The man we call modern, the man who is aware of the immediate present, is by no means the average man.
He is rather the man who stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before him, above him the heavens, and below him the whole of mankind with a history that disappears in primeval mists.
The modern man—or, let us say again, the man of the immediate present—is rarely met with, for he must be conscious to a superlative degree.
Since to be wholly of the present means to be fully conscious of one's existence as a man, it requires the most intensive and extensive consciousness, with a minimum of unconsciousness.
It must be clearly understood that the mere fact of living in the present does not make a man modern, for in that case everyone at present alive would be so.
We always find in the patient a conflict which at a certain point is connected with the great problems of society.
Hence, when the analysis is pushed to this point, the apparently individual conflict of the patient is revealed as a universal conflict of his environment and epoch.
The old religions with their sublime and ridiculous, their friendly and fiendish symbols did not drop from the blue, but were born of this human soul that dwells within us at this moment.
All those things, their primal forms, live on in us and may at any time burst in upon us with annihilating force, in the guise of mass-suggestions against which the individual is defenseless.
Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with ism. Or has anyone the nerve to claim that the World War or Bolshevism was an ingenious invention?
Just as outwardly we live in a world where a whole continent may be submerged at any moment, or a pole be shifted, or a new pestilence break out, so inwardly we live in a world where at any moment something similar may occur, albeit in the form of an idea, but no less dangerous and untrustworthy for that. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 204.
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