We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life.
The hero wants to open up everything he can.
But the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot. Incapacity prevents further ascent.
Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it.
We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life.
For how else shall it develop into ability?
We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it.
But that is precisely what we wanted.
Incapacity will overcome us and demand its share of life.
Our ability will desert us, and we will believe, in the sense of the spirit of this time, that it is a loss.
Yet it is no loss but a gain, not for outer trappings, however, but for inner capability.
The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal.
This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands.
If all heroism is erased, we fall back into the misery of humanity and into even worse.
Our foundations will be caught up in excitement since our highest tension, which concerns what lies outside us, will stir them up.
We will fall into the cesspool of our underworld, among the rubble of all the centuries in us.
The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs.
Consequently you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists.
No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down. ― Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 240
Problems of Life – Anthology
I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. [Life’s greatest problems] can never be solved but only outgrown. ~Carl Jung; “Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower”, Page 89.
You can succeed in going away from your problems, you need only to look away from them long enough. You may escape, but it is the death of the soul. ~Carl Jung, Dream
I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 5.
The analyst has unsolved problems because he is alive—life is a problem daily. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
It even seems as if young people who have had a hard struggle for existence are spared inner problems, while those who for some reason or other have no difficulty with adaptation run into problems of sex or conflicts arising from a sense of inferiority. “The Stages of Life” (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 762
If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. ~Carl Jung; The Content of the Psychoses; The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease.
The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence. ~Psychological Types Ch. 5, p. 271
The serious problems in life…are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. ~Carl Jung, Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Page 394.
I always worked with the temperamental conviction that fundamentally there are no insoluble problems, and experience justified me in so far as I have often seen individuals simply outgrow a problem which had destroyed others. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 88.
If you devote yourself, intentionally and intellectually, to dangerous problems such as the squaring of the circle, this is yet another indication of a tendency to get away from the body, because this problem symbolizes an irrational state of wholeness which cannot be contrived but can only be experienced. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 306-307
life life