From GoodReads

Psyche

"… ABSURD PREJUDICE TO SUPPOSE THAT EXISTENCE CAN ONLY BE PHYSICAL. As a matter of fact, the only form of existence of which we have immediate knowledge is psychic [i.e., in the mind]. We might as well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses." - Carl Jung

THE NATURE OF THE PSYCHE REACHES INTO OBSCURITIES FAR BEYOND THE SCOPE OF OUR UNDERSTANDING. It contains as many riddles as the universe with its galactic systems, before whose majestic configurations only a mind lacking in imagination can fail to admit its own insufficiency. This extreme uncertainty of human comprehension makes the intellectualistic hubbub not only ridiculous, but also deplorably dull. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 815

"IS THAT WHICH SCIENCE CALLS THE "PSYCHE" NOT MERELY A QUESTION mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon him and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more personal vocation?” ― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

"... MAN IN MY VIEW IS ENCLOSED IN THE PSYCHE (not in his psyche). Could you name me any idea that is not psychic? Can man adopt any standpoint outside the psyche? He may assert that he can, but the assertion does not create a point outside, and were he there he would have no psyche. Everything that touches us and that we touch is a reflection, therefore psychic." -- Carl Jung letter to Joseph Goldbrunner, May 14, 1950

“THE DECISIVE QUESTION FOR MAN IS: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.” - Carl Jung

Fate

"TRUST THAT WHICH GIVES YOU MEANING

and accept it as your guide." - Carl Jung

“UNTIL YOU MAKE THE UNCONSCIOUS CONSCIOUS,

it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung

INDIVIDUALITY: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic text from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has been turned into a Nazareth Gradually From Which Nothing Good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth – the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better." ~Jung, CW 13, Page 99.

"WHERE LOVE RULES, THERE IS NO WILL TO POWER; AND WHERE POWER PREDOMINATES, THERE LOVE IS LACKING. THE ONE IS THE SHADOW OF THE OTHER." — Carl Jung from The Psychology of the Unconscious

COMMUNICATION (REALIZING ONESELF) KEY TO HAPPINESS: Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 356.

MAN'S RELATIONSHIP TO GOD probably has to undergo a certain important change: Instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child's prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine love in us will be our form of worship of, and commerce with, God. - Carl Jung

"HOW CAN I BE SUBSTANTIAL without casting a shadow? I must have a dark side too if I am to be whole; and by becoming conscious of my shadow I remember once more that I am a human being like any other." - Carl Jung

IF THERE WERE NO IMPERFECTIONS, no primordial defect in the ground of creation, why should there be any urge to create, any longing that must be fulfilled?” – Carl Jung MDR page 32

"IF YOU MARRY THE ORDERED TO THE CHAOS, you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness." - Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235

"EVEN THE ENLIGHTEN PERSON REMAINS WHAT HE IS, and is never more than his own limited ego before the ONE who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky." - Carl Jung

TRANSENDENCE/ EVOLVING WHOLE: “Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to express itself as a whole... " – Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung

THERE ARE MANY SPIRITS, both light and dark. We should, therefore, be prepared to accept the view that spirit is not absolute, but something relative that needs completing and perfecting through life. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 645

LIFE LIVES ON ITS HIDDEN 'RHIZONE': “Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It's true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. – from Prologue, Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung

JUNG INFLUENCES...

● In popular culture ● Literature ● Art ● Music ● Theatre, film and television ● Video games

MYTH MORE PRECISE THAN SCIENCE: “What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of individual life..." – Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung

ARCHETYPES...

"THE CONTENTS OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS ARE ARCHETYPES, PRIMORDIAL IMAGES THAT REFLECT BASIC PATTERNS THAT ARE COMMON TO US ALL, AND WHICH HAVE EXISTED UNIVERSALLY SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME." - Carl Jung

As the ego looks in the direction of the Self, the transpersonal center of the psyche (transcending the individual), it tends to experience the Self not as a unity (at least not at first) but as a multiplicity of archetypal factors that one can think of as being represented by mythological gods.

The gods can be seen to stand for the archetypes, the basic patterns within the human psyche that exist independent of personal experience. We all have all of them present, and it is in our best interest to honor all of them at appropriate times and in any given situation because without this balance we run the risk of over identification with one element and thereby do violence to all the others. In turn, this sort of extremism throws our psyche out of whack and we can only see one facet of ourselves and the world. – partially paraphased from Eternal Drama by Edward F. Edinger (GoodReads).

THE PSYCHE CONSISTS ESSENTIALLY OF IMAGES. It is a series of images in the truest sense, not an accidental juxtaposition or sequence, but a structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a "picturing" of vital activities. And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 618

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS MUST BE THOUGHT OF AS a world of images equivalent to the outer world which, is the world of real objects. This formulation must be limited, however, by the recognition that both worlds are psychological functions only, that is, they are subjective. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar, Page 26

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS-SO FAR AS WE CAN SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT at all-appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious. . . .

We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual. -- Carl Jung, The Structure of the Psyche, Collected Works 8, Paragraph 325

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS APPEARS TO BE A LIVING ORGANISM CONTAINING AS MUCH OF THE FUTURE AS THE PAST : "I have a question here about the collective unconscious but I cannot describe it in detail. I can only say that it APPEARS TO BE A LIVING ORGANISM, CONTAINING AS MUCH OF THE FUTURE AS OF THE PAST. We can understand people better from their future than from their past because they are moving away from the latter and going towards the former. The future consists of things that are not yet, but in the unconscious it is as if they had always been. FUTURE EVENTS ARE ALL THERE IN SEED, already formed, ONLY WE HAVE NO WAY OF EXPLAINING THEM; the language of the future is, so to speak, not available. When we try to explain the future, necessarily we use the language of the past and that is wrong and misleading. The unconscious

is always creatively developing the coming time, forming it out of the old and the past."

– Carl Jung, ETH, 06/09/1934

INDIVIDUATION

LIFE'S GOAL: INDIVIDUATION. Realizing the self, an archetype transcending all opposites, so that every aspect of your personality is expressed equally … anima (male) and animus (female), ego and shadow, good and bad, conscious and unconscious, and COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS...

“INDIVIDUALIZATION DOES NOT SHUT ONE OUT FROM THE WORLD, BUT GATHERS THE WORLD TO ONESELF.” - Carl Jung

“EACH OF US IS A UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL – but, in the course of our lives we spend much time, energy and effort to be like others, to fit in, to meet expectations...We need a process that can help us reconnect to our own uniqueness in the world of our daily lives – a way to recover and connect back to our 'soul'.” - Jutta von Buchholz, Jungian analyst

“UNTIL YOU MAKE THE UNCONSCIOUS CONSCIOUS, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” -- Carl Jung

"WHERE LOVE RULES, THERE IS NO WILL TO POWER; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." — Carl Jung from The Psychology of the Unconscious, 1943

"TRUST THAT WHICH GIVES YOU MEANING and accept it as your guide." - Carl Jung

“THE SELF AS THE ESSENCE OF INDIVIDUALITY is unitemporal and unique; as an archetypal symbol it is a God-image and therefore universal and eternal.” - Carl Jung

“THE SELF IS OUR LIFE'S GOAL, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination

we call individuality.” - Carl Jung

WHOLENESS - The goal toward which the individuation process is tending is "Wholeness" or "Integration": a condition in which all the different elements of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, are welded together. The person who achieves this goal possesses "an attitude that is beyond the reach of emotional entanglements and violent shocks - a consciousness detached from the world" (CW 13, par 68).

... idea that the super abundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite -- psychically transmogrifies into its shadow opposite, in the repression of psychic forces that are thereby cathected into something powerful and threatening.

Free will

Or "so-called 'free will'..."

ARCHETYPES AUTONOMOUS: I see that many of my pupils indulge in a superstitious belief in our so-called " free will" and pay little attention to the fact that the archetypes are, as a rule, autonomous entities, and not only material subject to our choice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626

FREE WILL & COMPULSION: …the fact is that free will only exists within the limits of consciousness. Beyond those limits there is mere compulsion. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1, Page 227

FREE WILL AS A PATH: Free will is doing gladly and freely that which one must do. ~Carl Jung; “C. G.Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances" edited by Ferne Jensen.

INSTINCTS: The psyche is also the scene of conflicts between instinct and free will, for instincts are without order and collide with the organised consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 10.

SELF

The Archetype of the Self.

The ego is the workshop where the self is made.

The self has inconceivable powers and possibilities but it needs a world in which these powers and possibilities can become conscious.

Objects and a world to contain them are necessary for consciousness, a place where differentiation occurs and can be experienced.

The self is always present but does not know it … yet everything must be brought into consciousness.

A saying of the alchemist is, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

The saying holds for God, for the anima mundi and for the soul of man.

A variety of forms is revealed through the realization of the self. The self is dissolved into many egos.

Art on right from Alex Grey collection

When the self has become conscious it leads to “participation mystique.”

The self is not wholly personal.

One has one’s own personal view of it, but at the same time it is also, in a sense, more general.

It is also the self of others, being greater than the individual.

A man is both, ego and self. The ego recedes more and more to make room for the self, changing the individual until the ego has disappeared.

The spiritual has to be incarnated but to be able to transform the ego into the self requires also a descent into the depths, into the gross clay (as Freud saw), so that everything has been experienced.

When we say “Our Father,” the Father also symbolizes that self which is hidden in Heaven, in the unconscious.

The Son (Christ) is the consciously achieved self.

The Holy Spirit is the Paraclete promised by Christ in the Words:

“Ye are as gods,” or “Greater things will be done by you.”

If a man sees himself as imago Dei he should and must make good use of his time.

The ego, the puny man, is the opposite of the imago Dei.

If God is A and Christ is B and man is C, then C equals A.

It is said sometimes that Christ relinquished his divinity and became man.

But that cannot be, for what can have become of the divinity?

I do not know in what relation the ego stands to the self, but the self as a transcendent possibility is always present.

As an ego I am less than my totality because I am only conscious of being an ego.

The self is infinitely more extensive.

The ego is a province, merely an administrative centre of a great empire.

Man is an indescribable phenomenon because his self cannot be completely grasped.

The self is the light of the world; it is the full realization of everything in consciousness.

Every animal and every plant is a representation of the self… Thus the whole world enters consciousness.

We would call the self a multiple consciousness in God, or a spiritual Olympus, or an inner firmament.

Paracelsus already lmew this and wrote it for us.

The self is simultaneously something abstract and something personal (supremely personal, indeed}.

It is like the mana that is spread throughout nature which we can only make contact with through our experience of life or through ritual.

Then mana becomes for us incarnated divine power having the aspects of numen and the unknown daimon.

It is as if a turbine in a power station were suddenly to become conscious and say, “I am a part of this power … but I need water to function and engineers to care for me.”

~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Pages 35-36.

God

"Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity..."

See also "Philemon on 'God'" notes

● “’SELF’ IS SOMETHING THAT CAN BE VERIFIED psychologically. We experience “symbols of the self” which cannot be distinguished from “God symbols. I cannot prove that the self and God are identical, although in practice they appear so. Individuation is ultimately a religious process which requires a corresponding religious attitude = the ego-will submits to God’s will. To avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, I say “self” instead of God. It is also more correct empirically. Analytical psychology helps us to recognize our religious potentialities.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 265.

● "I CANNOT DEFINE FOR YOU WHAT GOD IS, I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man, and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being.

Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern in his collective unconscious." ~Carl Jung, Jung and the Story of our Time, 216-217

● “GOD IS NO LONGER MILES OF ABSTRACT SPACE AWAY from you in an extra-mundane sphere. This divinity is not a concept in a theological textbook, or in the Bible; it is an immediate thing, it happens in your dreams at night, it causes you to have pains in the stomach, diarrhea, constipation, a whole host of neuroses.” —C. G. Jung

● “A THING THAT IS INFINITE AND ETERNAL HATH NO QUALITIES, since it hath all qualities. This nothingness or fullness we name PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for then would be distinct from pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma. In pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would me self-dissolution.

● “THE OPPOSITES ARE CONTAINED IN THE PLEROMA, BUT BECAUSE THEY ARE EQUALLY BALANCED, THEY ARE VOID. Although the opposites are manifested in individuals, they are not balanced and void. The individual’s task is to pursue his own distinctness, and this involves him in distinguishing himself from the opposites.

● “WE LABOUR TO ATTAIN TO THE GOOD AND BEAUTIFUL, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, and, therefore, at the same time, from the evil and the ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely nothingness and dissolution.” – Carl Jung Sermo I, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos.

● INDIVIDUATION AND INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE ARE INDISPENSABLE FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF GOD THE CREATOR.…

it is impossible for us to assume that a Creator producing a universe out of nothingness can be conscious of anything, because each act of cognition is based upon a discrimination for instance, I cannot be conscious of somebody else when I am identical with him.

If there is nothing outside of God everything is God and in such a state there is simply no possibility of self-cognition. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 312-316. See full letter at God’s transformation

● I DON"T BELIEVE (in a personal God), but I do know of a power of a very personal nature and an irresistible influence. I call it “God.” -- Carl Jung, Letter to Paul A. Hilty, Oct. 25, 1955

● UNCONSCIOUS AS "GOD": Hence I prefer the term "the unconscious," knowing that I might equally well speak of "God" or "daimon" if I wished to express myself in mythic language. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 336-337

● PERSONAL PSYCHE REFLECTS UNIVERSE: "Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche." ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 335

● ALL THINGS: “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”

● IF THE CREATOR WAS CONSCIOUS OH HIMSELF, He would not need conscious creatures; nor is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of creation, which squander millions of years upon the development of countless species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 339

● THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS SO GREAT that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 339

● ACCORDING TO MY VIEW, one should rather say that the term "God" should only be applied in case of numinous inconceivability. -- Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II

● WHEN YAHWEH CREATED THE WORLD from his prima materia, the “Void,” he could not help breathing his own mystery into the Creation which is himself in every part, as every reasonable theology has long been convinced.

From this comes the belief that it is possible to know God from his Creation.

When I say that he could not help doing this, I do not imply any limitation of his omnipotence; on the contrary, it is an acknowledgment that all possibilities are contained in him, and that there are in consequence no other possibilities than those which express him. - Carl Jung, CW 11. Answer to Job, Pages 400-401, Paras 629-630.

● INDIVIDUAL'S JOURNEY. "If we see God outside ourselves, he tears us loose from the self, since God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the God moves into the self, he smatches us from what is outside us. We arrive at singleness in ourselves." ~Carl Jung.

● EVEN THE ENLIGHTENED PERSON REMAINS WHAT HE IS and never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose firm has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.

● GOD-IMAGE: UNION OF OPPOSITES WITHIN PSYCHE -Individuation, in Jung's view, is a spiritual journey; and the person embarking upon it, although he might not subscribe to any recognized creed, was nonetheless pursuing a religious quest. By paying careful attention to the unconscious, as manifested in dream and fantasy, the individual comes to change his attitude from one in which ego and will are paramount to one in which he acknowledges that he is guided by an integrating factor which is not of his own making. This integrating factor... is named the Self, which not only signifies union between the opposites within the psyche, but a God-image or at least cannot be distinguished from one" (CW 9 ii, par. 42). Jung states: Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality - (CW 9 ii, par 42) (Storr 229).

● UNION OF OPPOSITES: FULLNESS OF LIFE: I understood that the new God would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Pages 243.

● "GOD IS REALITY ITSELF". - “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”

● GOD COULD BE TERMED 'COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS'. - “For the collective unconscious we could use the word God. But I prefer not to use big words, I am quite satisfied with humble scientific language because it has the great advantage of bringing that whole experience into our immediate vicinity.

“You all know what the collective unconscious is, you have certain dreams that carry the hallmark of the collective unconscious; instead of dreaming of Aunt This or Uncle That, you dream of a lion, and then the analyst will tell you that this is a mythological motif, and you will understand that it is the collective unconscious.”

● DIVINITY IS AN IMMEDIATE THING. - “This God is no longer miles of abstract space away from you in an extra-mundane sphere. This divinity is not a concept in a theological textbook, or in the Bible; it is an immediate thing, it happens in your dreams at night, it causes you to have pains in the stomach, diarrhea, constipation, a whole host of neuroses.”

● UNCONSCIOUS AS AN ARCHETYPE OF WHOLENESS; GOD-IMAGE AN ARCHETYPE OF THE SELF. - “It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness. Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with this special content of it, namely the archetype of the Self.” -- Carl Jung, The Visions Seminars, Answer to Job, Jung Letters, Vol. 2

● "MEANING MAKES A GREAT MANY THINGS ENDURABLE - perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that "God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man." -- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

● IF GOD’S CONSCIOUSNESS IS CLEARER THAN MAN’S, then the Creation has no meaning and man no raison d’etre." --C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume II, Page 117.

POWER VERSUS LOVE

● CLICK HERE for Jung's thoughts on the personality of Christ.

BIBLICAL JUNG: "The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once? ~C.G Jung "The Undiscovered Self," CW vol. 10, par. 521.

VOCATVS ATQUE NON VOCATVS DEUSADENRIT : On the tomb of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung this saying is written, "Called or uncalled, God is there." This is Spartan proverb

Ideas outlined

JUNGIAN/ ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY...

1. Psyche

● See "Self" under 9. Archetypes below

● Ego = conscious mind.

● Personal unconscious = memories & suppressed memories

● Collective unconscious = "psychic inheritance"; reservoir of our experiences as a species.

Examples (sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality): deja vu; love at first sight; symbols in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, literature, etc.)

2. Archetypes

(See also #9 below) = contents of the collective unconscious (dominants, imagos, mythological, primordial images, etc.); acts as an "organizing principle" (instincts).

"All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness, not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us." --Jung in The Structure of the Psyche.

ARCHETYPE, PSYCHOID VERSUS IMAGE: “Your conception of the archetype as a psychic gene is quite possible.

“It is also a plausible hypothesis that the archetype is produced by the original life urge and then gradually grows up into consciousness with the qualification, however, that the innermost essence of the archetype can never become wholly conscious, since it is beyond the power of imagination and language to grasp and express its deepest nature.

“It can only be experienced as an image.

“Hence the archetype can never enter consciousness in its entirety but remains a borderline phenomenon, in the sense that external stimuli impinge upon the inner archetypal datum in a zone of friction, which is precisely what we might describe consciousness as being.

“This view would do greater justice to the essentially conflicting nature of consciousness.”

– C.G. Jung to Elisabeth Metzger (2/7/1942) ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 313.

3. Shadow

= amoral -- neither good nor bad, instinctual (like animals), though"dark side" of the ego stored there (evil self unable to admit to.)

4. Persona

= public image (mask, "good impression", "false impression", etc. .)

5. Anima or animus

= archetype communicating with the collective unconscious; together, they are referred to as syzygy.

● Anima = female aspect present in the collective unconscious of men (often deep emotionality and the force of life itself).

● Animus = male aspect present in the collective unconscious of women

(tending toward the logical, rationalistic, even argumentative).

6. Dynamics of the psyche

● Principle of opposites = every wish suggests its opposite. Opposition creates psyche's power (or libido) of the psyche; extent of contrast gives increasing amounts of energy.

● Principle of equivalence = energy created shared by both sides equally. Recognized wish not fulfilled beneficial to psyche's growth; if you denied or suppress it, the energy develops complex.

● Complex = pattern of suppressed energy clustered around archetypal theme. Complexes can “possess” & even lead to a multiple personality.

● Principle of entropy = tendency for oppositions to come together (energy decreases); process of rising above (admitting, understanding) opposites is called transcendence.

7. Introverts / extroverts

● Introverts = shy; ego embracing collective unconscious & archetypes.

● Extroverts = sociable; ego embracing persona & outer word.

8. Four functions

Irrational functions = perception (sensing, intuiting); rational functions = judging (thinking, feeling).

● Sensing = getting information via senses.

● Thinking = evaluating logically.

● Intuiting = seeing around corners.

● Feeling = weighing emotional response.

CLICK HERE for detailed analysis

of four functions

PHOTO ABOVE: Jung & mandalas as tools to study psyche

9. Archetypes

See also #2 above

"All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form, they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness, not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses but to translate into visible reality the world within us." -- Carl Jung, The Structure of the Psyche.

Primordial patterns inherent in the psyche. Endless, overlapping & merging together. Unknowable in themselves, they manifest as compelling images and motifs.

Archetypal images take a variety of forms, including inner personalities, e.g. shadow, anima, animus and the Self.

Archetypes = patterns, behaviors, innate, universal, hereditary; universal patterns and images within collective unconscious. Forces of basic human motivations, values, and personalities.

Four major among unlimited archetypes: PERSONA (social mask hiding primitive); SHADOW (repressed shortcomings); ANIMA/ ANIMUS (female/ male image = "true self" and primary source of communication with the collective unconscious. Combined anima/ animus = syzygy or the divine couple, completion, unification, and wholeness); SELF (mandala = unified psyche, conscious/ unconscious surrounding ego = personality). GOAL = individuation/ self-actualization.

Primordial patterns inherent in the psyche. Endless, overlapping & merging together. Unknowable in themselves, they manifest as compelling images and motifs.

Archetypal images take a variety of forms, including inner personalities, e.g. shadow, anima, animus and the Self.

Examples of archetypes include...

Objects: trees, magical rings, the Holy Grail.

Places: home, enchanted gardens, hell, labyrinth.

Processes: night sea journeys, rites of initiation, heroic quests, and alchemical procedures.

Abstract forms: circles, squares, spirals, and mandalas.

Personalized figures: the wise old man, the trickster, the hero, and the divine child

.

Specific examples...

Mother = symbolized by the primordial mother or "earth mother" of mythology, by Eve and Mary in western traditions, and by less personal symbols such as the church, the nation, a forest, or the ocean.

Father = authority figure.

Family = idea of blood relationship or ties deeper than conscious reasons.

Child = represents the future, becoming, rebirth, and salvation.

Hero = ego fighting the shadow, often ignorant of the ways of the collective unconscious.

Maiden = purity, innocence, naivete.

Trickster = clown, magician, troublemaker.

Hermaphrodite = male and female, union of opposites.

Wise old man = form of the animus, revealing the nature of the collective unconscious.

● Self = most important archetype of all … the ultimate unity of the personality. Symbols: circle, cross, mandala. Personifications: Christ, Buddha, etc.

10. Synchronicity

“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding

everything I cannot explain as a fraud.” -- Carl Jung

See also ► Jung’s letters ► Carl-Jung.net ► Guardian report ► Wikipedia

● Psychological processes = mechanism (cause & effect/ determinism) or teleology (purpose/ free will).

● Synchronicity = meaningful occurrence, neither strictly mechanistic or teleological. More than coincidence. A connection with nature through collective unconscious -- meaningful, but noncausal, connection between an inner and outer event separated by time and space, but, like the Tao, a whole at some level. Example: waking up (inner event) near the time a relative dies (outer event). Jung shared the classic Chinese view that all events happening during this moment of time share its qualities. Synchronicity works because time is a fabric (Einstein) interwoven w/ space.

Behind all these phenomena Jung places the archetype or the constellation of an archetype, which, in his view, is a process that engages equally objective manifestations, in the physical world, and subjective ones, in the psychological universe.

Synchronicity, as an explicative theory, applies to phenomena from the area of parapsychology, prevision and premonition. FROM Carl Jung- Synchronicity.

Jung thought of astrology (which he called the sum of all psychological knowledge of antiquity), the I Ching, and paranormal events as examples of synchronicity. Often triggered by an intense affect that causes anabaissement du niveau mental and corresponding charging of an ordering (not causing) archetype, synchronistic events demonstrate how active archetypes underlie and cut across the spacetime continuum and express their psychoid quality. See unus mundus.

Synchronicity, which fulfills as a fourth the triad of space/time continuum, indestructible energy, and causality, takes three forms: the coincidence of a psychic event with an objective one that takes place simultaneously; of a psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision) which later turns out to be a reflection of an objective and more or less simultaneous distant event; the same, but the event perceived happens in the future--the phantasm is its present form.

Unlike the "primitive" or the East, we tend not to see meaning in chance because we focus on single events and their causes, not on how chance events arrange themselves in groups or series. Synchronicity is one example of acausal orderedness, the underlying equivalence of psychic and physical processes, and represent acts of creation in time of an eternal pattern (Bergson).

Myth: a (usually collective) tale, fable, or dogma that unconsciously symbolizes the activities of the collective unconscious. Natural, intermediate stage between conscious and unconscious cognition. Like religious symbols, myths aren't invented, they arise from the unconscious. Example: legends of the "treasure hard to attain" symbolize the inward treasure of contact with the real Self we must struggle through so many issues to locate. Jung says myths describe inner reality more accurately than so-called scientific truths. They are a kind of therapy for the problems of humanity. They also let a person know what's going on in hisunconscious (it's not you, but the "gods" talking).

ANALYSIS: Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind

Quantum Physics

Jung collaborated with quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli – also Albert Einstein -- in developing his concept of synchronicity.

Click here for a thumbnail summary of quantum physics basic tenets.

"This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is

the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter,

stage manager, author, audience, and critic." ~Carl Jung, General

Aspects of Dream Psychology

11. Active imagination

● Exploring the collective unconscious...

Active imagination: Meditation that observes unconscious as images, narrative or separate entities. Little to no influence is exerted on visualization as it expresses itself.

ACTIVE IMAGINATION is not hypnosis, contemplation, or meditation (but all three).

Hypnosis (is) … the world of unconsciousness.

Contemplation … sharpen(s) the mind's reasoning ability.

Meditation asks us to move away from the dream world and our everyday mind through focusing on a single word, our breathing, or our movement...

Elements of all of these practices are touched upon when practicing Active Imagination. But, Active Imagination relies upon an alert mind, the non-rational, and a high level of inner creative fludity...

Events that bring a person to relax their everyday awareness (e.g. listening to stories, watching the flames in a fireplace, listening to the sea) can move us into Active Imagination. From Mystical Experience Registry.

Click here for ALL the images from the Red Book.

More on imagination

“I really prefer the term 'imagination' to 'fantasy', because there is a difference between the two ... fantasy is mere nonsense, a phantasm, a fleeting impression; but imagination is active, purposeful creation. And this is exactly the distinction I make too. A fantasy is more or less your own invention, and remains on the surface of personal things and conscious expectations. But active imagination, as the term denotes, means that the images have a life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their own logic - that is, of course, if your conscious reason does not interfere.

You begin by concentrating upon a starting point...When you concentrate on a mental picture, it begins to stir, the image becomes enriched by details, it moves and develops. Each time, naturally, you mistrust it and have the idea that you have just made it up, that it is merely you own invention. But you have to overcome that doubt, because it is not true. We can really produce precious little by our conscious mind. All the time we are dependent upon things that literally fall into our consciousness …

For instance, if my unconscious should prefer not to give me ideas, I could not proceed with my lecture, because I could not invent the next step. You all know the experience when you want to mention a name or a word which you know quite well, and it simply does not present itself; but sometime later it drops into your memory. We depend entirely upon the benevolent co-operation of our unconscious. If it does not co-operate, we are completely lost.

Therefore I am convinced that we cannot do much in the way of conscious invention; we over-estimate the power of intention and the will. And so when we concentrate on an inner picture and when we are careful not to interrupt the natural flow of events, our unconscious will produce a series of images which make up a complete story.”

Philemon

“Philemon and the other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I had conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I.

“He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, "If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them."

“It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, or the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be used against me.” -- Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1965, p.183

"We do not create ideas; they create us." -- Jung, A Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Also see Active Imagination" links page

IT WAS HE [PHILEMON] WHO TAUGHT ME psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 183

PSYCHOLOGICALLY, PHILEMON REPRESENTED superior insight. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 183

"THERE ARE GHOSTLY GURUS TOO," he added. "Most people have living gurus. But there are always some who have a spirit for teacher."

~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 184

LATER, PHILEMON BECAME RELATIVIZED by the emergence of yet another figure, whom I called Ka. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 184

PHILEMON WAS THE SPIRITUAL ASPECT, OR "MEANING." KA, ON THE OTHER HAND, was a spirit of nature like the Anthroparion of Greek alchemy with which at the time I was still unfamiliar.

~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 185

KA WAS HE WHO MADE EVERYTHING REAL, but who also obscured the halcyon spirit, Meaning, or replaced it by beauty, the "eternal reflection."

~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 185

THEN I THOUGHT, "PERHAPS MY UNCONSCIOUS IS FORMING A PERSONALITY that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression."

~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 185

PICTURED ABOVE: "... other figures of my fantasies" (left-to-right), Philemon, Ka, Elijah, and Salome...

12. Individuation

(life's goal);

finding the "divine" self...

Individuation: the process by which a person integrates unconscious contents into consciousness, thereby becoming a psychologically whole individual.

Self-realization. Release from persona and identification with the collective unconscious.

An ongoing dialog between ego and Self in which the ego is relativized. Individuation can only unfold in the context of a relationship with others.

In life's first half individuation takes the form of adaptation to culture; in the second half, the ego turns inward and confronts the archetypal ground behind it.

Individuation is the human expression of life's inborn urge toward growth, expansion, and development of innate capacities. It is therefore both a synthesis and an entelechy of the self, a creation of the new and expression of something already present in germinal form.

Classic individuation falls very roughly into four categories, all of which recur and interpenetrate: shadow work, anima/animus work, Wise Old Man/Wise Woman work, and Self work. At each stage the ego integrates the personal aspect of the constellated key archetype; energy from its nonpersonal aspect regresses into the unconscious to activate the next archetype. Individuation is not a road, it's a spiral around the Self.

Individuation makes one conscious of his/her relationships with others, even the cosmos. Individuation begins with guilt and need for expiation due to splitting with conformity, for which the person must give some equivalent: values that help the community.

Comprehensive glossary of Jungian terms

SWITZERLAND HOMES

TWO HOMES: KÜSNACHT & BOLLINGEN, SWITZERLAND

KÜSNACHT/ Jung's home, an immense piece of property on Lake Zurich, where he lived from 1908 until his death in 1961. It is currently the museum of the University Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Zurich.

BOLLINGEN/ Bollingen Tower: Carl Jung's spiritual retreat Bollingen Tower (outside village of Bollingen on the northern shore of Lake Zürich) which was for him an architectural structure mapping his human psyche. Here he lived fairly primatively, while adding more comforts as an extension of consciousness in old age. For much of his life Jung spent several months each year living at Bollingen. The Tower is now owned by a family trust and is not open to the public.

The Bollingen Foundation, created in 1945 but inactive since 1968, was named after it. Jung bought the land in 1922 after the death of his mother. In 1923 he built a two-story round tower on this land. It was a stone structure suitable to be lived in. Additions to this tower were constructed in 1927, 1931, and 1935, resultingin a building that has four connected parts.

A second story was added to the 1927 addition after the death of Jung's wife in 1955,

signifying "an extension of consciousness achieved in old age."

Above the front door rises an attached tower which houses a spiral staircase

– the main staircase of the house.

The rest of thehouse is in a traditional Swiss lakeside style, “modern” for the early 1900′s, with elegant proportions and simple, fin-de-siècle style ornamentation.

The inscription carved on the lintel over the main door of the house is: “Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit” (a quote from the Oracle at Delphi: “Summoned or not summoned, God will be present.”). See "A Tale of Two House" also "Last Encounter with Carl Jung".

Freud vs. Jung

FREUD VERSUS JUNG: “To him (Freud) the unconscious was a product of consciousness, and it simply contained the remnants, I mean, it was sort of a storeroom where all the discarded things of consciousness were heaped up and left.

“But to me (Jung) the unconscious, then was already a matrix, a sort of basis of consciousness of a creative nature, namely, capable of autonomous acts, autonomous intrusions into consciousness.

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial Insight that there are things In the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.

“Psychologically, Philemon represented superior Insight.

“All my works, all my creative activities, have come from those Initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.” ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 153.

Bollingen

Bollingen on the Obersee,

upper Lake Zürich...

“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree,in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower

that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.” ― Carl G. Jung

Mind & motivation

MIND & MOTIVATION GRAPHS

(Jung's paradigms & individuation; Maslow's self-actualization)

1. Universe. 2. Mind. 3. Archetypes. 4. Motivation.

Jung's active imagination and individuation may only be possible, or more easily accessible, through a certain reverie similar to Maslow's self-actualization process?

Basic concepts

“My message is not wholly understood; only poets understand it.” -C.G. Jung

Alchemy

“THE TREMENDOUS ROLE WHICH THE OPPOSITES AND THEIR UNION PLAY IN ALCHEMY helps us to understand why the alchemists were so fond of paradoxes. In order to attain this union, they tried not only to visualize the opposites together but to express them in the same breath. Characteristically, the paradoxes cluster most thickly round the arcane substance, which was believed to contain the opposites in uncombined form as the prima materia, and to amalgamate them as the lapis Philosophorum. Thus the lapis is called on the one hand base, cheap, immature, volatile, and on the other hand precious, perfect, and solid; or the prima materia is base and noble, or precious and parvi momenti (of little moment). The materia is visible to all eyes, the whole world sees it, touches it, loves it, and yet no one knows it. 'This stone therefore is no stone,' says the Turba, 'that thing is cheap and costly, dark, hidden, and known to everyone, having one name and many names.' The stone is 'thousand-named' like the gods of the mystery religions, the arcane substance is 'One and All'.” ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Pages 42-48.

Alchemist quest

(from Jung's alchemy class 1941; click here for the full lecture)

“To the alchemist, matter was endowed with a living soul, and as he met this soul everywhere in his experiments, he concluded that at the bottom of all these individual, physical manifestations, there was a universal, all-permeating soul, an anima mundi (soul of the world), which was the cause of every living substance and of its particular form...

“For man has the yearning in himself to become what he would call the perfect man.

“Or rather, there is the image of a perfect and complete being in his unconscious.

“… the idea or feeling that everything in man is striving towards completion.

“Therefore, we are not surprised when we learn that the alchemists themselves drew a direct parallel between the imperfection of nature and the imperfection of man, and that they saw in the lapis philosophorum (philosopher's stone), the perfect materia, an analogy to Christ, the perfect, divine man.

“But the outstanding and remarkable characteristic of alchemy is the fact that the alchemists did not search for perfection in man but in matter.

“Matter was endowed with a divine soul in their eyes...

“No one need remain ignorant of the fact that he is striving for power, that he wants to become very rich, that he would be a tyrant if he had the chance, that he is pleasure seeking, envious of other people, and so on.

“Everyone can know such things of him or herself, because they are mere ego knowledge.

“But Self-knowledge is something completely different, it is learning to know of the things which are unknown.

“And when someone learns to know of these, he may say of himself that he is a fountain, from which two streams arise; one flows towards the East, where the sun rises, and the other towards the West, where the sun sets.

“… two contrary streams flow from man and two eagles arise from them.

“These are the volatile substances for the alchemist, he calls them spiritus, spiritual potentialities.

“They fly up, fall down again, naked, are re-feathered below and fly up yet again.”

Factors for happiness

1. HEALTH: Good physical & mental health.

2. RELATIONSHIPS: Good personal & intimate relationships.

3. AESTHETICS: Faculty for perceiving beauty in art & nature.

4. FULFILMENT: Reasonable standards of living & satsfactory work.

5. METAPHYSICS: A philosophic or religious point of view capable

of coping successfully with the vicissitudes of life.

Politics

COLLECTIVE SUBHUMAN

What the public still doesn’t know and can’t get into its head is that the collective man is subhuman, nothing but a beast-man, as was clearly demonstrated by the exquisite bestiality of the young German fighters during the Blitzkrieg in Poland. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 282

INDIVIDUAL VOICE

Any organization in which the voice of the individual is no longer heard is in danger of degenerating into a subhuman monster. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 282

WE MAKE OUR OWN EPOCH:

“The great events of world history, are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.” – Carl Jung

PARTICLE OF THE MASS:

“No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.” – Carl Jung, Paracelsus the Physician (1942)

NON-DOCTRINAIRE:

"The political and social isms of our day preach every conceivable ideal, but, under this mask, they pursue the goal of lowering the level of our culture by restricting or altogether inhibiting the possibilities of individual development. " – Carl Jung

JUNG ON SPEAKING OUT

ABOUT WORLD ATROCITIES

Indivdualism

I am afraid of America which educates its children away from being individuals into being mass-educated people. These are the Marxists without knowing it. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Pages 90-95

“It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities . . . interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible. . . . ” - Carl Jung

“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.” - Carl Jung

“To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.” - Carl Jung

“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.” - Carl Jung

“For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.” - Carl Jung

“Yet the real carrier of life is the individual. He alone feels happiness, he alone has virtue and responsibility and any ethics whatever. The masses and the state have nothing of the kind. Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself. He is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State. … The goal of [the individual] is a higher one than the fulfilment of collective ideals, which are all nothing but makeshifts and conditions for bare existence. Since this is the absolute foundation, nobody will deny their importance, but collective ideals are not by a long way the breath of life which a man needs in order to live. If his soul does not live nothing can save him from stultification. His life is the soil in which his soul can and must develop. He has only the mystery of his living soul to set against the overwhelming might and brutality of collective convictions." – - Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1963 (pars. 194 & 198)

Individual rights

"Jung stressed the importance of individual rights in a persons relation to the state and society.

He saw that the state was treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected" but that this personality was "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it", and referred to the state as a form of slavery.

He also thought that the state "swallowed up [people's] religious forces", and therefore that the state had "taken the place of God"—making it comparable to a religion in which "state slavery is a form of worship."

Jung observed that governments "stage acts of state" comparable to religious displays: "Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fire to scare off demons."

From Jung's perspective, this replacement of God with the state in a mass society led to the dislocation of the religious drive and resulted in the same fanaticism of the church-states of the dark ages—wherein the more the state is 'worshiped', the more freedom and morality are suppressed; this ultimately leaves the individual psychically undeveloped with extreme feelings of marginalization." From The Native American Taoist.

Party & state

To Heinz Westmann

Dear Mr. Westmann, 12 July 1947

Best thanks for your letter and your news about the Present Question Conference.

The theme is indeed very interesting: "What is the critical problem in human relationships today?"

Human relationships today are threatened by collective systems, quite apart from the fact that they are still, or always were, in a dubious and unsatisfactory condition.

The collective systems, styled "party" or "State," have a destructive effect on human relationships.

And they can easily be destroyed, too, because individuals are still in a condition of unconsciousness which cannot cope with the tremendous growth and fusion of the masses.

As yon know, the main endeavour of all totalitarian States is to undermine personal relationships through fear and mistrust, the result being an atomized mass in which the human psyche is completely stifled.

Even the relation between parents and children, the closest and most natural of all, is torn asunder by the State.

All big organizations that pursue exclusively materialistic aims are the pacemakers of mass-mindedness.

The sole possibility of stopping this is the development of consciousness in the single individual, who thereby is rendered immune to the lure of collective organizations.

This alone keeps his soul alive, for its life depends on the human relationship.

The accent must fall on conscious personalization and not on State organization.

The latter inevitably leads to the blight of totalitarianism.

In this sense I wish your undertaking every success.

I am writing you this instead of a special greeting and leave it to you to make what use you will of this letter.

With best regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 472.

Individualist

"In so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman...

People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations in the world can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans.”

Carl Gustav Jung – The Undiscovered Self

Miscellaneous

WE NEED MORE UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN NATURE, because the only real danger that exists is man himself . . . We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil.

THE UNCONSCIOUS IS NOT JUST EVIL BY NATURE, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.” The Practice of Psychotherapy (1953)

NIGHTS THROUGH DREAMS tell the myths forgotten by the day. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

OFTEN THE HANDS WILL SOLVE A MYSTERY that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT TASKS men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves. Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post (1977)

WE ARE LIVING IN WHAT THE GREEKS CALLED the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. The Undiscovered Self (1958)

ART IS A KIND OF INNATE DRIVE that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense— he is “collective man”— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind. Psychology & Literature(1930)

ONE LOOKS BACK WITH APPRECIATION to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

WE SHOULD NOT PRETEND TO UNDERSTAND the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation (1921)

THE HEALTHY MAN DOES NOT TORTURE OTHERS – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

THE DREAM IS THE SMALL HIDDEN DOOR in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach. The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934)

MISTAKES ARE, AFTER ALL, THE FOUNDATIONS OF TRUTH, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

WHAT CAN A MAN SAY ABOUT WOMAN, HIS OWN OPPOSITE? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world. Women In Europe (1927)

EVERY FORM OF ADDICTION IS BAD, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

THE EROTIC INSTINCT IS SOMETHING QUESTIONABLE, and will always be so whatever a future set of laws may have to say on the matter. It belongs, on the one hand, to the original animal nature of man, which will exist as long as man has an animal body. On the other hand, it is connected with the highest forms of the spirit. But it blooms only when the spirit and instinct are in true harmony. If one or the other aspect is missing, then an injury occurs, or at least there is a one-sided lack of balance which easily slips into the pathological. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal. The Psychology of the Unconscious(1943)

NO TREE, IT IS SAID, CAN GROW TO HEAVEN unless its roots reach down to hell.

YOUR VISION WILL BECOME CLEAR ONLY WHEN you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.

WHEN AN INNER SITUATION is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

A MAN WHO HAS NOT PASSED THROUGH the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

PEOPLE WILL DO ANYTHING, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will PRACTICE Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come. Psychology & Alchemy(1952)

PSYCHOANALYSIS CANNOT BE CONSIDERED a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfills to perfection its own natural conditions of growth. The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913)

GREAT TALENTS ARE THE MOST LOVELY and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off. Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

EMOTION IS THE CHIEF SOURCE OF all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype (1938)

WE ARE SO CAPTIVATED BY AND ENTANGLED in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Symbolic Life (1953); also in Man and His Symbols (1964)

NOTHING HAS A STRONGER INFLUENCE psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

SELDOM, OR PERHAPS NEVER, DOES A MARRIAGE DEVELOP into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain. Contributions To Analytical Psychology (1928)

THE DYNAMIC PRINCIPLE OF FANTASY IS PLAY, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth. Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation (1921)

THE MEETING OF TWO PERSONALITIES is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. Modern Man In Search of a Soul (1933)