Carl Jung (quotes) - Wisdom Trove

Making the unconscious conscious

.

Go within and face your soul …

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.
The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one’s own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you find that you can not support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation.
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
Your perception will become clear only when you can look into your soul.
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.
The more veiled becomes the outside world, steadily losing in colour, tone and passions, the more urgently the inner world calls us.
The inner man has access to the sense organs of god.
God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts—God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.

.

… and get deeply in touch with your feelings and emotions …

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.
Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.
Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.
How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one’s emotions.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.
Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.

.

… beyond the mere intellect …

Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.
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.

.

… in order to make the unconscious conscious

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.
Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light, but making the darkness conscious.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.
What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.
We may think that we fully control ourselves. However, a friend can easily reveal something about us that we have absolutely no idea about.
Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.
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.”
How can anyone see straight when he does not see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings?
The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.
The greatest sin is to be unconscious.

.

To make the unconscious conscious brings great freedom from our conditioning …

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.
Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.
Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.
The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.
We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.
Our unconscious is the key to our life’s pursuits.

.

… and helps us to transcend our human problems

All the greatest and most important problems in life are fundamentally insoluble … They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This “outgrowing” proves on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the horizon and through this broadening of outlook, the insoluble lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge.
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.
When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.

.

Awaken

.

Awaken from ego …

Even the enlightened person 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.
Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned.
An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.

.

… and wake up to who you really are

I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.
I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.
The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.
We discover ourselves through others.
You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things.
To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock.

.

Discover your connection to the infinite

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.
Even the enlightened 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.

.

The power of perception

.

Realise the power of mental perception in influencing the way we interpret things

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.

.

Self acceptance and integration

.

Come to accept and love yourself …

A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.
The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? As a rule, the Christian’s attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.
What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved — what then?
Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.

.

… including your shadow …

How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.
If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.
It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one’s personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self- knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
The best political, social and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapuetic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period of time.
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.
What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved — what then?

.

… and your madness

Be silent and listen: have you recognised your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognise your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognise it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognise in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.

.

Accepting your shadow stops you projecting it onto others

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
The best political, social and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.
Everything about other people that doesn’t satisfy us helps us to better understand ourselves.
A man’s hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.

.

Accepting your shadow brings wholeness

I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.
I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.
Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.

.

Be who you are

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.
The only important thing is to follow nature. A tiger should be a good tiger; a tree, a good tree. So people should be people. But to know what people are, one must follow nature and go alone, admitting the importance of the unexpected.
The whole point of Jesus’s life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.

.

Come to understand and know yourself

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

.

Embrace and accept life

.

Remain attentive, accepting life as it unfolds

Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be – by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before.
I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume and attitude towards them.
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me.
What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to way I thought it ought to.
One must be able to let things happen.

.

Embrace personal change and renewal

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.
I’ve realised that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool.

.

Embrace the duality inherent in life

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word “happiness” would lose it’s meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites – day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.
There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

.

Embrace creativity

A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.
Creative power is mightier than its possessor.
If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
The creative process is a living thing, implanted, as it were in the souls of men.
True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories. That is why I say to any beginner: Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories but your own creative individuality alone must decide.

.

Embrace intuition

In such doubtful matters, where you have to work as a pioneer, you must be able to put some trust in your intuition and follow your feeling even at the risk of going wrong.
Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.
Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations.
Intuition is one of the four basic psychological functions along with thinking, feeling, and sensing.

.

Embrace your potential …

Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted.
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
You must live life in such a spirit that you make in every moment the best of possibilities.
The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.

.

… and your talents

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.
If you are a gifted person, it doesn’t mean that you gained something. It means you have something to give back.

.

Embrace nature

As musician, Nature is maestro to ten thousand bird songs, chirping crickets, howl and roar of wild beasts, buzz of insects, trumpeting of elephants, organ music of the surf–the great symphony of forest and jungle.
Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.
Nature is not matter only. She is also a spirit.
Our world has become dehumanised. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature.

.

Embrace solitude

I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.

.

Embrace personal change and growth

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
In every adult there lurks a child— an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.

.

Embrace imagination

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Without the playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.

.

Embrace the mystery of existence…

Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.
It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.

.

… and the state of knowing and not knowing

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions – not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know.
I have gradually learned to be cautious even in disbelief.
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.
Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.

.

Embrace passion

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

.

Embrace individuality

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.
In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.
The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.
Resistance to the organised mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

.

Embrace opportunities for challenge

Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man –his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life.
My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

.

Embrace love

Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.
Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.
For better to come, good must stand aside.
Still, nothing is possible without love. For love puts one in a mood to risk everything, and not to withhold important elements.
Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror.

.

Embrace silence

Silence is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torrent for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.
Real work is completed in silence and strikes a chord in the minds of only a very few.

.

Find meaning

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
When goals go, meaning goes. When meaning goes, purpose goes. When purpose goes, life goes dead on our hands.
Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide.
Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.

.

Embrace what comes from within

Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

.

Find meaning in synchronicity

.

Recognise synchronicity when it happens and find meaning in it

Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.
Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.
Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.
Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world.
Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.
The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or “runs.” What I found were “coincidences” which were connected so meaningfully that their “chance” concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.
We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.
Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogenous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in time, or that space is relative to the psyche.
Synchronistic events provide an immediate religious experience as a direct encounter with the compensatory patterning of events in nature as a whole, both inwardly and outwardly.

.

Thoughts on human challenges

.

Fear

Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.
If there is fear of failing, the only safety consists in deliberately jumping.

.

Envy

Envy does not allow humanity to sleep.

.

Pain

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow.
The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.
God enters through the wound.
The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and…each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

.

Order and chaos

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

.

Addiction

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

.

Mistakes

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.

.

Criticism

Criticism has the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved, or redirected, but it is capable only of harm when there is something to be built.

.

Conflict

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light.

.

Repression and resistance

Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.
What you resist, persists.
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
You always become the thing you fight the most.
The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral.It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.
All fanaticism is repressed doubt.
Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.

.

Emptiness and lack of meaning

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.
But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?
Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists… But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

.

Loneliness

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.
If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.

.

Growing older

Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.
The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.
Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.
We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what in the morning was true will in evening become a lie.

.

Shame

Shame is a soul eating emotion.

.

Misfortune

Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth.
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

.

Neurosis

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.
Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
Contemporary man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by “powers” that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food – and, above all, a large array of neuroses.
Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

.

Judging

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.

.

Cruelty

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

.

Perfectionism

Perfection belongs to the Gods; the most we can hope for is excellence.
There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.

.

Unhappiness

If you are unhappy, you are too high up in your mind.

.

Collective unconsciousness

The change of character brought about by the uprush of collective forces is amazing. A gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast. One is always inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances, but nothing could explode in us if it had not been there. As a matter of fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and there is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a possible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach. It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and common sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal, overwhelming forces.
The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual.
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.

.

Death

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.
Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream… It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think about life after death.

.

Thoughts on God, religion and spirituality

.

Religion

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.
If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude. Carl Jung

.

God

God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts—God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.
One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.
The gods have become our diseases.
We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important.
The inner man has access to the sense organs of god.
Called or not, God is always there.
Explore daily the will of God.
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 of his collective unconscious.
I believe that we have no real access to who we really are except in God. Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are.
If God wishes to be born as man and to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, He suffers the terrible torment of having to bear the world in its reality. It is a crux; indeed, He Himself is His own cross. The world is God’s suffering, and every individual human being who wishes even to approach his own wholeness knows very well that this means bearing his own cross. But the eternal promise for him who bears his own cross is the Paraclete.
Remember that the only God man comes in contact with is his own God, called Spirit, Soul and Mind, or Consciousness, and these three are one.
I don’t believe there is a God. I know there is a God.
I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.
Man is the mirror God holds up to himself, the sense organ with which he apprehends his being.

.

Karma

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

.

Re-incarnation

My life often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me.

.

Thoughts on art, science, psychology, astrology

.

Psychology

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world.
The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body.

.

Art

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 realise 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.

.

Science

Science is not a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.
Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable.
Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.
Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror.

.

Astrology

Astrology is of particular interest to the psychologist, since it contains a sort of psychological experience which we call projected – this means that we find the psychological facts as it were in the constellations. This originally gave rise to the idea that these factors derive from the stars, whereas they are merely in a relation of synchronicity with them. I admit that this is a very curious fact which throws a peculiar light on the structure of the human mind.
Astrology is one of the intuitive methods like the I Ching, geomantics, and other divinatory procedures. It is based upon the synchronicity principle, meaningful coincidence. … Astrology is a naively projected psychology in which the different attitudes and temperaments of man are represented as gods and identified with planets and zodiacal constellations.
Obviously astrology has much to offer psychology, but what the latter can offer its elder sister is less evident. So far as I judge, it would seem to me advantageous for astrology to take the existence of psychology into account, above all the psychology of the personality and of the unconscious.

.

More thoughts

.

Dreaming

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.
The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.
We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?
Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.
This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theatre where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

.

Images and symbols

There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.
It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can “experience” is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.
A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.
The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.
I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths of and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism….Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche.
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.
In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.

.

Introversion

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge.

.

Teaching and child raising

An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. 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.
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a ‘continent,’ a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

.

The collective unconscious

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.
The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.
The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.

.

Women

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
Every man carries within himself the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, a hereditary factor of primordial origin.
Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.

.

Healing

We don’t really heal anything; we simply let it go.
Healing proceeds from the depths to the heights.
Healing comes only from that which leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglements with ego.
We don’t get wounded alone and we don’t heal alone.
Only the wounded physician heals.
Just imagine what would happen if practicing physicians, the ones who have come into contact directly with suffering humanity, had some acquaintance with Eastern systems of healing. The Spirit of the East surges through every pore as a balm for all afflictions.

.

Public and personal morality

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering, ‘There is something not right,’ no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.

.

Success

To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.
The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.

.