64 / 100
300px Rembrandt Belsazar

Carl Jung: To be fully Conscious is Possible 

Visions Seminar

 

Dr. Jung:  To be fully conscious is quite possible.

Mrs. Crowley:  But what I do not understand is the idea of that complete self identity, identity just with yourself, because it seems to me that you are simply in another layer where you are completely surrounded by another stream-only on another level–so that you cannot but disidentify. You are still an instrument or part of the stream, you are still part of a vast layer of non-understanding.

Dr. Jung:  Naturally. You must always be, otherwise you would be God himself.  The point is that you should assimilate yourself and not project half of yourself into other people or institutions. Of course you are far from being perfect, or perfectly conscious. When you are integrated you are perhaps as unconscious as you ever were, only you no longer project yourself; that is the difference. One should never think that man can reach perfection, he can only aim at completion–not to be perfect but to be complete. That would be the necessity and the indispensable condition if there were any question of perfection at all. For how can you perfect a thing if it is not complete?  Make it complete first and see what it is then. But to make it complete is already a mountain of a task, and by the time you arrive at absolute completion, you find that you are already dead, so you never even reach that preliminary condition for perfection yourself. Completion is not perfection: to make a building perfect one must first construct it, and a thing which is not even half finished cannot be perfected. First make it complete: then polish it up if you have time and breath left.  But usually one’s whole life is eaten up on the effort at completion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 589-590