Carl Jung: Looking outwards has got to be turned into looking into oneself.
Then what do you advise this inimitable being to do once he passes the ominous age of forty?
An ever-deepening self-knowledge is, I’m afraid, indispensable for the continuation of real life in old age, no matter how unpopular self-knowledge may be.
Nothing is more ridiculous or inept than elderly people pretending to be young—they even lose their dignity, the one prerogative of age.
Looking outwards has got to be turned into looking into oneself.
Discovering yourself provides you with all you are, were meant to be, and all you are living from and for.
The whole of yourself is certainly an irrational entity, but this is just precisely yourself, which is meant to live as a unique and unrepeatable experience.
Thus, whatever you find in your given disposition is a factor of life which must be taken into careful consideration.
If you should find, for instance, an ineradicable tendency to believe in God or immortality, do not allow yourself to be disturbed by the blather of so-called freethinkers.
And if you find an equally resistant tendency to deny all religious ideas do not hesitate: deny them and see how that influences your general welfare and your state of mental or~ spiritual nutrition.
But beware of childishness: whether you call the ultimate unknown “God” or “Matter” is equally futile, since we know neither the one nor the other, though we doubtless have experiences of both.
But we know nothing beyond them, and we cannot produce either the one or the other. ~Carl Jung, Undiscovered Self, Page 447-448
