Above all, we know desperately little about the possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.
Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof would be just as impossible as the proof of God.
Hence we may cautiously accept the idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word.
Psychic heredity does exist —that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposi- tion to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth. Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845
For when the soul vanished at death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counterpole to the state of death in this world. Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 493
The souls or spirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of the living; they merely continue it. The view that the psyche is a spirit is implicit in this.
When therefore something psychic happens in the individual which he feels as belonging to himself, that something is his own spirit.
But if anything psychic happens which seems to him strange, then it is somebody else’s spirit, and it may be causing a
possession.
The spirit in the first case corresponds to the subjective attitude, in the latter case to public opinion, to the time-spirit,
or to the original, not yet human, anthropoid disposition which we also call the unconscious. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 38 The synchronicity principle possesses properties that may help to clear up the body-soul problem.
Above all it is a fact of causeless order, or rather, of meaningful orderedness, that may throw light on psychophysical parallelism.
The “absolute knowledge” which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self-subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence.
Such a form of existence can only be transcendental, since, as the knowledge of future or spatially distant events shows, it is contained in a psychically relative space and time, that is to say in an irrepresentable space-time continuum. Carl Jung, CW, Para 948.
The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.
But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.
For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.
It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than myself experiences me. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 45.
Neurosis—let there be no doubt about this—may be any number of things, but never a “nothing but.”
It is the agony of a human soul in all its vast complexity—so vast, indeed, that any and every theory of neurosis is little better than a worthless sketch, unless it be a gigantic picture of the psyche which not even a hundred Fausts could conceive. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 357
A neurosis is by no means merely a negative thing, it is also something positive.
Only a soulless rationalism reinforced by a narrow materialistic outlook could possibly have overlooked this fact.
In reality the neurosis contains the patient’s psyche, or at least an essential part of it; and if, as the rationalist pretends, the neurosis could be plucked from him like a bad tooth, he would have gained nothing but would have lost something very essential to him.
That is to say, he would have lost as much as the thinker deprived of his doubt, or the moralist deprived of his temptation, or the brave man deprived of his fear.
To lose a neurosis is to find oneself without an object; life loses its point and hence its meaning. This would not be a cure, it would be a regular amputation. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355
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