Some Carl Jung Quotations [Posted June 30, 2017]

It is most important that you should be born; you ought to come into this world—otherwise you cannot realize the self, and the purpose of this world has been missed. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
It is utterly important that one should be in this world, that one really fulfills one’s entelechia, the germ of life which one is. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
You see, the shoot must come out of the ground, and if the personal spark has never gotten into the ground, nothing will come out of it; no linga [creative core] or Kundalini will be there, because you are still staying in the infinity that was before. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29
For you should leave some trace in this world which notifies that you have been here, that something has happened. If nothing happens of this kind you have not realized yourself; the germ of life has fallen, say, into a thick layer of air that kept it suspended. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
Everything that has life is individual—a dog, a plant, everything living—but of course it is far from being conscious of its individuality. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 5
Individuation only takes place when you are conscious of it, but individuation is always there from the beginning of your existence. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 5
The instinct of individuation is found everywhere in life, for there is no life on earth that is not individual. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 4
The world itself becomes a reflection of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 50
There are plenty of people who are not yet born. They all seem to be here, they walk about—but as a matter of fact, they are not yet born, because they are behind a glass wall, they are in the womb. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
They are in the world only on parole and are soon to be returned to the pleroma [fullness] where they started originally. They have not formed a connection with this world; they are suspended in the air; they are neurotic, living the provisional life. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28.
You must believe in this world, make roots, do the best you can, even if you have to believe in the most absurd things—to believe, for instance, that this world is very definite, that it matters absolutely whether such-and-such a treaty is made or not. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29
You see, the shoot must come out of the ground, and if the personal spark has never gotten into the ground, nothing will come out of it; no linga [creative core] or Kundalini will be there, because you are still staying in the infinity that was before. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29
Today, instead of the sea or leviathan, we say analysis, which is equally dangerous. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 17
We could not possibly judge this world if we had not also a standpoint outside, and that is given by the symbolism of religious experiences. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 27
Small children are very old; later on we soon grow younger. In our middle age we are youngest, precisely at the time when we have completely or almost completely lost contact with the collective unconscious, the samskaras. We grow older again only as with the mounting years we remember the samskaras anew. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Page 74.
Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
Without personal life, without the here and now, we cannot attain to the supra-personal. Personal life must first be fulfilled in order that the process of the supra-personal side of the psyche can be introduced. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Page 66.
The fairy tale is the great mother of the novel, and has even more universal validity than the most-avidly read novel of your time. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 262.
If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death! ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 272
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
Great is he who is in love, since love is the present act of the great creator, the present moment of the becoming and lapsing of the world. Mighty is he who loves. But whoever distances himself from love, feels himself powerful. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
But the brightness of love seems to come from the fact that love is visible life and action. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 252.
To live oneself means to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249.
Day does not exist through itself, night does not exist through itself. The reality that exists through itself is day and night. So the reality is meaning and absurdity. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 242.
The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create. The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239.
Depths and surface should mix so that new life can develop. Yet the new life does not develop outside of us, but within us. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239.
To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images madness is divine. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238.
I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught God is love. But you should know that love is also terrible. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 235.
Great is the power of the way. In it Heaven and Hell grow together, and in it the power of the Below and the power of the Above unite. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 308.
I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.
Magic is the working of men on men, but your magic action does not affect your neighbor; it affects you first, and only if you withstand it does an invisible effect pass from you to your neighbor. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 308.
The moon is dead. Your soul went to the moon, to the preserver of souls. Thus the soul moved toward death. I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And I decided to die outside and to live within. For that reason I turned away and sought the place of the inner life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
Where reason abides one needs no magic. Hence our time no longer needs magic. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 314.
Magic is a way of living. If one has done one's best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 314.
The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
Death gives me durability and solidity. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 323.
The knowledge of your heart is how your heart is. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 234.
You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.
Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 230.
The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 236.
Thus I saw that the lover survives, and that he is the one who unwittingly grants hospitality to the Gods. ~Carl Jung to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 315
The intuitive is always bothered by the reality of things; he fails from the standpoint of realities; he is always out for the possibilities of life.
The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 229
But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 229
You seek the path. I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 231
Who exhausts the mystery of love? ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 315.
I had still not become a man again who carried within himself the conflict between a longing for the world and a longing for the spirit. I did not live either of these longings, but I lived myself and was a merrily greening tree in a remote spring forest. Thus, I learned to live without the world and spirit; and I was amazed how well I could live like this. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
Oh Izdubar, most powerful one, what you call poison is science. In our country, we are nurtured on it from youth, and that may be one reason why we haven't properly flourished and remain so dwarfish. When I see you, however, it seems to me as if we are all somewhat poisoned. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 278.
After all the rebirths you still remain the lion crawling on the earth, the Chameleon], a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering lizard, but precisely not a lion, whose nature is related to the sun, who draws his power from within himself, who does not crawl around in the protective colors of the environment, and who does not defend himself by going into hiding. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead, I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light. That belongs to the earth. I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
The meanings that follow one another do not lie in things, but lie in you, who are subject to many changes, insofar as you take part in life. Things also change, but you do not notice this if you do not change. But if you change, the countenance of the world alters. The manifold sense of things is your manifold sense. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 273.
The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason. So much unreason / was in man that he needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the Logos in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the One, the Powerful One, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280.
Through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple. And you prepare to sleep through the millennia like everyone else, and you sleep down into the womb of the millennia, and your walls resound with ancient temple chants. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266.
Incidentally-mustn't it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality? ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 265.
If ever you have the rare opportunity to speak with the devil, then do not forget to confront him in all seriousness. He is your devil after all. The devil as the adversary is your own other standpoint; he tempts you and sets a stone in your path where you least want it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 261.
I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 260.
I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. I repeat he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around in himself who holds him back from the best. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 260.

Carl Jung: The stuff men talk on such occasions, sniffing around each other like dogs, is what the English call "eyewash."

Dear Frau Jacobi, 21 April 1933

Many thanks for your detailed letter.

From what you say of him, Dr. N. seems to be the right man.

If he can win over Frau S., in whose sound judgment I have the fullest confidence, he must be quite something.

An ordinary idiot of a neurologist couldn't do that.

X. is an extraordinarily difficult case, unfortunately far advanced in neurotic degeneration.

The danger is that the treatment will get lost in trivialities.

With X. one must always keep the whole in mind.

He should be cured from "above," for ultimately it is a question of the great conflict for a Weltanschauung, which in his case has collided with an antiquated infantile attitude embodied by his wife.

Hence on the one hand this great question must be considered, and on the other his infantilism and the junk shop of trivialities.

No small task!

I would be glad to know of an intelligent neurologist in Vienna. I have often been asked.

My wife has told me of all the garbage that has piled up round the magazine project.

Oh this animal I hope I won't need to do any more explanatory work.

For instance the essence of the "famous" meeting in Munich was my private talk with Heyer, where only the two of us were together.

I had to see what sort of programme he would commit himself to.

Even then I had my private doubts, but had still to wait for the official document, the prospectus, where it was bound

to come out how those gentlemen were planning the project.

I then saw that everything would devolve upon me and that I would be boundlessly overburdened.

An absolutely unworkable proposition!

The stuff men talk on such occasions, sniffing around each other like dogs, is what the English call "eyewash."

Everything null and void, valueless, until there's a signed contract. That alone counts.

Everything else a capricious, deceptive anima intrigue that simply drives women crazy, because they always want to know why and how.

The main thing is to know how things are not done.

Please give X. my best greetings and tell him-because his love is all too easily injured-he should meditate on Paul's words in the Epistle to the Corinthians: "Love endureth all things."

With cordial greetings,

Yours ever,

Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 120-121

Carl Jung: The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own ...

The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind, and the care of our children. This is the obvious purpose of nature.

But when this purpose has been attained -and more than attained-shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests, and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure.; Carl Jung; In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; The Stages of Life; Page 787.

Carl Jung: Does the World stand of the verge of a Spiritual Rebirth

This is what theologians for several centuries have been crying for; what many of them have professed to see through the fog of doubts, disillusion and despair, like a star glowing in the high heavens. I am not a theologian; I am a doctor, a psychologist. But as a doctor, I have had experience with thousands of persons from all parts of the world—those who came to tell me the stories of their lives, their hopes, their fears, their achievements, their failures.

I have studied carefully their psychology, which is, and which must be, my guide. Out of my experience with those thousands of patients, I have become convinced that the psychological problem of today is a spiritual problem, a religious problem, Man today hungers and thirsts for a safe relationship to the psychic forces within himself. His consciousness, recoiling from the difficulties of the modern world, lacks a relationship to safe spiritual conditions. This makes him neurotic, ill, frightened. Science has told him that there is no God, and that matter is all there is.

This has deprived humanity of its blossom, its feeling of well-being and of safety in a safe world.

As modern man is driven back upon himself by doubt and fear, he looks inward to his own psychic life to give him something of which his outer life has deprived him. In view of ‘the present widespread interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena—an interest such as the world has not experienced since the last half of the seventeenth century—it does not seem beyond the range of possibility to believe that we stand on the threshold of a new spiritual epoch; and that from the depths of man’s own psychic life new spiritual forms will be born. Look at the world about us, and what do we see? The disintegration of many religions.

It is generally admitted that the churches are not holding the people as they did,particularly educated people, who do not feel any longer that they are redeemed by a system of theology. The same thing is seen in the old established religions of the East— Confucianism and Buddhism. Half the temples in Peking are empty. In our Western world millions of people do not go to church. Protestantism alone is broken up into four hundred denominations. Contrast this state of life and thought with that of the Middle Ages. In those centuries almost everyone went to Mass every morning.

The whole life was lived within the church, which became a tremendous outlet of psychic energy. Instead, we have today an intricate and complicated life full of mechanical devices for living. A life crowded with motor cars and radios and motion pictures. But none of these things is a substitute for what we have lost. Religion gives us a rich application for our feelings. It gives meaning to life. Man in the Middle Ages lived in a meaningful world. He knew that God had made the world for a definite purpose; had made him for a definite purpose—to get to heaven, or to get to hell.

It made sense. Today the world in which all of us live is a madhouse. This is what many people are feeling, Some of those people come to me to tell me so. All that energy which was the origin of the rich blossom of man’s emotional life during the Middle Ages, and which found expression in the painting of great religious pictures, the carving of great religious statues, the building of the great cathedrals, has gone flat,)It is not lost, because it is a law that energy cannot be lost. Then what has become of it? Where has it gone?

The answer is that it is in man’s unconscious. It may be said to have fallen down into a lower storey. Take the example of a business man—successful, rich, not yet old. He is perhaps forty-five. He says, “I have made my fortune; I have sons who are old enough to carry on the business which I founded. I will retire. I will build a fine house in the country and live there without any cares and worries.” So he retires. He builds his house and goes to live in it.

He says to himself, “Now my life will begin.” But nothing happens. One morning he is in his bath. He is conscious of a pain in his side. All day he worries about it; wonders what it can be. When he goes to the table he does not eat. In a few days his digestion is out of order. In a fortnight he is very ill. The doctors he has called in do not know what is the matter with him. Finally one of them says to him: “Your life lacks interest. Go back to your business. Take it up again.” The man is intelligent, and this advice seems to him sound.

He decides to follow it. He goes back to his office and sits down at his old desk and declares that now he will help his sons in the management. But when the first business letter is brought to him, he cannot concentrate on it. He cannot make the decisions it calls for. Now he is terribly frightened about his condition. You see what happened. He couldn’t go back. It was already too late. But his energy is still there, and it must be used. This man comes to me with his problem. I say to him: “You were quite right to retire from business. But not into nothingness.

You must have something you can stand on. In all the years in which you devoted your energy to building up your business you never built up any interests outside of it. You had nothing to retire on.” This is a picture of the condition of man today. This is why we feel that there is something wrong with the world. All the material interests, the automobiles and radios and skyscrapers we have, don’t fill the hungry soul. We try to retire from the world, but to what? Some try to go back to the churches. A few are able to do this. But many are not finding this entirely satisfactory.

They are like the business man who tried to go back to his desk. And these people come to me, asking me to help them to find a meaning in their lives. What shall I tell them? Among them comes a man who is only slightly neurotic. He says to me: “I am not really very sick. Perhaps I should not be here at all taking up your time. But I know you are busy with the human mind. I thought, therefore, that you might be able to tell me on what terms I may live. I have the feeling of being forlorn and lonely in a world that makes no sense.”

I say to him: “My dear man, I don’t know any more than you do the meaning of the world or the meaning of your life. But you—all men—were born with a brain ready made. It took millions of years to build the brain and the body we now have. Your brain embodies all the experience of life. The psyche, which may be called the life of the brain, existed before consciousness existed in the little child. “Now, suppose that I am in need of advice about living, and I know of a man who is already thousands of years old.

I go to him and say, ‘You have seen many changes; you have observed and experienced life under many aspects. My life is short—perhaps seventy years, perhaps less—and you have lived for thousands of years. Tell me the meaning of life for me.’ ” When I say this to my patient, he cocks his ears and looks at me. “No,” I say, “I am not that man. But that man speaks to you every night. How? In your dreams.” I go on: “You are in trouble. You feel that your life has no orientation. I cannot tell you what to do.

But let us ask the Great Old Man. He will tell you. Go away for a few days, and you will have a dream. Come back and tell me about it.” He goes away; he comes back and brings me a dream. It is difficult to work out. But we do work it out together, and it tells us something about him. Certain people lose connection with life because they have made mistakes, or because they are living the wrong way, in a life that is intellectual only. The dreams they bring to a psychologist will take up these things first. All dreams reveal spiritual experiences, provided one does not apply one’s own point of view to the interpretation of them. Freud says that all man’s longings expressed in his dreams relate to sexuality.

It is true that man is a being with sex. But he is also a being with a stomach and a liver. As well say that because he has a liver all his troubles come from that one organ. Primitive man has little difficulty with sex. The fulfillment of his sexual desires is too easy to constitute a problem. What concerns primitive man—and I have lived among primitives, and Freud has not—is his food: where he is to get it, and enough of it. Civilized man in his dreams reveals his spiritual need. When modern science disinfected heaven it did not find God. Some scientists say that the resurrection of Jesus, the virgin birth, the miracles—all those things which fed Christian thought through ages, are pretty stories, but none the less untrue.

But what I say is, Do not overlook the fact that these ideas which millions of men carried with them through generations are great eternal psychological truths. Let us look at this truth as the psychologist sees it. Here is the mind of man, without prejudice, spotless, untainted, symbolized by a virgin. And that virgin mind of man can give birth to God himself. “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” This is a great psychological truth. Christianity is a beautiful system of psychotherapy. It heals the suffering of the soul. This is the truth which man has clung to through the ages. Even after his consciousness has listened too long at the door of modern materialistic science, he clings to it in his unconscious.

The old symbols are good today. They fit our minds as well as they fitted the minds that conceived them. Deep in the unconscious of each one of us are all the attempts of that Great Old Man to express his spiritual experiences. Suppose I ask you to stay in my house. I tell you that it is well built, comfortable; that our life is pleasant; that you will have good food. You can swim in the lake and walk in the garden. With these beliefs in your mind you decide to come, and you enjoy your stay. But suppose, when I ask you, I say to you: “This house is unsafe. The foundations are not secure. We have many earthquakes in this region. Besides all that, we have had illness here. Someone recently died of tuberculosis in this room.”

Under those conditions and with these ideas in your mind, do you enjoy your stay in that house? That medieval man we have talked of had a beautiful relationship with God. He lived in a safe world, or one that he believed to be safe. God looked out for everyone in it; he rewarded the good and punished the bad. There was the church where the man could always get forgiveness and grace. He had only to walk there to receive it. His prayerswere heard. He was spiritually taken care of. But what is modern man told? Science has told him that there is no one taking care of him. And so he is full of fear. For a time, after we gave up that medieval God, we had gold for a deity. But now that, too, has been declared incompetent. We trusted in armies, but the threat of poison gas defeated them. Already people talk about the next war.

In Berlin they have built dugouts under the streets for retreat from poison gas attacks. If they go on talking in this way, thinking this way, the next war will explode of itself. Naturally enough, in a world of this sort, everybody gets neurotic. Even if the house you live in is really safe, if you have the idea that it is not, you will suffer. Your reaction depends entirely on what you think. In making this point to my students, I say: “How do you measure a thing? By its effects. And usually by its terrible effects. An avalanche occurs which wipes away a dozen farms, kills scores of cows, and you say, ‘An elephant of an avalanche!’ Now, tell me, what is the most destructive thing you know of ?” In turn we consider fire, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, diseases.

Then I say, “Can you think of nothing more terrible than any of these things? What about the World War?” Ah, yes! High explosives. “But,” I say, “do high explosives make themselves? Do they declare war. It is the psyche of man that makes wars. Not his consciousness. His consciousness is afraid, but his unconscious, which contains the inherited savagery as we l as the spiritual strivings of the race,) says to. him, “Now it is time to make war. Now is the time to kill and destroy.” And he does it. The most tremendous danger that man has to face is the power of his ideas. No cosmic power on earth ever destroyed ten million men in four years. But man’s psyche did it. And It can do it, vain. I am afraid of one thing only—the thoughts of people. I have means of defense against things.

I live here in my house happily with my family. But suppose they get the illusion that I am a devil. Can I be happy with them then? Can I be safe? All of us are subject to mass infections. I Mass infections) are greater than man. And man is their victim. He shouts and parades and pretends that he is the leader, but really he is their victim. They are the up rush of earthly and spiritual forces from the depth of the psyche. Turn the eye of consciousness within to see what is there.

Let us see what we can do in small ways. If I have planted a cabbage right, then I have served the world in that place. I do not know what more I can do. Examine the spirits that speak in you. Become critical. The modern man must be fully conscious of the terrific dangers that lie in mass movements. Listen to what the unconscious says. Hearken to the voice of that Great Old Man within you who has lived so long, who has seen and experienced so much. Try to understand the will of God: The remarkably potent force of the psyche.

I say: Go slow. Go slow. With every good there comes a corresponding evil, and with every evil a corresponding good. Don’t run too fast into one unless you are prepared to encounter the other. I am not concerned about the world. I am concerned about the people with whom I live. The other world is all in the newspapers. My family and my neighbors are my life—the only life that I can experience. What lies beyond is newspaper mythology. It is not of vast importance that I make a career or achieve great things for myself. What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfill the divine will within me. This task gives me so much to do that I have no time or any other.

Let me point out that if we were all to live in that way we would need no armies, no police, no diplomacy, no politics, no banks. We would have a meaningful life and not what we have now—madness. What nature asks of the apple-tree is that it shall bring forth apples, and of the pear-tree that it shall bring forth pears. Nature wants me to be simply man. But a man conscious of what I am, and of what I am doing. God seeks consciousness in man. This is the truth of the birth and the resurrection of Christ within. As more and more thinking men come to it, this is the spiritual rebirth of the world. Christ, the Logos—that is to say, the mind, the understanding, shining into the darkness.

Christ was a new truth about man. Mankind has no existence. I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word. Be what God means you to be; don’t worry about mankind which doesn’t exist, you are avoiding looking at what does exist—the self You are like a man who leans over his neighbor’s fence and says to him: “Look, there is a weed. And over there is an-I- other one. And why don’t you hoe the rows deeper? And I why don’t you tie up your vines?” And all the while, his own garden, behind him, is full of weeds. ~Carl Jung [1934]; C.G. Jung Speaks; Pages 67-75.

Carl Jung: "Sex is a Playground for Lonely Scientists.

This diagram shows the medieval understanding of spheres of the cosmos, derived from Aristotle, and as per the standard explanation by Ptolemy. It came to be understood that at least the outermost sphere (marked “Primũ Mobile”) has its own intellect, intelligence or nous – a cosmic equivalent to the human mind.

Sex is a playground for lonely scientists. You might as well study the psychology of nutrition as the psychology of sex.

Primitive man, of course, had the sex instinct, but he was much more deeply concerned with feeding himself.

Besides, why base the psychology of a man on his bad corner? When I deal with one who is mentally unbalanced I am not concerned only with one function of his mind and body.

I look for the ancient man in him.

I try to trace the strata of the human mind from its earliest beginnings, just as a geologist might study the stratification of the earth.

The fear of ancient man crouching at the ford is in all our unconscious minds, as well as all other fears and speculations born of man’s experience through the ages. The mind of mankind is immortal.

For instance, I remember suddenly feeling, during an earthquake in Switzerland, that the earth was alive, that it was an animal.

At once I recognized the ancient Japanese belief that a huge salamander lies inside the earth, and that earthquakes happen when he turns in his sleep.’ A patient of mine once told me that whenever lightning flashed she saw a great black horse. That is another primitive idea—that lightning was a horse’s leg striking downwards, the horse of Odin.’

If a man or a woman ceases to be able to communicate with us, we say that he or she is insane.

But if I can find the ancient man in them, if I can explain the great black horse in the lightning, I may be able to make them communicate with me. I may be able to restore the bridge—more easily if I can discover from their dreams what is in their unconscious minds.

That is why I correspond not only with medical scientists, but with students of religion and mythology in all parts of the world.

That is why I am at present studying medieval texts in the British Museum. The medieval stratum in our unconscious mind is nearest to the surface. The study of medical science is in transition. The relationship between mind and body is being more fully appreciated.

Not that there is anything new in that.

The medieval doctors studied dreams.

Eastern medicine is based on psychotherapy—the treatment of disease by hypnotic influence.

Psychology is not yet, of course, a recognized part of the medical curriculum.

There is much enthusiasm, but there is also much misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

Still, I have four hundred students at Zurich, and the criminal courts call me in as a last resort if they are unable to decide upon the guilt or innocence of a suspect.’

In twenty years you will have your organization of approved medical psychologists, just like your Medical Register.

And your next book?

It is nearly finishd. I shall call it “Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process.”‘ It’s about how man becomes himself.

Man is always an individual, but he’s not always himself. . . . “Be yourself,” as the Americans say. ~Carl Jung; Tavistock Lectures; C.G. Jung Speaks; Pages 85-87.

Carl Jung: In our sleep we consult the 2,000,000-year-old man which each of us represents.

Before I came here I had the impression one might get from Europe that he [Roosevelt] was an opportunist, perhaps even an erratic mind.

Now that I have seen him and heard him when he talked at Harvard, however, I am convinced that here is a strong man, a man who is really great.

Perhaps that’s why many people do not like him.

[Dr. Jung paid his respects to dictators, explaining their rise as due to the effort of peoples to delegate to others the complicated task of managing their collective existence so that individuals might be free to engage in “individuation.” He defined the term as the development by each person of his own inherent pattern of existence.]

People have been bewildered by the war, by what has occurred in Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain.

These things take their breath away.

They wonder if it is worth while living because they have lost their beliefs, their philosophy.

They ask if civilization has made any progress at all. I would call it progress that in the 2,000,000 years we have existed on earth we have developed a chin and a decent sort of brain. Historically what we call progress is, after all, just a mushroom growth of coal and oil.

Otherwise we are not any more intelligent than the old Greeks or Romans.

As to the present troubles, it is important simply to remember that mankind has been through such things more than once and has given evidence of a great adaptive system stored away in our unconscious mind.

[It is to this great adaptive system in every individual that he addresses himself, he explained, when a patient comes to him, broken down by his struggles with the problems of his individual existence.]

Together the patient and I address ourselves to the 2,000,000-year-old man that is in all of us.

In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.’ And where do we make contact with this old man in us?

In our dreams,they are the clear manifestations of our unconscious mind.

They are the rendezvous of the racial history and of our current external problems.

In our sleep we consult the 2,000,000-year-old man which each of us represents.

We struggle with him in various manifestations of fantasy.

That is why I ask a patient to write up his dreams.

Usually they point the way for him as an individual.

[Dr. Jung said we dream all the time—it is normal to dream.

Those who say they have a dreamless sleep, he insisted, merely forget their dreams immediately on waking.

In all languages, he pointed out, there is a proverb recording the wisdom of sleeping on any difficult problem. . . .

Even when awake, Dr. Jung concluded, we dream; unbidden fantasies flit through the background of our minds and occasionally
come to notice when our attention to immediate external problems is lowered by fatigue or reverie.

There is hope of repairing a breakdown whenever a patient has neurotic symptoms.

They indicate that he is not at one with himself and the neurotic symptoms themselves usually diagnose what is wrong.

Those who have no neurotic symptoms are probably beyond help by any one. ~New York Times interview October 4, 1936 as found in C.G. Jung Speaking [Pages 88-90. Carl

Some Carl Jung Quotations [Posted June 29,2017]

Thought is a disembodied something because it has no spatial qualities. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.
What is light without shadow? What is high without low? You deprive the deity of its omnipotence and its universality by depriving it of the dark quality of the world. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 967
Our shadow is the last thing that has to be put on top of everything, and that is the thing we cannot swallow; we can swallow anything else, but not our own shadow because it makes us doubt our good qualities. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1090.
The extension [of the body] in space, therefore, creates a pluralistic quality in the mind. That is probably the reason why consciousness is possible. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.
To ascribe infinite evil to man and all the good to God would make man much too important: he would be as big as God, because light and the absence of light are equal, they belong together in order to make the whole. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 929
If you yourself can provide for it, then you are the whole mystery of the church: you are the transubstantiation. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1012-1013
Do you think that somewhere we are not in nature, that we are different from nature? No, we are in nature and we think exactly like nature. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1277
So "I" is as if it were something abstract, yet in a vague way it coincides with your body; when you say "I" you beat your chest for instance, to emphasize the "I." ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 361.
So whatever comes from behind comes from the shadow, from the darkness of the unconscious, and because you have no eyes there, and because you wear no neck amulet to ward off evil influences, that thing gets at you, possesses and obsesses you. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1265.
You see, it is as if the self were trying to manifest in space and time, but since it consists of so many elements that have neither space nor time qualities, it cannot bring them altogether into space and time. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.
And those efforts of the self to manifest in the empirical world result in man: he is the result of the attempt. So much of the self remains outside, it doesn’t enter this three-dimensional empirical world. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.
The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977
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It is even very important that the anima is projected into the earth, that she descends very low, for otherwise her ascent to the heavenly condition in the form of Sophia has no meaning…She is the one that is rooted in the earth as well as in the heaven, both root and branch of the tree. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 533.
We suffer very much from the fact that we consist of mind and have lost the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 251.
For the archetype is nothing human; no archetype is properly human. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.
Nietzsche’s idea is that out of that lack of order, a dancing star should be born. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 106
The relationship between religion and the unconscious is everywhere obvious: all religions are full of figures from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1351.
That center, that other order of consciousness which to me is unconscious, would be the self, and that doesn’t confine itself to myself, to my ego: it can include I don’t know how many other people. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 783.
If they are physicians they should treat their own neurosis, otherwise they are just vampires and want to help other people for their own needs. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 824-825
If you can stand yourself, then you might be capable of loving somebody else; otherwise, it is a mere excuse, just a lie. And that cannot be repeated often enough. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Page 699
The part of the unconscious which is designated as the subtle body becomes more and more identical with the functioning of the body, and therefore it grows darker and darker and ends in the utter darkness of matter. . . . Somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked. And that is the [subtle body] where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls "psyche. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.
For what is the body? The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience of the body. So it is really one and the same thing. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355.
You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: the contact the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.
Around the eighth year there is a transition to ego consciousness, as we have already seen in previous children’s dreams. The child breaks away from the extremely close relatedness with the familial milieu; he has already acquired a certain experience of the world, and the libido, which had up to then been tied to the parents, detaches itself from them and often is introverted. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 323.
The mental state of the first years of life does not differ from the collective unconscious; it is a world rich of images. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 182.
The child has to step out of this primordial world, to be able to really enter into life. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 184.
I am all for sending kids to public elementary schools, therefore, by no means to exclusive private schools, so that they can ingest the necessary dirt. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 213.
Men are rarely split off from sexuality, because it is too evident for them, but what they lack is Eros, the relational function. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 313

The relational function with the unconscious must not be transformed into a relational function with the conscious world! ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 317.
In the Old Testament it says: “Your old men shall dream dreams.” They had a wise anima who could open their inner ears. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 319.
Moreover, the unconscious has a different relation to death than we ourselves have. For example, it is very surprising in which way dreams anticipate death. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 343.
The four always expresses the coming into being of what is essentially human, the emergence of human consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 367.
Around the birth of Christ, there follows the Age of Pisces. Pisces is a water sign. That is probably why we have to look for the spirit in the water, in life’s flow of images, and in the unconscious. And now we are on the threshold of the sign of Aquarius. The air element is assigned to it, and it is symbolized by an angel or a human being, instead of an animal. Here the spirit is meant to become something subtle again, and man to become who he is. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 354-355.
But there’s absolutely no way around it, because we can be sure: the simpler a dream is, the more we are confronted with general and fundamental problems. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 368.
In religious instruction, we more and more refrain from making children acquainted with these images, and instead offer them moral teaching, in which the devil is ignored altogether. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 369.
The infantile soul is no tabula rasa at all, as presumed by modern psychology, but the ancient images are always already there a priori. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 369.
Thus the devil is a preliminary stage of individuation, in the negative it has the same goal as the divine quaternity, namely, wholeness. Although it is still darkness, it already carries the germ of light within itself. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
If a primordial image forces itself onto consciousness, we have to fill it with as much substance as possible to grasp the whole scope of its meaning. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 368.
The division into four is a principium individuationis; it means to become one or a whole in the face of the many figures that carry the danger of destruction in them. It is what overcomes death and can bring about rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
Nobody will ever become conscious if he does not hit his head on something. Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 377.
Only when we bear our situation and accept our depression will it be possible for us to change internally. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
As the unconscious has a tendency to project itself into the outer world, there is a danger that one might get dissipated in the environment, instead of staying with oneself. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
In the process of individuation, too, new contents can announce themselves in this devouring form and darken consciousness; this is experienced as a depression, that is to say, as being pulled downward. - ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
When the unconscious intrudes into spaces of consciousness, it is automatically split into its pairs of opposites. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 408.
The fact that deity and devil belong together also plays a great role in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
The real purpose of the religious ceremonial is to revivify. It was created to lift man out of the ordinary, to disturb his habitual ways, that he may become aware of things outside. ~Carl Jung, Dreams Seminar, Page 399.
Children also contain a future personality within themselves, the being that they will be in the following years. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 50.
There are good circumstances when a good smack, morally or physically, is the most effective way to counter the great fascination of the images. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 184
Four flows emanate from the navel, two air- and two blood-vessels, so to speak, through which the growing child receives its food, the blood, and the pneuma. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 365-366.
The children already live in a tomorrow, only they are not aware of it. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 50.
It is no sign of culture if a woman is only a daughter, or only a pregnant mother, or only a whore. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 321
The dream represents that tendency of the unconscious that aims at a change of the conscious attitude. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 5.
The color blue cannot be found in alchemy, but it is found in the East, where it takes the place of black and actually represents a color of the underworld. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 366.
In Sahasrara there is no difference. The next conclusion could be that there is no object, no God, there is nothing but Brahman. There is no experience because it is One, without a second. It is asleep, it is not, and that is why it is nirvana. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminars, Page 59.
We are entangled in the roots, and we ourselves are the roots. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29
We make roots, we cause roots to be, we are rooted in the soil, and there is no getting away for us, because we must be there as long as we live. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29