1. Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.

Nature is not

matter only, she is also spirit.

Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!

Alchemical Studies CW 13

The ancient world contained a large slice of nature and a number of questionable things which Christianity was bound to overlook if the security of a spiritual standpoint was not to be hopelessly compromised.

penal code and no moral code, not even the sublimest casuistry, will ever be able to codify and pronounce just judgment upon the confusions, the conflicts of duty, and the invisible tragedies of the natural man in collision with the exigencies of culture.

“Spirit” is one aspect, “Nature” another.

“You may pitch Nature out with a fork, yet she’ll always come back again,” says the poet.

Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose.

And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations—as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness—nature pops up with her inescapable demands.

Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.

Were that not so, the only source of spirit would be human reason.

It is the great achievement of Paracelsus to have elevated the “light of nature” to a principle and to have emphasized it in a far more fundamental way than his predecessor Agrippa.

The lumen naturae is the natural spirit, whose strange and significant workings we can observe in the manifestations of the unconscious now that psychological research has come to realize that the unconscious is not just a “subconscious” appendage or the dustbin of consciousness, but is a largely autonomous psychic system for compensating the biases and aberrations of the conscious attitude, for the most part functionally, though it sometimes corrects them by force.

Consciousness can, as we know, be led astray by naturalness as easily as by spirituality, this being the logical consequence of its freedom of choice.

The unconscious is not limited only to the instinctual and reflex processes of the cortical centres; it also extends beyond consciousness and, with its symbols, anticipates future conscious processes.

It is therefore quite as much a “supraconsciousness.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 29

 

Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog