Monday, July 17, 2017

Some Carl Jung Quotations [Posted July 17, 2017]





One can never know in what form a man will experience God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 482.

One might almost say that man himself, or his innermost soul, is the prisoner or the protected inhabitant of the mandala ~Carl Jung, CW 11, par. 157.

Any theological treatment of the devil that is not related to God's trinitarian consciousness is a falsification of the actual position. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Para 103.

It is the goal of our psychological development and in metaphysical terms amounts to God's incarnation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.

The beauty of the ritual action is one of its essential properties, for man has not served God rightly unless he has also served him in beauty. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 379.

As a totality, the self is by definition always a complexio oppositorum [union of opposites], and the more consciousness insists on its own luminous nature and lays claim to moral authority, the more the self will appear as something dark and menacing. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 716.

The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a [person] postulates as being a greater totality than [oneself] can become a symbol of the self. For this reason the symbol of the self is not always as total as the definition would require. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 232.

Empirical psychology loved, until recently, to explain the "unconscious" as mere absence of consciousness-the term itself indicates as much-just as shadow is an absence of light. Today accurate observation of unconscious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us, that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a mere shadow could never be endowed with. Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 14.

It is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would run counter to the conditions of his own history, and though he might thus be fulfilling them, he would nonetheless be misjudged, derided, tortured and crucified. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 522.

The fact of God’s “unconsciousness” throws a peculiar light on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from his sins, even if he is baptized in the prescribed manner and thus washed clean, as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin, that is, from the wrath of God. Consequently, the work of salvation is intended to save man from the fear of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.

A dogma is always the result and fruit of many minds and many centuries, purified of all the oddities, shortcomings, and flaws of individual experience. But for all that, the individual experience, by its very poverty, is immediate life, the warm red blood pulsating today. It is more convincing to a seeker after truth than the best tradition. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 88.

There is religious sentimentality instead of the numinosum of divine experience. This is the well-known characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery. It is readily understandable that such a religion is incapable of giving help or of having any other moral effect. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 52.

Whatever the metaphysical position of the devil may be, in psychological reality evil is an effective, not to say menacing, limitation of goodness, so that it is no exaggeration to assume that in this world good and evil more or less balance each other, like day and night, and that this is the reason why the victory of the good is always a special act of grace. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 253

Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 286

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 131

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 132

As a rule those tendencies that represent the antisocial elements in man's psychic structure—what I call the "statistical criminal" in everybody—are suppressed, that is, they are consciously and deliberately disposed of. But tendencies that are merely repressed are usually of a somewhat doubtful character. They are not so much antisocial as unconventional and socially awkward. The reason why we repress them is equally doubtful. Some people repress them from sheer cowardice, others from conventional morality, and others again for reasons of respectability. Repression is a sort of half-conscious and half-hearted letting go of things, a dropping of hot cakes or a reviling of grapes which hang too high, or a looking the other way in order not to become conscious of one's desires. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 129

If the repressed tendencies, the shadow as I call them, were obviously evil, there would be no problem whatever. But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but—convention forbids. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 134

In reality, the acceptance of the shadow-side of human nature verges on the impossible. Consider for a moment what it means to grant the right of existence to what is unreasonable, senseless, and evil! Yet it is just this that the modern man insists upon. He wants to live with every side of himself—to know what he is. That is why he casts history aside. He wants to break with tradition so that he can experiment with his life and determine what value and meaning things have in themselves, apart from traditional presuppositions. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 528

Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a remedy as beheading would be for headache. To destroy a man's morality does not help either, because it would kill his better self, without which even the shadow makes no sense. The reconciUation of these opposites is a major problem, and even in antiquity it bothered certain minds. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 133

If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the "House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140

Our knowledge of good and evil has dwindled with our mounting knowledge and experience, and will dwindle still more in the future, without our being able to escape the demands of ethics. In this utmost uncertainty we need the illumination of a holy and whole-making spirit—a spirit that can be anything rather than our reason. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 267

He is the man who plants a field and before the crop is ripe is off again to a new field. He has ploughed fields behind him and new hopes ahead all the time, and nothing comes off. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 33.

The people would never have been Deutsch taken in and carried away so completely if this figure had not been a reflected image of the collective hysteria Deutsch. Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400 .

The immunity of the nation depends entirely upon the existence of a leading minority immune to the evil and capable of combating the powerful suggestive effect. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400

When you are in the darkness you take the next thing, and that is a dream. And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth and in consequence are isolated. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674.

The serpent in the cave is an image which often occurs in antiquity. It is important to realize that in classical antiquity, as in other civilizations, the serpent not only was an animal that aroused fear and represented danger, but also signified healing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 116.

The serpent owes his existence to God and by no means to man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 690.

Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent upon space and time, we can easily understand the central importance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1572.

We do not know what an archetype is (i.e., consists of), since the nature of the psyche is inaccessible to us, but we know that archetypes exist and work. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 694.

The better we understand the archetype, the more we participate in its life and the more we realize its eternity or timelessness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 695.

The utterances of the heart—unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole. The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only to the gentle breath of a premonitory mood, which does not drown the song but listens. What the heart hears are the great things that span our whole lives, the experiences which we do nothing to arrange but which we ourselves suffer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 9

We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity nothing is holy any longer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 94

To find happiness in the spirit one must be possessed of a "spirit" to find happiness in. A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. Probably only suffering, disillusion, and self-denial do that. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 6

Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects into it everything he fears and despises in himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 8

Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situations in which the great "principles" entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 869

The individual ego is the stable in which the Christ-child is born. ~Carl Jung; CW 11, Para 207

Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 163.

It is a privilege born of human freedom in contradistinction to the compulsion of natural law. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 158.

Through reflection, "life" and its "soul" are abstracted from Nature and endowed with a separate existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 158.

The attainment of wholenesss requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 556.

Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. ~Carl Jung; CW 11, Para 802.

Not nature but the "genius of mankind" has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 734.

Whoever knows God has an effect on him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para. 617.

Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Par. 575.

The future indwelling of the Holy Spirit amounts to a continuing incarnation of God. Christ, as the begotten son of God and pre-existing mediator, is a first-born and a divine paradigm which will be followed by further incarnations of the Holy Ghost in the empirical man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para. 693.

All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his ‘oppositeness’ has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, par. 659.

It does not seem to fit God’s purpose to exempt man from conflict and hence from evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.

The inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world, but also of the pleromatic drama for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus. . . . the two main climaxes are formed first by the Job tragedy and secondly by Ezekiel’s revelation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 686.

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 746.

When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was "the true seat of anxiety," he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 849.

The true history of the Spirit is not preserved in learned volumes but in the living psychic organism of every individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 56

The educated man tries to repress the inferior man in himself, not realizing that by so doing he forces the latter into revolt. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 136.

Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para. 146.

Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 97.

The quaternity is the sine qua non of divine birth and consequently of the inner life of the trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 125.

In the initiation of the living, however, this "Beyond" is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind's intentions and outlook, a psychological "Beyond" or, in Christian terms, a "redemption" from the trammels of the world and of sin. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 813.

Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything "given." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 813.

But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 906.

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