The saying holds for God, for the anima mundi and for the soul of man.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Group Facebook
A saying of the alchemist is, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
The saying holds for God, for the anima mundi and for the soul of man.
A variety of forms is revealed through the realization of the self. The self is dissolved into many egos.
When the self has become conscious it leads to “participation mystique.”
The self is not wholly personal.
One has one’s own personal view of it, but at the same time it is also, in a sense, more general. It is also the self of others, being
greater than the individual.
A man is both, ego and self.
The ego recedes more and more to make room for the self, changing the individual until the ego has disappeared. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 34
“Now, all these myth-pictures represent a drama of the human psyche on the further side of consciousness, showing man as both the one to be redeemed and the redeemer.
The first formulation is Christian, the second alchemical. In the first case man attributes the need of redemption to himself and leaves the work of redemption, the actual opus, to the autonomous divine figure; in the latter case man takes upon himself the duty of carrying out the redeeming opus, and attributes the state of suffering and consequent need of redemption to the anima mundi imprisoned in matter. In both cases redemption is a work.
In Christianity it is the life and death of the God-man which, by a unique sacrifice, bring about the reconciliation of man, who craves redemption and is sunk in materiality, with God. The mystical effect of the God-man’s self-sacrifice extends, broadly speaking, to all men, though it is efficacious only for those who submit through faith or are chosen by divine grace; but in the Pauline acceptance it acts as an apocatastasis and extends also to non-human creation in general, which, in its imperfect state, awaits redemption like the merely natural man.” Psychology and Alchemy (Part 3, Chapter 3.3).