Carl Jung: Everyone has Two Souls
My contention that man is born equipped with a highly differentiated and fully developed brain with innumerable attributes has often met with antagonism.
Most people continue to believe that everything they have become, every reaction of their psychic ego to everyday occurrences, is determined by their education and their environment.
Few people know anything about the ancestral soul and even fewer believe in it.
Aren’t we all the carriers of the entire history of mankind? Why is it so difficult to believe that each of us has two souls?
When a man is fifty years old, only one part of his being has existed for half a century.
The other part, which also lives in his psyche, may be millions of years old.
Every newborn child has come into this world with a fully equipped brain.
Although in the early stages of life the mind has not gained complete mastery over the body, it is clearly preconditioned for reacting to the outer world—that is, it has the capacity to do so.
Such mental patterns exert their influence throughout life and remain decisive for a person’s thinking.
The newborn does not begin to develop his mental faculties on the first day of his life.
His mind, a finished structure, is the result of innumerable lives before his and is far from being devoid of content.
It is unlikely that we shall ever discover the remote past, into which the impersonal psyche of the individual reaches only during his lifetime, and that environment and education are decisive influences in this process.
These influences become effective from the first days of a child’s life.
On the whole, the receptivity of a small child’s brain tends to be widely underestimated, but the practicing psychologist has frequent evidence to the contrary.
or madman, may project us, against our conscious wills, into another catastrophe from which we may never recover.
We may gas our lives out, and then will we have deserted refuges and none of us left to sit, and dream, in the sun. ~Carl Jung [1931] found in C.G. Jung Speaking; Pages 47-49.
Jung’s Soul: Soul. How should I put the question?
- IV I].333
Jung: You forgot one thing, my soul-and this weighs heavily on me-the skeleton of the prehistoric elephant. An unbearable obscurity remains here. Ask the wise one what the skeleton means.
Soul. How should I put the question?
I. Now that’s simple. You just ask him directly.
S. Will it work. Will he answer? Quite a long time has elapsed since then. The gate is closed. So be it, I knock: wise Philemon, or you, white serpent, speak! What does the skeleton mean? The door opens-the serpent curls up on the black threshold. Speak, serpent-how do you explain the skeleton to me?
Serpent. The gnawed bones? Now that which remains from prehistoric times is what couldn’t be consumed by the ants. The outline remained, what decomposed disappears, but what was solid** remained.
S. Why does it remain in front of the gate, as if it means to block my way to Philemon?
Serp. The primordial past is an obstruction between you and Philemon.
S. What is the primordial past?
Serp. The history of men and Gods, necessary errors that once lived and still obscure the view. An old hoe, useful for cultivation, not a plough that quickly turns the soil. An old instrument, you understand, once good, but now replaced by something better.
S. Why do we need old instruments? What is the old tool.
Serp. Why does this man write down what you say?
S. He must write it, so that he has it and understands.
Serp. Is this the only way? Can’t he look?
S. If he is in a position to.
Serp. He should try.
S. (tome): Will you try? (to the Serp.) would that be the newer, better way?
Serp. It would be. Not everything can be said. He should practice his seeing. It is a better way than the old one.
I. But what if it’s not successful?
Serp. What’s he saying? That it might not succeed? Nonetheless, this is the way to go. ~The Black Books, Vol. VI, Page 292
