Carl Jung: You can be anything if you are a spirit, because you have no form, no shape, you are just gas.

You can be anything if you are a spirit, because you have no form, no shape, you are just gas.

You can assume any form; you can be this or that; you can transform at will quite arbitrarily into God knows what.

“But you should not think like that,” or: “You should believe something, that will save you.” Believe if you can!

You see, that is just the trouble.

And why can’t you?

Because you have a body.

If you were a spirit you could be anywhere, but the damnable fact is that you are rooted just here, and you cannot jump out of your skin; you have definite necessities.

You cannot get away from the fact of your sex, for instance, or of the color of your eyes, or the health or the sickness of your body, your physical endurance.

Those are definite facts which make you an individual, a self that is just yourself and nobody else.

If you were a spirit you could exchange your form every minute for another one—but being in the body you are caught; therefore, the body is such an awkward thing: it is a definite nuisance.

All people who claim to be spiritual try to get away from the fact of the body; they want to destroy it in order to be something imaginary, but they never will be that, because the body denies them; the body says otherwise.

They think they can live without sex or feeding, without the ordinary human conditions; and it is a mistake, a lie, and the body denies their convictions. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 64