I believe that we have the choice
I believe that we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God. I daily weigh up my whole life and I continue to regard the fiery brilliance of the God as a higher and fuller life than the ashes of rationality. The ashes are suicide to me. I could perhaps put out the fire but I cannot deny to myself the experience of the God. Nor can I cut myself off from this experience. I also do not want to, since I want to live. My life wants itself whole.
Therefore I must serve my self I must win it in this way. But I must win it so that my life will become whole. For it seems to me to be sinful to deform life where there is yet the possibility to live it fully. The service of the self is therefore divine service and the service of mankind. If I carry myself I relieve mankind of myself and heal my self from the God.
I must free my self from the God, since the God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is also the abomination, he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness, he is more than power, he is also powerlessness, he is more than omnipresence, he is also my creature. ~Carl Jung; Red Book, Vol. I, Page 67
There is no other choice. It is a destiny which has to be accepted.
Puer Aeternus Problem by Marie-Louise Von Franz
The process of individuation is a process of inner growth to which one is tied – one cannot get away from it. If you say no to it and to do not accept it, then, since you are not in it, it grows against you, and then it is your own inner growth which kills you.
If you refuse the growth, then it kills you, which means that if a person is completely infantile and has not other possibility, then not much will happen.
But if the person has a greater personality within – that is a possibility of growth, then a psychological disturbance will come.
That is why we say that a neurosis is a positive symptom in a way.
It shows that something wants to grow, it shows that that person is not right in his or her present state.
If the growth is not accepted, then it grows against you, at your own expense, and then there is what might be called a negative individuation.
The process of individuation, of inner maturing and growth, goes on unconsciously and ruins the personality instead of healing it.
The inner possibility of growth in a person is a dangerous thing because either you say yes to it and go ahead, or you are killed by it.
There is no other choice. It is a destiny which has to be accepted. — Marie-Louise von Franz, Puer Aeternus, Page 59
Carl Jung on the Ego and “Free Will.”
I have suggested calling the total personality which, though present, cannot be fully known, the self.
The ego is, by definition, subordinate to the self and is related to it like a part to the whole, Inside the field of consciousness it has, as we say, free will.
By this I do not mean anything philosophical, only the well-known psychological fact of “free choice” or rather the subjective feeling of freedom.
But, just as our free will clashes with necessity in the outside world, so also it finds its limits outside the field of consciousness in the subjective inner world, where it comes into conflict with the facts of the self.
And just as circumstances or outside events “happen” to us and limit our freedom, so the self acts upon the ego like an objective occurrence which free will can do very little to alter.
It is, indeed, well known that the ego not only can do nothing against the self, but is sometimes actually assimilated by unconscious components of the personality that are in the process of development and is greatly altered by them. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Pages 4-5; Para 9.
freedom choice
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