Carl Jung on the need for Mythic Statements
The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and unconscious.
Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness.
Meaning makes a great many things endurable perhaps everything.
No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.
For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.
It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God.
The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way of distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God.
There is nothing about this Word that could not be considered known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us spontaneously and places obligations upon
us.
It is not affected by the arbitrary operation of our will.
We cannot explain an inspiration.
Our chief feeling about it is that it is not the result of our own ratiocinations, but that it came to us from elsewhere.
And if we happen to have a precognitive dream, how can we possibly ascribe it to our own powers?
After all, often we do not even know, until some time afterward, that the dream represented foreknowledge, or knowledge of something that happened at a distance.
The Word happens to us; we suffer it, for we are victims of a profound uncertainty: with God as a complexio oppositorum, all things are possible, in the fullest meaning of the phrase.
Truth and delusion, good and evil, are equally possible.
Myth is or can be equivocal, like the oracle of Delphi or like a dream.
We cannot and ought not to repudiate reason; but equally we must cling to the hope that instinct will hasten to our aid in which case God is supporting us against God, as Job
long ago understood.
Everything through which the “other will” is expressed proceeds from man his thinking, his words, his images, and even his limitations.
Consequently he has the tendency to refer everything to himself, when lie. begins to think in clumsy psychological terms, and decides that everything proceeds out of his intentions and out of himself.
With childlike naivete he assumes that he knows all his own reaches and knows what he is “in himself.”
Yet all the while he is fatally handicapped by the weakness of his consciousness and the corresponding fear of the unconscious.
Therefore he is utterly unable to separate what he has carefully reasoned out from what has spontaneously flowed to him from another source.
He has no objectivity toward himself and cannot yet regard himself as a phenomenon which he finds in existence and with which, for better or worse, he is identical.
At first everything is thrust upon him, everything happens to him, and it is only by great effort that he finally succeeds in conquering and holding for himself an area of relative freedom. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Pages 340-341.