Carl Jung: Our mandala is indeed an "eye," the structure of which symbolizes the centre of order in the unconscious.

Our mandala is indeed an "eye," the structure of which symbolizes the centre of order in the unconscious.

The eye is a hollow sphere, black inside, and filled with a semi-liquid substance, the vitreous humour.

Looking at it from outside, one sees a round, coloured surface, the iris, with a dark centre, from which a golden light shines.

B6hme calls it a "fiery eye," in accordance with the old idea that seeing emanates from the eye. The eye may well stand for consciousness (which is in fact an organ of perception), looking into its own background.

It sees its own light there, and when this is clear and pure the whole body is filled with light. Under certain conditions consciousness has a purifying effect.

This is probably what is meant by Matthew 6 : 22ff., an idea expressed even more clearly in Luke 11 : 33.

The eye is also a well-known symbol for God.

Hence B6hme calls his "Philosophique Globe" the "Eye of Eternity," the "Essence of all Essences," the "Eye of God."

By accepting the darkness, the patient has not, to be sure, changed it into light, but she has kindled a light that illuminates the darkness within.

By day no light is needed, and if you don't know it is night you won't light one, nor will any light be lit for you unless you have suffered the horror of darkness.

This is not an edifying text but a mere statement of the psychological facts.

The transition from Picture 7 to Picture 8 gives one a working idea of what I mean by "accepting the dark principle." It has sometimes been objected that nobody can form a clear conception of what this means, which is regrettable, because it is an ethical problem of the first order.

Here, then, is a practical example of this "acceptance," and I must leave it to the philosophers to puzzle out the ethical aspects of the process. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Page 337.

~Image: Eye of Ra

Carl Jung on "Maternal Instinct"

The over development of the maternal instinct is identical with that well-known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages and all tongues.

This is the mother love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends.

Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead. Mother is mother love, my experience and my secret.

Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are?

The attempt to say these things has always been made, and probably always will be; but a sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being-so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness-who was our mother.

He knows that the mother carries for us that inborn image of the mater nature and mater spiritualis, of the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part. ~Carl Jung, CW 9.i Page.172

Carl Jung: A Child is not born Tabula Rasa

Image: Female Figure (Sibyl with Tabula Rasa) by Diego Velázquez, ca. 1648

It is in my view a great mistake to suppose that the psyche of a new-born child is a tabula rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it.

In so far as the child is born with a differentiated brain that is predetermined by heredity and therefore individualized, it meets sensory stimuli coming from outside not with any aptitudes, but with specific ones, and this necessarily results in a particular, individual choice and pattern of apperception.

These aptitudes can be shown to be inherited instincts and preformed patterns, the latter being the a priori and formal conditions of apperception that are based on instinct.

Their presence gives the world of the child and the dreamer its anthropomorphic stamp.

They are the archetypes, which direct all fantasy activity into its appointed paths and in this way produce, in the fantasy-images of children’s dreams as well as in the delusions of schizophrenia, astonishing mythological parallels such as can also be found, though in lesser degree, in the dreams of normal persons and neurotics.

It is not, therefore, a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Page 136.

Carl Jung: Symbols are spirit from above, and under those conditions the spirit is above too.

Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious.

That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious.

All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols.

Symbols are spirit from above, and under those conditions the spirit is above too.

Therefore it would be a foolish and senseless undertaking for such people to wish to experience or investigate an unconscious that contains nothing but the silent, undisturbed sway of nature.

Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed.

Heaven has become or us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were.

But "the heart glows," and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 50

Carl Jung: In the centre is the golden light in the form of a lamp, as she herself stated.

In Picture 9 we see for the first time the blue "soul-flower," on a red background, also described as such by Miss X (naturally without knowledge of Bohme).

In the centre is the golden light in the form of a lamp, as she herself stated.

The cortices are very pronounced, but they consist of light (at least in the upper half of the mandala) and radiate outwards. [Footnote 143]

The light is composed of the rainbow hues of the rising sun; it is a real cauda pavonis.

There are six sets of sunbeams.

This recalls the Buddha's Discourse on the Robe, from the Collection of the Pali Canon:

His heart overflowing with lovingkindness . . . with compassion . . . with joyfulness . . . with equanimity, he abides, raying forth lovingkindness, compassion, joyfulness, equanimity, towards one quarter of space, then towards the second, then towards the third, then towards the fourth, and above and below, thus, all around.

Everywhere, into all places the wide world over, his heart overflowing with compassion streams forth, wide, deep, illimitable, free from enmity, free from all ill-will. . . .[Footnote144] ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 596

Footnote 143 Cf. Kabbala Denudata, Appendix, ch. IV, sec. 2, p. 26: "The beings created by the infinite Deity through the First Adam were all spiritual beings, viz. they were simple, shining acts, being one in themselves, partaking of a being that may be thought of as the midpoint of a sphere, and partaking of a life that may be imagined as a sphere emitting rays."

Footnote 144 "Parable of the Cloth," in The First Fifty Discourses from the Collection of the Middle-Length Discourses (Majjhima Nikaya) of Gotama the Buddha, I, pp. 39f. modified. This reference to the Buddha is not accidental, since the figure of the Tathagata in the lotus seat occurs many times in the patient's mandalas.

Carl Jung: In the centre is the golden light in the form of a lamp, as she herself stated.

In Picture 9 we see for the first time the blue "soul-flower," on a red background, also described as such by Miss X (naturally without knowledge of Bohme).

In the centre is the golden light in the form of a lamp, as she herself stated.

The cortices are very pronounced, but they consist of light (at least in the upper half of the mandala) and radiate outwards. [Footnote 143]

The light is composed of the rainbow hues of the rising sun; it is a real cauda pavonis.

There are six sets of sunbeams.

This recalls the Buddha's Discourse on the Robe, from the Collection of the Pali Canon:

His heart overflowing with lovingkindness . . . with compassion . . . with joyfulness . . . with equanimity, he abides, raying forth lovingkindness, compassion, joyfulness, equanimity, towards one quarter of space, then towards the second, then towards the third, then towards the fourth, and above and below, thus, all around.

Everywhere, into all places the wide world over, his heart overflowing with compassion streams forth, wide, deep, illimitable, free from enmity, free from all ill-will. . . .[Footnote144] ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 596

Footnote 143 Cf. Kabbala Denudata, Appendix, ch. IV, sec. 2, p. 26: "The beings created by the infinite Deity through the First Adam were all spiritual beings, viz. they were simple, shining acts, being one in themselves, partaking of a being that may be thought of as the midpoint of a sphere, and partaking of a life that may be imagined as a sphere emitting rays."

Footnote 144 "Parable of the Cloth," in The First Fifty Discourses from the Collection of the Middle-Length Discourses (Majjhima Nikaya) of Gotama the Buddha, I, pp. 39f. modified. This reference to the Buddha is not accidental, since the figure of the Tathagata in the lotus seat occurs many times in the patient's mandalas.

Carl Jung: Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious

Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.

The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the "subconscious," usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness.

Water is the "valley spirit," the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water-a yang embraced in the yin.

Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious.

So the dream of the theologian is quite right in telling him that down by the water he could experience the working of the living spirit like a miracle of healing in the pool of Bethesda.

The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 40