Carl Jung to Alan Watts on the Wheel of Life
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
To Alan W. Watts
Dear Sir, 21 December 1936
I’m sorry to be so late in thanking you for kindly sending me the “Wheel of Life.”
I have seen it already.
As you rightly point out, it is not exactly what I meant by mandalas, although figuratively it is a mandala.
There are as you certainly know two kinds: the one I would call a mandala proper, namely for purposes of magic and worship, generally yoga practices.
And the other, the cosmic, geographical, “scientific” mandala.
The “Wheel of Life” belongs to the latter category.
It is a close parallel to our Western cosmological, geographical, and physiological representations, of which you find plenty of examples in alchemistic philosophy and in the early mystical texts ( f.i. Hildegard von Bingen).
The Trinity is very frequently the centre.
Such mandalas are usually based upon even numbers.
That is as you see the reason why I said that I haven’t come across Buddhist mandalas based upon 3, 5, or 6 ( 2 x 3) .
I’m most indebted to you for mentioning the literature concerning the “Wheel.”
Yours truly,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 222-223
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
