Carl Jung: Individuation is not an intensification of consciousness, it is very much more.

Individuation is not an intensification of consciousness, it is very much more.

For you must have the consciousness of something before it can be intensified, and that means experience, life lived.

You can only be really conscious of things which you have experienced, so individuation must be understood as life.

Only life integrates, only life and what we do in life makes the individual appear.

You cannot individuate, for instance, by locking yourself up in a cell, you can only individuate in your concrete life, you appear in your
deed; there you can individuate and nowhere else.

Real consciousness can only be based upon life; upon things experienced, but talking about these things is just air.

It is a sort of conscious understanding, but it is not individuation. Individuation is the accomplishment through life.

For instance, say a cell begins to divide itself and to differentiate and develop into a certain plant or a certain animal; that is the process of individuation.

It is that one becomes what one is, that one accomplishes one’s destiny, all the determinations that are given in the form of the germ; it is the unfolding of the germ and becoming the primitive pattern that one was born with. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 757-758