You clearly understand that I am not a mystic but an empiricist.
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
To Norbert Drewitt, O.P.
Dear Father, 25 September 1937
I am much obliged to you for kindly sending me your offprints and notes.
It has interested me very much indeed to read them.
I was particularly satisfied with the fact that you clearly understand that I am not a mystic but an empiricist.
It is true however that a vivid interest in religion and religious truth has guided my research.
My chief curiosity was always the question: What does the human mind, inasmuch as it is a natural involuntary functioning, produce if left to itself?
Such a problem, of course, is only possible after a complete renunciation of all traditional truth, no matter how true it may be.
Whatever my statements are, they are always based upon experiences, and whatever I say is never intended to contradict or to defend an existing truth.
Its sole purpose is to express what I believe I have seen.
Whatever I try in the way of explanation, it never intends to explain away or to recommend or to advise, its sole purpose is to make a particular kind of experience generally and humanly understandable.
I see from your writings that you make a most serious attempt to understand and clarify an exceedingly involved situation.
Your standpoint is of course a positive creed, while I start from a complete lack of truth and understanding.
Yet we are working at the same problem.
I also am impressed by the fact of your complete sincerity and honesty.
I believe therefore that whatever the book you are writing may contain, it will be an honest attempt at a reconciliation of scientific statements with revealed truth.
I am inclined to believe from what I know already that such an enterprise is possible.
But I wish I could talk to you once personally in order to explain to you what my standpoint is in this matter.
I am afraid that I am unable to do it in a letter.
It would require too much Space and time.
I am coming to England next spring at the beginning of April and I should much appreciate it if you would kindly allow me to call on you once during my stay in London.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 237.
It is difficult for a theologian to put himself in an empiricist’s shoes.
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
To Pastor Ernst Jahn
Dear Pastor Jahn, 7 September 1935
I am sorry that pressure of work has prevented me from answering your kind letter. Please forgive me. It is very kind of you to have gone into my work so thoroughly.
With your permission, I would like to draw your attention to a few points that have struck me.
It seems to me that you approach my views too much from the angle of the theologian.
You seem to forget that I am first and foremost :m empiricist, who was led to the question of Western and Eastern mysticism only for empirical reasons.
For instance, I do not by any means take my stand on Tao or any Yoga techniques, but I have found that Taoist philosophy as well as Yoga have very many parallels with the psychic processes we can observe in Western man.
Nor do I get anybody to draw or contemplate mandala pictures as in Yoga, but it has turned out that unprejudiced people take quite naturally to these aids in order to find their bearings in the chaos of unconscious processes that come to light.
A point which theologians very often overlook is the question of the reality of God. When I speak of Cod, I always speak as a psychologist, as I have expressly emphasized in many places in my books.
For the psychologist the Cod-image is a psychological fact.
He cannot say anything about the metaphysical reality of Cod because that would far exceed the limits of the theory of knowledge.
As an empiricist I know only the images originating in the unconscious which man makes of God, or which, to be more accurate are made of God in the unconscious; and these images are undoubtedly very relative.
Another point is the relation between the psychological I and Thou.
The unconscious for me is a definite vis-a-vis with which one has to come to terms.
I have written a little book about this.
I have never asserted, nor do I think I know, what the unconscious is in itself.
It is the unconscious region of the psyche. When I speak of psyche I do not pretend to know what it is either, and how far this concept extends.
For this concept is simply beyond all possibility of cognition.
It is a mere convention for giving some kind of name to the unknown which appears to us psychic.
This psychic factor,as experience shows,is something very different from our consciousness.
If you have ever observed a psychosis in a person you know intimately, you will “know what a dreadful confrontation that can be.
It seems to me that it is difficult for a theologian to put himself in an empiricist’s shoes.
What the theologian takes to be spiritual realities are for the empiricist expressions of psychic life, which at bottom is essentially unknown.
The empiricist does not think from above downwards from metaphysical premises, but comes from below upwards from the phenomenal world and, conscious of the limitations of his mind, must be content with understanding the psychic processes re-constructively.
And so it is with my therapy. I have chiefly to do with people in whom I cannot implant any values or convictions from above downwards.
Usually they are people whom I can only urge to go through their experiences and to organize them in a way that makes a tolerable existence possible.
The pastor of souls is naturally not in this position as a rule; he has to do with people who expressly demand to be spiritually arranged from above downwards.
This task should be left to the pastor of souls. But those rarer people who cannot accept traditional values and convictions, who in other words do not possess the charisma of faith, must perforce seek advice from the empiricist, who for his part, in order to do justice to his task, can appeal to nothing except the given realities.
Thus he will on no account say to his patient, “Your psyche is God,” or ”Your unconscious is God,” because that would be just what the patient has fled from in disgust.
Rather he will start off the psychic process of experiencing unconscious contents, whereby the patient is put in a position to experience his psychic realities and draw his own conclusions.
What I described in the Golden Flower are simply the results of individual developments which closely resemble those arrived at through Eastern practices.
Centuries ago Yoga congealed into a fixed system, but originally the mandala symbolism grew out of the unconscious just as
individually and directly as it does with Western man today.
I had known about the spontaneous emergence of these symbols for 17 years but deliberately published nothing on this subject so as to prevent the regrettable but undeniable imitative instinct from getting hold of these pictures.
In these 17 years I had ample opportunity to see again and again how patients quite spontaneously reached for the pencil in order to sketch pictures that were meant to express typical inner experiences.
Yoga, however, as we know it today, has become a method of spiritual training which is drilled into the initiates from above.
It holds up the traditional pictures for contemplation and has precise rules as to bow they should be executed.
In this respect Yoga is directly comparable to the Exercitia of Loyola. But that is the exact opposite of what I do.
I am therefore an avowed opponent of taking over Yoga methods or Eastern ideas uncritically, as I have stated publicly many times before.
So what I have said on these matters is the result of empirical work and does not constitute the technical principles of my therapy.
Perhaps I may draw your attention to a book that has just been published (Die kulturelle Bedeutung der komplexen Psychologie, Jul.
Springer, Berlin 1935), in which the first contribution deals with my method.
There you will find a philosophical basis for my whole work, which will doubtless elucidate for you any points that may still be obscure.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1, Pages 195-197]
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