esotericism means mystification. Yet we never know the real secrets, even the so-called esotericists do not know them. Esotericists-at least earlier-were supposed not to reveal their secrets. But the real secrets cannot be revealed. Nor is it possible to make an ‘esoteric” science out of them, for the simple reason that they are not known.
What are called esoteric secrets are mostly artificial secrets, not real ones. Man needs to have secrets, and since he has no notion of the real ones he fakes them. But the real ones come to him out of the depths of the unconscious, and then he may reveal things which he ought really to have kept secret.
Here again we see the numinous character of the reality in the background. It is not we who have secrets, it is the real secrets that have us. ~Carl Jung; Civilization in Transition; Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology; Page 468; Paragraph 886
