Carl Jung: It had a soul which lay in the darkness and it was their task to seek it there

Lecture III 16th May, 1941

In the last lecture we began considering the evidence, which is to be found in the writings of the old masters, as to the attitude which the art demands from its adepts.

We will continue this subject today.

The next passage is from the "BOOK OF KRATES, a text which has come to us through the Arabs, but which, judging by its subject matter, certainly dates back to Alexandrian times.

There is a dialogue between an adept and an angel.

Such dialogues are by no means rare in the alchemistic literature, the philosophical content is often depicted in the form of conversations.

There is even a famous classic, the "Turba philosophorum", which is written in the form of a supposed meeting of all the old Greek philosophers to discuss the secrets of the art.

In our passage from the "Book of Krates" it is an angel who is interviewed by an "artifex" (an artist) , that is, by a philosopher who, we are told, was a "pneumatikos" (a spiritual man).

He says in the course of his conversation with this angel:

"He who belongs to the spiritual people is bent on having books and seeks them, and he will make it his duty to strive with mind, soul and body to propagate the ideas which they contain. When he discovers something clear and precise in them, he gives thanks to God. When he meets a point which is obscure, he strives with the help of his studies to get an exact conception of it, in order to reach the goal which he has set himself, and to act accordingly."

The angel, smiling, answers Krates:

"Your intentions are excellent, but your soul will never decide to hand out the truth to the people, on account of the diversity of opinions and the wretchedness of ambition."

We hear in this text that Krates, the "pneumatikos", has the idealistic intention of preaching the truths that he has realised, of spreading abroad his philosophy among the people.

But the angel smiles in his superiority at this idealism, as if it were too optimistic, and says that, though the intention is excellent, Krates will never decide to spread abroad the truth among the people.

And this for two reasons:

I. Because of the differences of opinion: if Krates should announce his truth, such a terrible quarrel would break out, that his small amount of enlightenment would be torn in shreds during the discussion, and trampled in the dust.

II. Because of the wretchedness of ambition: when someone has picked up a little of this truth, he is tempted to adorn himself with borrowed plumes, to assume an air of importance and thus to deceive himself.

For the truth these philosophers are seeking is intended to change the philosopher himself in some way ; so that in reality there is no tendency to spread abroad formulations of the truth, because the philosopher is aware that in doing so he would simply be handing the task of transformation to other people, instead of facing it himself.

This text is very profound.

When Krates had finished this conversation with the angel, the latter vanished and refused to return, and the text goes on to tell us how Krates behaved in these circumstances; in other words: what a philosopher must do in order to induce his angel to return to him:

" . . . In order to induce God to send the angel again, Krates persists in contemplation, fasting and prayer."

This is a purely religious exercise as you see. This relationship to an "angel", as you will hear again later, occurs fairly regularly in old alchemy.

The old masters often speak of a "spiritus familiaris", a familiar or helpful spirit, who stood by them in their work.

You find such spirits being invoked in Faust, that genuinely alchemistic work, the spirit of earth, for instance.

The familiar spirit is called the "paredros" in Greek, the one who stands by.

The spirits of the planets are most often invoked, particularly those that dominate the alchemist's horoscope.

It was Saturn, above all, that could make men skillful in practising the art.

In another treatise, called the BOOK OF OSTANES, which also comes to us through the Arabs though it is of antique origin, we read that:

"It is only possible to work on the stone with resignation, science and intelligence "

It is remarkable that all these Arab authors (Abul Qasim and such people, for instance) lay a great deal of emphasis on intelligence.

Knowledge and intelligence are by no means identical, as you know; there are many people who know a great deal, who labour under loads of information, without being at all intelligent.

The next quotation is from the "Liber de compositione alchemiae" which is said to be of Arabic origin. It is in Latin and may possibly come from the eighth century.

An old alchemist, called Morienus, appears in this treatise, both his actions and words are recorded.

We read in this book:

"He who does not possess the gift of patience should leave this work alone.”

This work is concerned with a peculiar transformation of the soul, a strange psychical process, and these words of Morienus agree exactly with the well-known words of St. Ambrose:

"In patientia vestra habetis animas vestras." (In your patience you possess your souls.)

The man who applies himself to this work, if he can only have sufficient patience, will gain possession of that which is uncontrolled in other people.

Another old master (whom it is impossible to date accurately, though we find traces of him as far back as the twelfth century), ALPHIDIUS, says:

"If thou art humble thy wisdom will become perfect; if not, the disposition will remain concealed in thine innermost."

This sentence shows us that the origin of the alchemistic work is not in the substances used in the opus, but in the soul of the worker.

Alphidius says in another passage:

"Know thou, that thou canst not have this science, unless thou consecratest thy mind (mens) to God; that is, if thou dost not destroy all corruption in thine heart."

Here again a most earnest moral and religious attitude is strongly emphasised.

In the same text, on the same page, we read:

"I have left all pleasures behind me, and have besought God to show me the pure water (aquam mundam)."

This pure water is the chief instrument of the art of alchemy.

It is the water of life which, as you will remember, is a term also applied to Christ.

In another treatise, the so-called "Epistle of Aristoteles", we read:

"May divine providence help thee to conceal thy purpose. One should have foresight and recognise the devilish illusions, and protect oneself against them from the beginning, for the devil is fond of meddling in the chemical procedure."

We have another reference here to a special devil who meddles in the alchemistic opus, a chemistry devil, apparently particularly connected with the work, and who finds great pleasure in disturbing the serious alchemists while they are working.

In other words: the alchemists must expect to come into conflict with their own unconscious during this work, the unconscious will attack them, and cause exceedingly disagreeable emotional disturbances and even illusory visions.

We come now to one of the most curious texts in old alchemy, the AURORA CONSURGENS, which I have often mentioned before.

It has of local interest for us, in that we have a unique and most beautiful manuscript copy of it in Zurich, the Codex Rhenoviensis, a fourteenth century manuscript which comes from the monastery of Rheinau.

Unfortunately it is not complete, four chapters are missing, as I told you last Semester.

There is a more complete though later text (also a manuscript) in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

This work is extremely interesting, in that it teaches us a great deal about the psychology of alchemy.

The first part is written in a dreamy, ecstatic style, whereby a great quantity of psychological material gushes out like lava.

It is, however, very difficult to understand, and the text is in rather bad condition.

The beginning is extraordinarily different from the end; the second part is very objectively written, and it is possible that the two parts are by different authors, for the first part is certainly a kind of ecstatic avowal.

One often does not know who is speaking, it is as if many voices mingled.

The first part must have been written by a cleric, the sentences consist of one Vulgate text after another, but it contains ideas which are extraordinarily interesting as to the inner psychology of the alchemistic work.

The text is called: "AURORA CONSURGENS" or "AUREA HORA" (the rising dawn or the golden hour).

We read there:

"If thou wouldst conquer, learn to endure."

The virtues are speaking and patience says this .

Later the apostle says:

"Be patient for the Lord draweth nigh."

This is a paraphrase of James V. 8:

"Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh."

This means in other word : the fulfilment of the goal of the alchemistic opus (the production of the mysterious substance) can evidently be expressed as if it were the "drawing nigh" of God himself.

This reminds us of the Mass where we also find a passage, before the consecration, in which the Advent of the Lord is announced.

As the author is a cleric, it is not unlikely that he smuggled in certain contents of the Mass.

For the Mass itself is an "opus" (the Benedictines themselves use this term), it is a work of transformation, and is therefore similar to the alchemistic procedure.

Undoubtedly the Mass did directly influence the later medieval texts, we can easily prove this; but it is doubtful. to say the least of it, in the case of the older texts, because the liturgy of the Eucharist was not yet in existence.

The alchemistic opus is older than the Mass, just as the eternal water of alchemy is older than Christian baptism.

The divine water is mentioned in texts (which are Pagan and had no connection with Christianity) in the first century A.D..

We can hardly say that it is the author who speaks in the first part of the text, it is rather a most mysterious being, which could be described by the Latin term "spiritus absconditus" (concealed spirit): the spirit of Mercury or Hermes.

Hermes is the old Psychopompos, a mystagogue (teacher of the initiants), and the Poimandres (shepherd of men).

These terms are of pagan origin, but there is also such a figure in an early Christian text: "The Shepherd of Hermas."

This mysterious "spiritus absconditus" was the spirit which had entered matter and was concealed there.

This idea is founded on Gen. I . 2, where the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters", and as it moved it went down into the materia, and has been concealed there ever since.

The Gnosis expresses it in the following way:

Nous (the Pneuma) was looking down on the surface of the primal sea and his attention was attracted by the sight of his own reflection.

As he bent down towards it, the loving arms of the Physis, the materia, embraced him and drew him down; he blended with her, and remains her prisoner until freed by a process of redemption.

It is he who is imprisoned in the depths of matter. The "spiritus absconditus" is not really in the materia, that is only a projection, he is of course in ourselves.

It is the unconscious, which appeared to earlier, more naive people in the materia, in objects.

This still happens to us today, not, however, in the form of beautiful and great images but rather in silly little things.

When two people have a quarrel, for instance, they say to each other the things they should say to themselves.

We see the mote in our brother's eye but not the beam in our own, and these projections can happen with impersonal as well as personal images.

The way in which the "spiritus absconditus" speaks through the author of the first part of the "Aurora consurgens", reminds one of the spirit of earth in Faust: this spirit speaks to Faust, who writes down what it says.

The author of our text continues later:

"Turn to me with your whole heart and do not spurn me because I am weak and black, for the sun has changed my colour (A) and the depths have hidden my countenance, (B) and the earth is corrupted and infected (C) in my operations, because darkness had been laid upon it. (D) Because I am held fast in the mire of the deep (E) and my substance is not revealed, therefore I cried out of the depths and from the abysses of the earth doth my voice speak unto you."

This passage consists entirely of texts from the Vulgate: (A) refers to the "Song of Solomon" I:5 & 6:14 "I am black, but comely, 0 ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me . . . "

It is the loved one, the bride, who speaks thus in the Song of Solomon.

This "spiritus absconditus" is often represented as feminine, and in a very peculiar form: above she is a beautiful virgin with a crown, and below a snake, the so-called Edem, a Gnostic idea, and really that same Physis who caught Nous in her loving arms.

(B) refers to Jonah II: 3-6:

"For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me . . . The waters compassed me about, even to the soul : the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me forever . . ."

This is a very beautiful description of this "spiritus absconditus", the spirit which is concealed in the depths of the water, and which has sunk down into the darkness of matter.

(C) refers to Psalm 106

" . . . The land was polluted with blood. "

and (D) to St. Luke XXIII: 44

" . . . and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour . "

There is evidence in the text of the "Aurora Consurgens" itself, that it is really these Vulgate texts which are quoted indirectly, so the connection is no arbitrary one.

The author often says: "Jesaias dicit" (Isaiah says) or "Apostolus dicit", so that one then knows for certain that it is these passages which are meant. It is interesting that during the Crucifixion the darkness coincides with the death of Christ, that is the moment when Christ went into the darkness.

(E) refers to Psalm 69:2: " sink in deep mire where there is no standing" and

(F) to the famous verse in Psalm 130: 1-2 : "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, 0 Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications."

The language of this text shows clearly that the work on their art was an entirely religious experience for these old philosophers.

They even sometimes felt that the language of the Bible was the most suitable language in which to express themselves, because the subject matter was so similar.

The baffling thing is that, although this whole world of images has nothing whatever to do with natural science, the two always appear together in the alchemistic opus.

But it is just here that we can realise what matter meant to these people, they experienced it in a mystical way.

It had a soul which lay in the darkness and it was their task to seek it there.

They were conscious of the fact that they could rescue the darkened God from the materia, or at least this is what they attempted to do.

We come now to a French alchemist of the fourteenth century: DE RUPESCISSA, who had a similar attitude:

"It is our purpose, with the aid of this book, to comfort and strengthen the poor preachers of the gospel (les pauvres hommes evangelisans), in order that their supplications and prayers should not be in vain where this work is concerned."

The alchemists are referred to here as "les pauvres hommes evangelisans", the poor people who make known the message, who preach the gospel.

The author draws another direct parallel here, between alchemy and the Christian religion.

We will now take a small leap forward in time, and come to the famous sixteenth century alchemist, H. KHUNRATH.

As I told you before, in common with the majority of medieval alchemists, Khunrath was a doctor and a very learned man.

On the subject of attitude, he says:

"It is not our avaricious design, self-will, activity devoid of vocation, diligent reading of worldly wisdom, study and slovenly experimenting on which it solely depends, but it is far more God's calling, his will and his grace. This is the reason why so few of you attain the art. It is impossible to reach this art through books alone, or by obstinate labour, or even by both at once and together, however diligently one tries, and whatever one's ability and desire."

We see here that the study of books and the work on the opus (both warmly recommended by all the alchemists) do not of themselves lead to the goal of the art.

Khunrath continues:

"Shouldst thou discover in thyself (with a true philosophical renunciation of all transitory things which the world values) a p articular inclination, a rightful passionate longing, a fervent love, a strong desire and an inner urge towards the chemical art - but not in order to heap up gold and riches or to accumulate great treasures after the way of Mammon, but rather with the hope of realising the Magnalia of the great God, and of using its fruits theosophically - then, without doubt, thou art conditioned, disposed, called and sent by God. Now pray and work as advised, and thy labour will not be in vain."

Such a man is an "electus", a chosen one, who is able to bring this art to its conclusion.

“To sum up: In this case, without the special support and assistance of Ruach Hhochmah-El, the god of divine wisdom, or of other sub-delegated go od spirits or angels sent by God, our theorising and practising are in vain."

Here again we are told, that the goal of this art can only be reached when a direct intervention of the Deity takes place, that is, through the Grace of God; God sends a delegate, an angel, to complete the work, to produce the stone.

Psychologically this means that, to reach the goal, a phenomenon must take place, of which one can only s ay that it is a personification, or an autonomous appearance, of the unconscious spirit.

The "spiritus absconditus" must, so to speak, appear "in figura", as the "paredros".

This is very difficult for us to understand, but such an idea presented no difficulty to medieval man, for he was completely convinced that the psyche was of an autonomous nature.

We are very vague about the psyche, we have a dim idea that it is a sort of vapour arising from the warmth of the brain or a mere result of psychological functions.

The modern attitude towards the psyche always reminds me of an old text book, for the medical corps of the Swiss army, which said that the brain was like a dish of macaroni.

Presumably the psyche was the steam rising from the macaroni!

According to the spirit of that time, the psyche was an epiphenomenon of the physical.

We should really b e willing to confess that we are quite ignorant of the nature of the psyche; though unfortunately we do know that it can act in a very independent and unexpected way and produce phenomena which are impossible to explain rationally.

With all our modern means of disinfection we cannot rid ourselves of our fears, and is not the history of the world made by factors far beyond man's conscious intentions?

The s e factors are of a psychical nature, yet we go on thinking that the psyche is a vapour.

To call the psyche an epiphenomenon, or to identify it with human consciousness, is equally foolish.

Consciousness is also a psychical phenomenon, but it swims on the great unconscious, as it were, and we shall never know what the unconscious is, for it is the unconscious, the unknown, the "spiritus absconditus".

With what could we comprehend it?

Only with itself, because we can never get outside the psyche.

For it is the Ouroboros, it always eats its own tail, it is an inescapable vicious circle.

We are always entirely dependent on what our psyche makes of a thing, on what our brain says about it.

Take cold and warmth as an instance: If we come from a temperature of 20 degrees below zero and touch this table it will seem warm, almost hot, whereas it is a cool surface for other people.

Psychical existence is the phenomenon par excellence, we cannot conceive of any other kind of existence.

Beyond the twelve categories of Kant is the "noumenon", "das Ding an sich" (thing in itself), the union of the opposites, the Deity.

How can we be sure, then, that anything is what it seems to us, for we are always dependent on a psychical image.

Everything that we touch is psychical; we make wonderful scientific instruments to discover the real nature of things, but in the e!!.d absolute objectivity is always defeated by the fact that everything is psychical.

Old Khunrath was aware of this fact in his own way.

He continues:

"Beloved, hearken to what the philosophers themselves said about their books.

Hortulanus says:

"Hortulanus was also an old master of the art.

" 'Oho dear reader, if thou knowest how to prepare our stone, then I have told thee the truth, but if thou art not capable of doing this, then I have told thee nothing.' Geber, Morienus, Lilium and others say the same, that only he who knows how to prepare the stone can rightly and truly understand the sayings of the philosophers."

So no one understands this art who does not know it already.

"It is therefore most necessary to entreat God, the Lord of Hosts, for the spirit of his wisdom, that he may dispel our darkness and enlighten us with the light of his knowledge and truth, that he may embrace us, overshadow us and fill us with his great goodness, that he may open to us the writings and other monumenta of the philosophers, interpret and expound them, and lead us to understand the light of nature; thus all is well: If thou hast made him"

The spirit of God's wisdom = the Holy Ghost.

"thy praeceptor familiaris"

The familiar spiritual teacher.

"then all obscure words and hidden things are clear and open to thee. For God from Heaven can reveal all hidden things. Of a truth this is so."

We see here that for Khunrath the culmination of wisdom is to realise that we know nothing out of ourselves, it must be revealed to us through a kind of miracle.

These old philosophers expected, through their preoccupation with the science, their meditation and contemplation, that they would entice the grace of God to come to them and bring them revelations.

Such an idea (as is often the case with superstition) was not at all stupid.

There is something in such ideas.

We know from experience, that when we are seriously striving to achieve something, all kinds of hunches come to us about it, and a hunch is a small revelation.

The right hunch in the right moment can even save one's life, and naturally a scientist or student can also get the right hunch at the moment when he is most perplexed.

In German the word for hunch is "Einfall" (dropping in), and we must notice the meaning of the words we use.

These "Einfiille", or hunches, are phenomena of a spontaneous nature, which we cannot control.

They rise of themselves from the depths of the unconscious, and, under certain conditions, bring us solutions or elucidations which are superior to our everyday consciousness.

And if someone tells us that he was enlightened at the critical moment, it is psychologically right, far more right than if he tells us, that at the critical moment he made the right hunch.

The latter is a definite lie, whereas the former is the truth.

When we say: "Thank God it just occurred to me in time", we don't think what we are saying, but psychologically we are right. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 153-160

Alchemy is founded on the conviction of the spontaneity of the spirit

The development of science, which is so extraordinarily characteristic for the West, owes its origin in a great measure to the experimental attitude of mind in alchemy.

Alchemy is founded on the conviction of the spontaneity of the spirit and of inspiration, and strives, in untiring speculative meditation, to explore the unbound spirit of nature and to give it expression.

The methods, which I described in my earlier lectures, attempt to imprint a predetermined form on the soul, working from outside inwards; whereas alchemy endeavours to assist a psychical potentiality, hidden in unconscious nature, to develop and unfold to the greatest possible extent, in that it removes, working from inside outwards, the obstacles in the path of the hidden soul striving towards the light.

"Hab et omnia in se, quo indiget" (it has everything which it needs in itself) was the principle on which this art or philosophy worked. Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, 8 Nov 1940.

Carl Jung: It is as if our consciousness were a continent, an island or even a ship on the great sea of the unconscious.

It was the anticipatory quality in dreams that was first valued by antiquity and they played an important role in the ritual of many religions.

It is impossible to put the conscious before the unconscious, for the latter exists before and after consciousness.

In childhood we are still contained in it and our consciousness slowly emerges from it as islands which gradually join together and form a continent.

It is as if our consciousness were a continent, an island or even a ship on the great sea of the unconscious.

The subject of the unconscious has been occupying philosophers for some time back and there are thousands of examples on every side which show how consciousness is fed from the unconscious; we are only able to speak if ideas flow to us from the unconscious part of the psyche, which is the mother of consciousness.

So we cannot judge dreams from the conscious point of view, but can only think of them as complementary to consciousness.

Dreams answer the questions of our conscious.

It is a primeval belief that questions can be put to the Gods and answered by dreams.

We are not far from the truth, in fact we are very near to primeval truth, when we think of ourdreams as answers to questions, which we have asked and which we have notasked. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, 23 November 1934

[Image courtesy of Craig Nelson]

Carl Jung: The secret power of water lies in its infallible faculty of knowing the deepest place and finding it.

A further stage of the projection already reaches a sort of conclusion.

That is, one begins to suspect that the effective thing is something definite, not just the celestial vault, the wide earth or the vast sea.

The existence of definite substances is suspected, and then one has already come nearer to a definition of the prima materia.

For instance, let us imagine the prima materia is water, water is a mysteriously determined power which can also evaporate as steam.

By this analogy we have come nearer to understanding the prima materia: it is similar to water, subject to mysterious laws which impress us in a marvellous way.

Think, for instance, of the definition of the Tao in Lao-Tse’s "Tao-te Ching", where he says that the Tao is like the nature of water, it always seeks the deepest place.

The secret power of water lies in its infallible faculty of knowing the deepest place and finding it.

It was this which impressed our forefathers so deeply; and when they speak of "water" it is the essence of the unconscious that they describe.

This essence is a peculiar wisdom of nature, a knowledge which man does not possess, an instinctive knowl- edge, a conformity to obscure laws, totally inexplicable to naive man.

The mysterious operative in nature, which determines us, is therefore said to be of the nature of water.

But it is not tangible like water itself; we read in the Rosarium, for instance, that it is "aqua sicca" (dry water),it does not moisten the hands. Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 11July1941.

Carl Jung: But had that "I" been created or did it just happen?

Carl Jung: “does man feel himself to have been created or not”?




"Homo creatus est" means that man was created.

We are inclined to turn our backs smilingly on such a statement, thinking naturally enough of the first chapter of Genesis.

But it is really a psychological declaration of the first importance: does man feel himself to have been created or not?

Natural science holds that man has developed, through long generations of pre-human ancestors.

This is, of course, a process of nature, not a human activity.

Do we feel that we have created ourselves or have we rather found ourselves?

Most people feel the latter, one day we found ourselves and said "I" for the first time.

But had that "I" been created or did it just happen?

This is quite a different question and a very difficult one. Our feeling gives us no answer.

We can only say that we gradually discovered ourselves with our gifts, our vices, our qualities and our imperfections.

No proofs lie to our hand whether this conglomeration had a purpose, an intention, behind it, or whether it was the result of blind chance.

Speaking generally, neither our own feeling nor natural science can assure us that there is any kind of purpose behind.

But if we leave general conclusions and seek out individuals with a long and ripe experience of life and ask them: "Do you feel you are the result of chance, or do you feel that something of some kind was at work in you, that created you as you are?"

Astonishingly many of such individuals will reply that they have the feeling of something at work which led them, of an inner meaning, an inner guidance, which curiously enough has made them what they are.

Is such a statement simply a subjective phantasy or are there scientific proofs?

We must answer: there is the fact that the unconscious, the unconscious psyche, is older than the conscious.

The child's psyche is unconscious, an animal psyche if you like to express it that way, and very gradually a conscious condition develops.

Things which we do not know today, which we shall only know in the future, exist already in the unconscious.

There are actual proofs that this is so. If we follow a series of dreams through months or years, we can see a thought appearing of which the dreamer is totally unaware and which he cannot see till, perhaps years afterwards, it breaks through into his consciousness.

One is, therefore, justified in saying that the unconscious knew it long before the conscious.

Then the question arises: "Has the unconscious consciousness of its own?" ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 212-213.

Carl Jung: We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter.

We see, therefore, that possession by a breath-like being is a primeval conception of a spiritual condition.

The man who unexpectedly speaks from an exalted or peculiar state is mana or tabu, if he speaks paradoxically then he is surely a sorceror.

All this shows us that the psychological phenomenon of the spirit is an exalted condition of life, or at least an unusual one, or, to formulate it still more carefully, it is a change in the personality.

You see it is something very different to the modern use of the word "Geist", and I am convinced that these original forms are far nearer to its real nature.

We can only speak of it as a human condition; what it is in and for itself is a question which cannot be answered, we can only know how it is experienced.

This is equally true of the concept of matter or body.

We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter.

Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body.

Here again there is danger of a misunderstanding.

If we ask modern man what is body, he describes the anatomical structure which he can
see with his eyes.

But that is no psychic experience, it is scientific experience of the body.

Psychic experiences is the image of the body which is reflected in the psyche.

How I experience the body from within is a totally different question.

I am inside the body as a psyche.

If we investigate carefully what that means we come on a lot of extremely peculiar experiences which have given rise to many of the strangest symbols.

If you want to know how the body can be experienced psychically you must turn to eastern Yoga; medieval philosophy also knew something of the matter.

If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen.

Our medieval philosophers discovered these, and such centres are highly differentiated in India.

Anatomical knowledge does not tell us how we fill our own bodies but psychic experience does give us information on this point.

We fill our bodies as if through inner streams.

The Indian teaching of Prana formulates this, it makes people aware that they can, so to speak, stream into certain limbs and, if one experiments on these lines, one finds it is possible to achieve very peculiar results.

One can, for instance, warm cold limbs in this way and enervate certain muscles.

Yogins have many stunts of this kind which are based on psychological Prana experience and have nothing to do with mysticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 225-226

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3. Frith Luton's Jungian Dream Analysis and Psychotherapy: http://frithluton.com/articles/

4. Lance S. Owens The Gnosis Archives http://gnosis.org/welcome.html

Carl Jung: The Rose Window is a mandala and we come here to a curious analogy between East and West,

The Rose Window is a mandala and we come here to a curious analogy between East and West, the mystical flower which is the seat of the divinity.

We have already often spoken of the Indian Padme or Lotus.

It has a female significance, for it really symbolises the womb.

And we read in the Paradiso, Canto XXXIII:

"For in thy womb rekindling shone the love
Reveal'd, whose genial influence makes now
This flower to germin in eternal peace:"
This rose is the rose we read of in the beginning of Canto XXXI:
"In fashion, as a snow white rose, lay then
Before my view the saintly multitude,
Which in His own blood Christ epoused . . ."

This is· the multitude of the whole Church and the centre, the womb so to speak, is the innermost sanctuary,
the Deity:

. .... , "In that abyss
Of radiance, clear and lofty, seem 'd, methought,
Three orbs of triple hue, clipt in one bound:
And, from another, one reflected seem'd,
As rainbow is from rainbow: and the third
Seem'd fire, breathed equally from both."

Ignatius was probably familiar with all these things, they appear again and again right through the Middle Ages
and even up to the present time.

Dante represents the whole sphere of Heaven as consisting of a series of circles and the highest or
last is the rose.

That is an exact parallel to those eastern mandalas where the lotus is in the centre surrounded by a
magic circle.

Curiously enough I came across a similar picture the other day, belonging to modern Catholic art, a
Representation of the birth of Christ, the Christmas mystery.

It depicted a snow landscape with mountains in the distance, there were some houses and quite in the
foreground a plant with four buds.

The Christ child is emerging from the central flower. [See sketch.)

This is a purely eastern idea, the god in the lotus and, as far as I know, it is not to be found in this form
in medieval art.

It may also possibly be an effort at syncretism, that is, at introducing the eastern symbol of the lotus into
Church iconography. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 19 January 1930

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4. Lance S. Owen Gnosis Archive http://gnosis.org/welcome.html

Carl Jung: The ego changes all the time, it has every kind of illusion,...

V. We come next to the four-headed Vajra and the quaternitas of the four elements united in one.

The Vajra is the incorruptible being, the diamond, corresponding to the lapis philosophorum in alchemy.

The four elements congeal, the separated are reunited; a unity, a centre appears.

The nearest conclusion would be to assume that this centre was the ego.

There are some passages in alchemistic books where it does seem to be the ego, but there are far more passages where it quite clearly is not.

It could not be the ego really, for that existed before, and this centre is formed from the conscious and unconscious.

I call this centre the Self.

It reaches far beyond the conscious, how far we do not know.

It is not just what we know of ourselves, but it includes the unconscious as well.

It is the great treasure, an eternal thing which can never be changed.

The ego changes all the time, it has every kind of illusion, but the Self is as it is,there is nothing we can alter in it.

The colour motif appears here, one old alchemist says there are so many colours that a man cannot imagine them, only a god can imagine them.

We see here how supernatural this being is, it has all colours, divine colours, which means all qualities, divine qualities.

We have the foundation for the Self in the Vajra and quaternitas, it is not yet animated but is represented as static condensed energy. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 176

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4. Lance S. Owens The Gnosis Archives http://gnosis.org/welcome.html

Carl Jung "ETH Lectures" - Quotations

A dog does not know that it is a dog any more than a star knows that it is a star. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 217-223

The fact that Christ is regarded as male and female is extremely important, because it lays the foundation for the transcendent function, the reconciliation of the opposites. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 200.

Anatomical knowledge does not tell us how we fill our own bodies but psychic experience does give us information on this point. We fill our bodies as if through inner streams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

The ego is an illusion which ends with death but the karma remains, it is given another ego in the next illusion. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Vol. 3, Page 17

A subtle body, breath or smoke resembling, which can also be correctly described as anima. Anima is the feminine of animus, which is identical with the Greek word anemos which means wind or breath. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

He [Dante] began to write his "Divine Comedy" in his thirty fifth year. The thirty-fifth year is a turning point in life - it is an interesting fact that Christ died in his thirty-fourth year. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture VII, Page 222.

This process of active imagination is the making conscious of the material which lies on the threshold of consciousness. Consciousness is an effort and you have to sleep in order to recuperate from the task. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Volume II, Page 12.

If we speak of the atom we are not moved by it, but when we speak of the soul everyone is personally touched, it always awakes an emotion. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Pages 140-142.

Saturn is the ruler of the sign of Aquarius, and it is quite possible that Khunrath meant the coming age, the age of Aquarius, the water carrier, which is almost due now. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XV, Page 128.

Confucianism was the recognised state religion in China, it subordinates the interests of the individual to those of the state, whereas Taoism is essentially a religion for the individual. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 142.

The central idea of Taoism is no moral question, but is the Tao, the indefinable essence of the right way, and this is also the mystery of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 142.

The goal which the alchemist sets himself, however, is not a direct redemption of the human being, nor is it a propitiation of the Deity nor a defence against evil. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 143.

It [Alchemy] is the idea of producing a perfect and complete being, a being which has a redeeming effect and which has many names: panacea, medicina catholica, the philosophers' stone and innumerable other synonyms. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 143.

The goal of alchemy is not merely material, it is partly in "the Beyond", and is almost exactly similar to the goal of Taoism, where the whole effort is directed towards finding or creating Tao. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 143.

Knowledge and intelligence are by no means identical, as you know; there are many people who know a great deal, who labour under loads of information, without being at all intelligent. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 154.

For the Mass itself is an "opus" (the Benedictines themselves use this term), it is a work of transformation, and is therefore similar to the alchemistic procedure. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 156.

The alchemistic opus is older than the Mass, just as the eternal water of alchemy is older than Christian baptism. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 156.

With all our modern means of disinfection we cannot rid ourselves of our fears, and is not the history of the world made by factors far beyond man's conscious intentions? ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 159.

The spirit of God's wisdom = the Holy Ghost. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 160.

The word meditation is used, when someone holds an inner dialogue (colloquium) with someone else who is invisible, and also when God is invoked, or when someone speaks to himself or to his good angel. ~Dr. Rulandus, Cited ETH, Page 171.

And so we find them in alchemy also, and the fact is recorded that in deep meditation dissociation occurs between the ego and a "second", that takes on the form of an inner figure, or represents something quite objective which will answer questions or produce enlightening remarks. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 172.

We are not used to thinking that light comes from within as well as from without, it is as if the eye had an inward light of its own, if we receive a blow on the head for instance, we see stars. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

The levitation of St. Francis is a typical example. You can see yourself from a foot above, from the ceiling or from the ground. The Yogin himself levitates because he is so identified with his contemplation that he loses the weight of his body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

The Chinese do not say there is no content, but "we will not speak of it ", and they are so wise that they really do not do so, but we are so childish that we write thick books about it! ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Page 210.

Nirvana, for instance is a positive non-being, this is something which you cannot say anything about. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

The twenty gods have no special importance in the East, Eastern man has no liking for being born a god, for the gods have to become men and this they think would only make the process last longer. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

The individual experience is woven in to this tissue, so it is of vital importance, where we come from, who our parents are, and what our early surroundings were. We say that a person has such and such a character, but one is born with a form which can only be changed with the greatest difficulty. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Page 179.

Unfortunately very few people can remember these primeval pictures, many people become ill because they have lost them and only get well when they find them again. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Pages 179.

Plato's philosophy is concerned with these pictures of a time before creation, creation is a reflection of these pictures. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Pages 179.

There are people indeed who always project the blame, but I hold this to be incorrect! The fruit comes to him from the mother, through the friend, the shadow; this means that if he goes out into the world with his shadow, fruit will come to him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Pages 180

There are cases like that, they understand the world in too deep a sense. Buddha was such a case. He was a prince with everything that he wanted in the world, but he knew nothing of the truth of life. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Pages 181.

There are cases where it is better not to interfere; we must fulfill our duty as doctors, but the fact remains that some people are not meant to be cured, they are not fitted for life and if you step in and interfere fate always takes its revenge on you. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 27

The foundation of the unconscious is not chaotic, but has a distinct organization. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 22Feb1935, Pages 190

When things fall into the unconscious, it is only the power of reproduction which is lost; to event is lost, nothing has ever not happened, it is all stored up, and even after ten thousand years can come up in its pristine freshness. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 22Feb1935, Pages 191.

In early childhood we become acquainted with fairy tales and we learn mythology in school and in our later reading, we forget most of it in consciousness, but in the depths it is all carefully treasured. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 22Feb1935, Pages 192.

God made the horse and the tiger to be what they are, but to us it has become more important to be Mr. So and So than to fulfil the primitive task of being a human being. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XVI 1Mar1935, Page 197.

We could say that it was owing to Al-Gazzali that Islam became a mystical religion, though we in the West know very little today of this mystical side. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10Nov1939, Page 178.

So Christian theologians became acquainted with the devotional and mystical books of the Arabs and they made a vast impression upon them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10Nov1939, Page 178.

One of the great dangers of our time is the uprooted population in big towns, they live too near together and become completely collective. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10Nov1939, Page 179.

I have never carried out such exercises [Ignatian] but I have studied the extensive literature about them carefully, and I will try to give you information gathered from this as objectively as possible. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10Nov1939, Page 181.

So meditation, in the Ignatian sense of the word, is something very different to eastern meditation, it is less an oratio than a petitio. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10Nov1939, Page183.

It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11Jan1935, Pages 171.

When we were first in Africa we thought we must always be armed, but we soon learnt it was safest to have only a stick for wild animals know whether you have a gun or not and what game you are after; the leopards used to come shooting with us, and take our partridges before we could reach them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 18Jan1935, Page 173.

Our projections on other people behave like the icicle, they return to us, we do not remain unpunished when we make projection. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 18Jan1935, Page 174.

Things which are unconscious must come to us from outside, we see them first in other people, they are thrown at us or we have to go out and fetch them in. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 18Jan1935, Page 174.

A dream gives us unadorned information about the condition of a patient, it is as if a nature- being were stating his diagnosis or taking a child by the ear and telling him what he is doing. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 18Jan1935, Page 174.

A dream is a product of nature, the patient has not made it, it is like a letter dropped from Heaven, something which we know nothing of. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 156.

Dreams often seem nonsense to us, but they spring from nature and are related to our future life. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 156.

It was the anticipatory quality in dreams that was first valued by antiquity and they played an important role in the ritual of many religions. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 156.

So we cannot judge dreams from the conscious point of view, but can only think of them as complementary to consciousness. Dreams answer the questions of our conscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 157.

We are not far from the truth, in fact we are very near to primeval truth, when we think of our dreams as answers to questions, which we have asked and which we have not asked. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 157.

We do not realise in the West how important our consciousness is, it is a cosmogonic fact of the first importance. Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XIII 17Feb1939, Page 85.

In psychological language: between the forms, tangible and visible to our senses, and the disappearance of all forms, there is a between world, the psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XIII 17Feb1939, Page 86.

"The innermost nature of all corn meaneth wheat, and of all metal, gold, and of all birth, man!" ~Meister Eckhart cited ETH Lecture XIII 17Feb1939, Page 87.

The Sambhoga-kaya corresponds exactly to the modern term collective unconscious; and the archetypal figures correspond to the Devatas of our text. ETH Lecture XIII 17Feb1939, Page 86.

Guilt is also by no means the only cause of complexes, but with people who are especially sensitive on this point it is a very common complex ingredient, they have a moral complex, and it is as if they were ridden by the devil. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 132.

To some people every word irritates a complex, but these people are usually insane, they apply every word to their complexes. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 132.

Big dreams are impressive, they go with us through life, and sometimes change us through and through, but small dreams are fragmentary and just deal with the personal moment. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 133.

Dreams never really repeat experience, they always have a meaning, they are like association experiments, only they themselves produce the test words, they are a whole system of test words. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 134.

I am an exceptionally good sailor, but once I also had to pay my tribute to Neptune. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 134.

Then there are philosophical dreams which think for us and in which we get the thoughts that we should have had during the day. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 135.

It is fairly easy to imagine being able to think consciously, to have one's thoughts under control, but when it comes to feeling it is much more difficult to do so, especially for a man. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 102.

As a matter of fact it is by no means everyone who can sit down and think out something voluntarily, and it is quite equally possible for someone to sit down and feel something out. It just depends which is your domesticated function. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 102.

They [Intuitives] draw the souls out of things and act according to what they discover by this process, just as if what they discovered were ordinary every day facts. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 102.

The idea of the functions did not originate with me but was discovered by the Chinese centuries ago. It is true, however, that I stumbled up on it without knowledge of the east and only afterwards found the parallels to my own discoveries. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 105.

Schopenhauer was primarily a thinker and secondarily an intuitive, whereas the quantities were reversed in Nietzsche. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 105.

Intuitives are often very poor because they never wait for the harvest. Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 107.

There is what we might call a fifth function over all these four functions: the will. This is a peculiar function set above the others with a certain quantity of disposable energy in direct relation to the ego. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 107.

We make the great mistake of thinking that children are born a tabula rasa, but this is not the case. They are born with a vast inherited memory which contains a subjective content to meet everything which they contact externally. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 108.

Emotions are often confused with feelings but this is all wrong. Feeling is a valuing function, whereas emotion is involuntary, in affect you are always a victim. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 109.

Affect is undomesticated primitivity, annoyance can still be a feeling, but when your head begins to burn and you find your heart and pulse beat, then it has gone over into an emotion. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 109.

Our present material consists of that which touches the ego, the individual or Self reaches far beyond this, it is only in the evening of life that we can say who we really are. ~ Carl Jung, Lecture VI 2June1934, Page 110.

The unconscious contains not only memories but also the germs of the new, creative seeds. ~ Carl Jung, Lecture VI 2June1934, Page 113.

Much of Christ's teaching is also to be found in the teaching of his cousin Mithras. ~ Carl Jung, Lecture VI 2June1934, Page 113.

The collective unconscious is a source in which all the past and all the future lie, it does not belong to the individual, but to mankind. ~ Carl Jung, Lecture VI 2June1934, Page 113.

The unconscious is a living being with its use, object, and goal, and is eternally looking for a way to reach that goal - a way which is not our personal one, but the human way, mankind's way. ~ Carl Jung, Lecture VI 2June1934, Page 113.

Jealousy is always an extremely suspicious symptom. ~Carl Jung, Lecture VIII 15June1934, Page 119.

Neurotics often hardly breathe at all and when at last they are forced to draw a breath they sigh, and their fond relations are much concerned and ask: "What is the matter?" But they were just in need of breath. ~Carl Jung, Lecture VIII 15June1934, Page 121.

This shallow breathing can have very serious results and can start tubercular trouble for people with many complexes get into the habit of not breathing to the bottom of their lungs. ~Carl Jung, Lecture VIII 15June1934, Page 121.

We sleep a third of our life away and in the remaining two-thirds we are only more or less conscious. ~Carl Jung, Lecture II, 27April1934, Page 96.

Alert consciousness is a very rare condition, it is tiring and expensive, and as it requires so much energy we prefer to let ourselves live in a kind of torpor. ~Carl Jung, Lecture II, 27April1934, Pages 96.

If the unconscious stopped living nothing would happen in consciousness, for all that comes into our heads proceeds from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Lecture II, 27April1934, Pages 97.

Consciousness is essentially the psyche's organ of perception, it is the eye and ear of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Lecture II, 27April1934, Pages 98.

There is nothing which man has done, thought or undertaken which has not originated in the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Lecture I, 20April1934, Page 93.

The psyche appears to everyone as that which is reality to him and it takes an exceedingly long self-education to see that one's own experience is not the general experience. ~Carl Jung, Lecture I, 20April1934, Page 93.

There is nothing living except the individual, there is no life except individual life but, since the individual is the bearer of life, it is also universal. ~Carl Jung, Lecture I, 20April1934, Page 94.

The psyche experiences itself and is at the same time a general phenomenon; everything that exists depends on this fact. ~Carl Jung, Lecture I, 20April1934, Pages 94.

Psychology is no arbitrary matter, it is more a phenomenology that consists of many realities which have to be accepted as they are. ~Carl Jung, Lecture I, 20April1934, Page 94.

Ego consciousness is no universal condition; it could rather be called the organ of orientation which is sub-divided into functions. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 99.

The history of energetics is largely intuitive, it starts primitively as intuitions of archetypes, first they were beings, now they are mathematical formulas. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 100.

There is unchanging opposition, war in fact, between thinking and feeling. If thinking appears cold to feeling, feeling certainly appears stupid to thinking. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 100.

Intuitives show a quite extraordinary inability to register sensation facts, they have extraordinary fantasies about a thing, they intuit what is inside the locked drawer, but have no idea what the bureau looks like outside. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 101.

You can quite well say “I think”, “I feel” but the other view works also, “I am thought”, “I am felt“. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 101.

In any case, the Clairvoyante's visions lead us to the conclusion that she possessed the faculty of exteriorization, of seeing psychic processes as if existing outside herself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 26.

These processes are based on psychological facts, but we do not know scientifically whether ghosts exist or not. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 26.

In my estimation, second sight is not an illness, but a gift; you might as well say that it is pathological to be endowed with remarkable intelligence, but the possession of a gift always carries with it the burden of responsibility. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 26.

We can have prophetic dreams without possessing second sight, innumerable people have such anticipatory dreams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 26.

This disproves the theory that a child's mind is a tabula rasa, for it shows us that the unconscious is no empty surface, but a prepared ground; the brain is complete with the history of the world and every child is born with an unconscious assumption of the world. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 27.

There is no escape from this psychic background with which we enter life, it can only be accepted, we are bound to see the world through our own inborn temperament. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 27.

I should like to stress the fact that intense withdrawal from outer reality brings about an animation of the inner world which calls forth these phenomena. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 39.
But psychology, of all things, demands that we be honest and shut our eyes to nothing. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 39.

Space is a pure conception, the condition a priori of all spatial experiences generally. It possesses "empirical reality" and is the frame of all outer experience. Time is "the formal condition a priori of all phenomena”. Time as inner sense (space being the outer sense) has “subjective reality”. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 40.

The psychic facts have neither length, breadth, nor weight, but are essentially spaceless, and it is exceedingly difficult to determine their duration. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 40.
If the light were suddenly to go out and you could no longer see me, you would not be likely to think that I had ceased to exist, yet it would be no more foolish than to assume that the contents of the psychic background only exist when we can see them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 41.

The ancients understood this far better than we do, they did not speak, therefore, of being in love but of being possessed or hit by a god. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 41.

The psyche has a great desire to become whole and to collect back its scattered parts. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 41.

The really normal man has no need to be always correct, or to stress his normality; he can be possessed by an idea, a conviction, a feeling, he can live all sides of himself and do many foolish things. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX,15Dec1933, Page 41.

G. Dorneus speaks of the veritas as an impregnable castle, a citadel which cannot be stormed, it contains the treasure which is taken away after death. The idea is that the treasure is something which is ordained to eternal life, and apparently after death it goes up to the skies and leads a post mortem existence. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939

Alchemical philosophy is an instrument and a way to the inner transformation of man, a problem which is practically unknown today. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939

The mystical rose, like the lotus in India, grows for the salvation of man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939

Dante saw the mystical rose as the last vision in the Paradiso, where it embraced the whole Heavens. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939

But we find the chief parallel to the lotus in the hymnology of Mary, where she is called the flower of Heaven, the noble rose of Heaven, the rose without thorn; she is also greeted as the sweet rose, etc. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939

Mary is the bud which contains the becoming being that is undergoing transformation. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939.

The negro spirituals are tremendously alive, they belong to the most living religious expressions extant, which is a result of the tension between the opposites: a highly developed religion on one side and complete
primitivity on the other. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 23rd June 1939

We find the flower-like, natural spiritual development, which is so universal in the East, also among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture Epilogue 23rd June 1939

In the Middle Ages Christ was no historical figure but a perpetual presence, as hestill is in the Roman Catholic Mass. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 7th July 1939

Visions are spontaneous phenomena which spring from the unconscious and are a-moral. A moral standpoint is introduced by consciousness, it is impressed by a certain atmosphere and declares the visions to be good or bad. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 7th July 1939

If you practise this art, there are certain thoughts which you can project at suitable moments. Mohammed seems to have been able to do this. His visions fitted the situation and corresponded to his own wishes. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 7th July 1939

Through active imagination the image is imprinted on the psychic essence of personality with the purpose of transformation. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd Nov 1939

One of the great dangers of our time is the uprooted population in big towns, they live too near together and become completely collective. The argument that man is raised by the community is false. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Nov 1939

And do you believe that the homo sapiens is sapiens? I have never seen one yet. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Nov 1939

We find the idea of the soul as the form giving principle already in the Middle Ages, it is the soul which forms the body and the outer life. So in meditating on the Anima Christi you are meditating on Christ's form. The same idea is to be found in the East. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture17th Nov 1939

Rama Krishna is not worshipped, his photograph is there to remind the worshippers of his form. This is, therefore, totally different to the worship of Christ but the basic idea of soul as form is common to both. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture ETH Lecture17th Nov 1939

The question is not why did our Christian ancestors believe things which are absurd, but how is it that humanity knows these things and prizes them so highly? ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture

The Church as an effective force has disappeared too, and what is left? The mob, the State, the man-made State, a mere ant heap of individuals. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1st Dec 1939

We fall captive to the herd animal if we cannot reach the individual divinity in ourselves. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1st Dec 1939

The feminine side of Christ is much emphasized in Christian iconology, he is usually represented as a very feminine man. The same characteristic was apparently attributed to his cousin, Mithras. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

This bi-sexuality of Christ is called androgynous, from aner (man) and gyne (woman). This is not only a Christian idea, the gods in most religions have an androgynous nature ascribed to them in some form orother. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

The Roman Catholic Church regards Christ as the spouse of its unmarried members. Therefore he is the bridegroom of women and the bride of men. I speak, of course, of the conscious of men, to their unconscious He is also the bridegroom. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

We could say that western man became conscious of the fact that this man, this teacher Jesus, was the divine man, whose path had been prepared for thousands of years by Osiris in Egypt and as the idea of the coming of the Messiah in Israel. This was no human conspiracy, probably Christ had a convincing effect, there was something about him which carried the conviction that he was filled with the spirit of God, that he was a prophet. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

If we want to draw the psychological conclusion we must go further and say that the West has an anima, that is, a feminine unconscious, and that the East has an animus, that is, a masculine unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

The mighty of this earth are usually very ordinary human beings, no giants in intellect or stature. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939

In my opinion our attitude to the East is one of Europe's worst sins. We ignore it or notice it in the wrong way. We are not alone on the earth. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 15th Dec 1939

"Do you feel you are the result of chance, or do you feel that something of some kind was at work in you, that created you as you are?" ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12th January 1940

A certain line of thought, for instance, is developed through a series of dreams; and I discover that I am the duplicate of my unconscious anticipation of myself; at the same moment I am filled with a sense of purpose as if a secret arrangement of my fate existed. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26th Jan 1940

But there is something which can be proved from everyday experience, not body becoming spirit, but body becoming conscious, man becomes conscious of his body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940

We must have a psychic image of the body, in order to become conscious of it, we must translate the Physical fact of the body into a psychic experience. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940

We meet with the possibility of a very dangerous misunderstanding here, because if we call becoming conscious becoming spirit, we think that consciousness is spirit and thus mix up the intellect and the spirit.
Spirit is in no way intellect, it is something totally different. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940

It is surely inaccurate to say that man is a body which becomes spirit. It is true that consciousness can reach far into the body and that this may have some effect on the processes themselves, but in a very limited degree. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940

Consciousness is becoming aware of, making an image or concept of something, and intellect is the ability to think. Neither of these things is spirit. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

If we consider this aspect of " Geist", we shall see that it is a peculiar condition of man. That which is moved, as if blown away by the wind, that which is made alive, is called spirit. It is, therefore, an increase of life. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

This is equally true of the concept of matter or body. We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter. Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

A host of possibilities is still embedded in the archetypes, in the realm of the Mothers. The abundance of possibilities eludes our comprehension. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 22

The origin of the archetypes is a crucial question. Where space and time are relative it is not possible to speak of developments in time.
Everything is present, altogether and all at once, in the constant presence of the Pleroma. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 22

Man is also distinct from the angels because he can receive revelations, be disobedient, grow and change. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 36.

God changes too and is therefore especially interested in man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 36.

Although the earth existed before there were any human beings, it could not be seen or known by anyone. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 22.

The idea of a normal man, perfectly healthy, is in itself an illusion. All mankind is liable to illness for we are not our own masters. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27 Jan 1939

It is a great blessing for mankind when the soul is contained in the dogma and there is always a great deal of misery when this is not the case. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27 Jan 1939

Where there are no forms and ceremonies, rites in which they can express their souls, people become moody and caught in conflicts. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27 January 1939

There is one tribe in Central Australia which spends two thirds of its time in religious ritual - and how much do we? We look down on them as primitives, but their way is far more meaningful than ours. We work for ourselves but they for the whole world. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27 January 1939

The microcosm is a small edition of the macrocosm, the anima mundi. They both have the same round form. Plato's idea is identical with the eastern idea of the Atman or Purusha. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3 Feb 1939

Modern philosophers philosophise with the head alone about man, but the old philosophy came from the whole man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3 Feb 1939

But here it is the earth which comes last out of Shunyata as the quinta essentia, apparently the goal of imagination is not spiritualization but that the tangible earth should become real. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Feb 1939

So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body. This has only a distant Relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

But when Przywara says that man is a "medium formale materiale", that is, a mediator between a formal and a material nature, we can again assent. Man is a peculiar psychic unity of experience of body and spirit, torn in two pieces by the intellect. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

We also find four colours in the Bardo Thodol as the lights of the four wisdoms, they form four "light-paths" to Buddhahood or redemption. These are clearly the four functions expressed as four paths of orientation. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Feb 1939

Man is the point that has become visible, stepping out from the Pleroma, knowing what he is doing, and able to name the things about him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 22

It is absolutely necessary to grasp every psychic process with all the four functions, otherwise we only grasp a quarter of it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Feb 1939

Very few people understand intelligent things whereas everybody understands stupid things; stupidity, therefore, is a far greater power than intelligence. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10 Feb 1939

Alchemy began at latest in the first century A. D. and is really a curious process of initiation, a s ort of practical Yoga. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

Alchemy works as a sort of chemistry on actual matter and yet it is essentially Yoga and the symbols which arise in both are very similar. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

The old idea of chaos was that it held everything in potentia including man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

This potential man was not the biological man but the philosophical man, a peculiar being, which is also sometimes called anima. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

You notice that the meditation is not on the spirit of the Buddha, but on the Body of the Buddha; the highest truth grows from the deepest roots of the body and not from the spirit. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 28

Proclus said: "Always where there is creation there is also time." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

I must mention an old author of the 16th century, a philosophical doctor, Dorneus, he was a sort of colleague of mine! He said: "Do you know that the heavens and the earth first of all were one, and that then through the art of the Creator they were divided into four so that you and all else could be created." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

Mark Twain wrote a book a out Christian Science, he showed it up as the most abject nonsense, as an outflowing of human stupidity. But, he adds, it is nevertheless very important, because it is stupidity which rules mankind. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII,10th February, 1939, Pages 76-81.

This perfect being is a conception of an optimum of life, and it is symbolically represented as the all-round being. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture 10, Page 81.

…I have been working for many years on the psychology of the unconscious, and it was the enigmatical and puzzling structure of the unconscious which brought me to alchemy, as well as to the study of Yoga and of the Ignatian exercises. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture 10, Page 81.

The "anima rationalis" is the reasonable mind of man, which is really the highest form of the human psyche, worthy of immortality. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 96.

The serpent is a Gnostic symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, because a snake is mainly backbone. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

If the unconscious can be localized anywhere it is in the basal ganglia, and it has the same uncanny character. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

The "art of gold making" is a sort of creating of the world, or it is based on the pattern of the creation of the world, and, as in Genesis, a cosmos is fashioned from the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

This means, applied to alchemy, that it is death to take alchemy as an external occupation, but the man who regards it as an inward experience, can live and rejoice. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

The assurance that the stone will remain with us seems to be directly related to Christ's promise: "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. " (St. Matt. XXVIII. 20.) ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

[Study and search of what thou art,
And what is in thee, thou wilt see,
Thy study, learning, whole and p art,
It all doth come from inside thee,
For what outside us we do ken
Is also in us, so Amen.] ~Salomon Trissmosin cited by Carl Jung, ETH, Page 105.

For by Self-knowledge, they do not mean mere knowledge of the ego, but also knowledge of the Nous, that mind or spirit which is represented by the snake. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 113.

This field is the collective unconscious where the treasure is hidden, the royal treasure in the sea. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 113.

There is another possibility, that of the subtle body, a fine material veil of the soul, which cannot exist so to speak without a body. This is the "corpus glorificationis" (glorified body), the transfigured body, which is our future portion. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 115.

The dreams of early childhood contain mythological motifs which the children could not possibly know of. These archetypal images are the primeval knowledge of mankind; we are born with this inheritance, though this fact is not obvious and only becomes visible in indirect ways. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 119.

These things are then lost to consciousness, and must be found again in the course of life, at the cost of infinite effort, if God is kind enough to send us a neurosis (that special gift of grace) to accompany us on life's journey. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 119.

It was Khunrath who said that Christ is the saviour of man, whereas the mysterious substance of alchemy is the saviour of the universe, not only of man but of nature. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 121.

KHUNRATH, who wrote in the sixteenth century, says directly: "He who knows the stone, is silent about it.” This reminds us of Lao Tsu's words: "Whoever speaks does not know, whoever knows does not speak." ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XV, Page 128.

When his pupils questioned Buddha about Shunyata, he was silent or replied in a round about way. There were things he did not want to speak of, he would not say what was best left unsaid. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII,10th February, 1939, Pages 76-81.

The serpent is a Gnostic symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, because a snake is mainly backbone. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.

The spirit is usually expressed by a serpent which proves that this spirit is not Just the human mind, but an animal or reptile mind. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.

We must assume, therefore, that the spirit has two aspects in alchemy, the human mind as we know it, and the serpent mind, which we can only say is unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.

The snake in alchemy is the "mercurial serpent", the old Gnostic image for the Nous, the mind, where the spirit was represented as a serpent, as the Agathodaemon (the good daemon), or directly called the serpent of the Nous. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.

This serpent does not represent "reason" or anything approaching it, but rather symbolises a peculiar autonomous mind which can possess one completely, a spirit of revelation which gives us "Intuitionen" (intuitions). ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.

Since the time of the old Gnostics, the serpent has been the symbol for the brain and its appendages; that is, for the lower centres of the brain and for the spinal cord, partly on account of its shape, but also from introspective reasons. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.

…the serpent is the hypostatic, underlying materia (the essence of matter), which sinks into the water, or is as it were in the water, and, through illusion, it deceives the senses. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 219.

The Kavirondos say that people only become human beings through initiation, before that they are animals. This is the sacrifice of avidya, of not knowing, of being a purely instinctive creature. This instinctive unity is divided into four and is reunited. This second unity is Mt. Meru. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

The ego is an illusion which ends with death but the karma remains, it is given another ego in the next illusion. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Vol. 3, Page 17

A subtle body, breath or smoke resembling, which can also be correctly described as anima. Anima is the feminine of animus, which is identical with the Greek word anemos which means wind or breath. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

We have our bete noire and say with the old Pharisee: "God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are.” We don't want to know that we are the "other men." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27 Jan 1939

In every case of very pronounced introversion, the three groups of phenomena, which I mentioned in the last lecture, occur: first, experience of the relative character of space and time; secondly, the autonomy of certain psychic contents and thirdly, the experience of symbols belonging to a centre which does not coincide with the centre of consciousness and which is equivalent to an experience of God. ~Carl Jung, Lecture X, 12Jan1934, Page 43.

Youth has to build many walls in order to shut off the background from the ego, so that it may believe in the outer world; for to remain under the fascination of the inner images causes hesitation and lack of accomplishment, and to live, to be wholly devoted to something, is also an art which must not be despised. ~Carl Jung, Lecture X, 12Jan1934, Pages 45.

I am personally of the opinion that not only people, but even animals have souls. I am also deeply convinced of the truth of all creeds. No logical standard of comparison exists, they all contain genuine and real psychological experience and it is merely stupid to criticize them with the aim of establishing one truth. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, Page 18.

Psychology did not suddenly spring into existence; one could say that it is as old as civilization itself. The ancient science of astrology, which has always appeared in the wake of culture all over the world, is a kind of psychology and alchemy is another unconscious form. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture I, Page 11.

In reality we imagine nothing, it imagines itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, Page 53.

Leopold did not suddenly spring into existence when he appeared as a control, he was always present in Helene Smith, he was part of her psychic structure. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, Page 53.

William James had a true understanding of these facts when he said: "Thought tends to personal form." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, Pages 53-54.

Psychology did not suddenly spring into existence, one could say that it is as old as civilization itself. Carl Jung, ETH Lecture I, 20Oct1933, Page 11.

In earlier days the healing of the psyche was regarded as Christ's prerogative, the task belonged to religion, for we suffered then only as part of a collective suffering. It is a new point of view to look up on the individual psyche as a whole with its own individual suffering. Carl Jung, ETH Lecture I, 20Oct1933, Page 12

It is no wonder, therefore, that nature herself strives to produce a strengthening of the ego in order gradually to bring about more consciousness, for without this the further development of mankind would be impossible. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 137.

The whole history of culture is really the history of a strengthening and widening of consciousness, and therefore of the controlling ego. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 137.

After half an hour’s conversation I felt I was listening to a Chinese sage or an east European peasant, still rooted in the Earth Mother yet close to Heaven at the same time. I was enthralled by the wonderful simplicity of his presence...~Mircea Eliade on Carl Jung, Ordeal by Labyrinth, Pages 162-3.

The lotus has always had an important mystical meaning. Its roots are down in the slime and mud at the bottom of the lake and the flower unfolds on the surface of the water. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 113.

There are, it is true, cases of people who are living below their own value where the shadow is the superior instead of the inferior part of the personality. Such people are apparently very modest but there is a lot of cunning in their modesty. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 113.

As we are considering man's psyche, the ego in the conscious and the shadow in the unconscious are both masculine but on the lower floor it is different. There man meets his other side which is feminine. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 114.

It is a primeval fact that the psyche consists of both sexes. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 114.

Yet we know that every embryo is formed of masculine and feminine genes, the sex is determined by the majority. Where then is the minority? Carl Jung, ETH, Page 115.

Marriage is no help in this, one does not reach it in that way, for we have deceived ourselves when we find our own feminine in a real woman. Carl Jung, ETH, Page 115.

If I have a beam in my own eye I shall see a mote in someone else’s eye and call it a beam. This exactly describes the way I necessarily first see my own feminine psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 116.

We think of maya as illusion, deception, but it is also building material, illusion which becomes real. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 116.

If we regard alchemy rationally it is complete nonsense but it is exceedingly meaningful psychologically, the whole riddle or secret of the human psyche is to be found in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 117.
The alchemists returned in matter to the mother, the first carrier of the feminine unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 117.

Mary is represented as a sea flower in one hymn and Christ as the sea bird that rests in her. This is exactly the eastern motif of the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 118.

These various formulations indicate the same being that we find in the Gnosis as the ethereal man, light and diaphanous, identical with gold, diamond, carbuncle, the Grail, and, in Indian philosophy, with the Purusha or personified as Christ or Buddha. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 118.

It is necessary to talk to Yogins themselves in order to understand and those who come over here are usually acrobats and not philosophers. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 119.

Through fettering the klesas one brings the eating of the world to an end, and can discriminate between oneself and desire. We reach our own will and its content by practising this restraint. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 127.

But we spend our free time listening to the wireless and rushing off to the cinema. Yet much of our western neurosis comes from the fact that we do not find enough time for ourselves; it would be wiser to meditate and seek the Void when we need rest, than to run after outer distraction. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 128.

Yoga does not lead to the ego but to the knowledge that the ego is only a phenomenon, it is the face, skin or symptom of an incomprehensible being. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 136.

When the ego is identified with the Atman it goes up on to a height where it does not belong, and when the two are separated the ego rolls down the hill. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 137.

The idea that Christianity dropped from Heaven as a direct revelation is an historical forgery. Its essential content is rich in philosophical ideas which reach back beyond Plato and Pythagoras. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 137.

Alchemy began about the same time as Christianity, in fact we find alchemical ideas in China long before our era, so one can only be sure that the symbolism and language of the Fathers of the Church play an enormous role in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 161-162.

The coniunctio in alchemy is a union of the masculine and feminine, of the spiritual and material principles, from which a perfect body arises, the glorified body after the Last Judgement, the resurrection body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 159.

This means an eternal body, or the subtle body, which is designated in alchemy as the philosopher's stone, the lapis aethereus or invisibilis. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 159.

Active imagination is to be understood as a way or method, to heal, raise and transform the personality. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 174.

In the East the Void represents a psychic emptying of all conscious contents through the practice of Yoga. In the western series the chaos, or nigredo, is not thought of as a psychic condition but as a condition of the materia. This is the great difference between the East and the West. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.

The ego changes all the time, it has every kind of illusion, but the Self is as it is, there is nothing we can alter in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.

Active imagination is the intentional activating of a function which otherwise remains passive. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.

We do not stop to think that nothing would exist, there would be no culture in the world, if it were not for active imagination; it is always the forerunner, everything springs from it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.
Later the single lotus is imagined on the firm ground of seven jewels, which is reality; so it is on the foundation of reality that the lotus is induced through imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 103.

We constantly hear of Mahatmas and Rishis living away in the mountains of Tibet who are capable of all kinds of magical practices and in India this is also taken for granted; but when Shri Rama Krishna became interested in the question and tried to discover if such people existed, he did not find a single one. Usually it is the invisible or psychic reality which is meant. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 103.

We, in the West, are all in the deep darkness of avidya and badly in need of redemption. We need to achieve psychic understanding, not just to be, but to know what you are. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 104.

In the West, we associate the spiritual with something high above, but the East finds it in Muladhara, the lower part of the pelvis, that which supports the roots, the lowest foundation of life. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 104.

I have seen such cases where a second personality brings about an absolute change in character. It is this phenomenon which is made conscious here through active imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 106.

Christian iconography represents Christ as a very feminine man. This is not just a matter of taste, but because he could not be the redeemer if he were not woman as well as man: all the opposites had to unite in him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 110.

In alchemy, the redemption of man is brought about through the opus; in contrast to Christianity, where redemption depends entirely on the grace of God. The eastern concept is identical with the alchemical idea: it is the task of the individual to redeem himself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 110.

The chemical and the psychological processes went hand in hand, the alchemists worked with such intensity and expectation that it had a psychological effect on them. This is difficult for us to understand. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 110.

We like to think that we are not unconscious but we are to an amazing extent: think of the many things we do without knowing it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 111.

These unconscious actions, therefore, do not exist for us (any more than America exists for those who do not know that it was ever discovered) but other people see what we are unaware of ourselves! ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 111.

This dissolution of the darkness also dissolves the picture which we have made of ourselves. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 111.

Just as the ark found a dry point on which to land, so you find a small but firm spot, an instinctive foundation on which you can stand and from which you can see: here I am right and there I am wrong, I am not quite right and not quite wrong, I am that. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 111.

Every profound student of alchemy knows that the making of gold was not the real purpose and that the process was a western form of Yoga. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 107.

It is, however, impossible for us to recognise our relationship to eastern ideas, or to assimilate these, unless we realise our own Christian background and that such ideas were expressed in the original documents of our own faith. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197.

The alchemists think of the Redeemer as lying hidden or sleeping in the materia, he does not only descend from heaven but comes also from the depths of matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 189.

There is indeed a meaning in suffering, it is a sort of divine secret, for it is less the human being and more the divine man that suffers. God humiliated himself to become man and thus necessarily fell a victim to human suffering. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 189.

We saw that Christ is the western parallel to the eastern Atman or Purusha, and the search for both is the search for the Self, though the paths are utterly different. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 189.

We know for psychological reasons that when the outer attitude to the world is feminine and passive, the inward attitude will be masculine and active. And of course vice versa, a belligerent outer attitude means a feminine inner attitude, characterized by a peculiar receptiveness and surrender. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 192.

It is curious that the East has such a negative attitude to suffering, that it regards it merely as an illusion to be overcome, whereas to us it is the path par excellence to Christ, to the Self. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 194.

I am afraid that the historical responsibility for this state of things belongs to the Church: it did not emphasize the metaphysical significance of the individual and taught its members to deify the Church, the institution. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

Our culture, which is threatened today, is primarily a Christian culture, if it had not been for the Roman Catholic Church, we should still be barbarians. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

But we stopped at the institution of the Church, it was erected for the welfare of mankind and the divine germ of the individual was neglected and repressed, to such an extent that we have no understanding for the East and depreciate its teaching as megalomania. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

We were all taught to depend on the walls of the Church, not on God in ourselves. How many of you even know that Christ said: “Ye are gods”? Have you ever heard a sermon on this text? I have not. But there are many passages in the New Testament which are never preached upon. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

Not the human being, not the ego, is God but the Self is God in man, and it is superior to human consciousness, just as the whole is superior to a part. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 196.

We suffer from a certain "development arrete", our spiritual development stopped short, whereas that of the East is hypertrophic. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197

He [Neitzche] expressed it as “God is dead” and he did not realise that in saying this he was still standing within the dogma, for Christ's death is one of the secret mysteries of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197.

There is a real salvation in these medieval ideas which can free a man and give his existence a meaning far beyond the sacred bank balance and which reaches as far as suffering. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 191.

The dogma claims that Christ was God who became man. In psychological language this means that the Self approached the consciousness of man, or that human consciousness began to realise the Self, as a real human fact. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 200.

Eastern man realizes the Self in himself but it approaches western man from outside, it is even an historical event, the life of Christ. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 200.

The East, on the contrary, first realizes the Self as the thumbling in man's heart, as the smaller than small which I contain. But the Self appears in western psychic experience as a divine figure, as something which contains me and faces me with the infinite power of a god. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 201.

We could say that western man became conscious of the fact that this man, this teacher Jesus, was the divine man, whose path had been prepared for thousands of years by Osiris in Egypt and as the idea of the coming of the Messiah in Israel. This was no human conspiracy, probably Christ had a convincing effect, there was something about him which carried the conviction that he was filled with the spirit of God, that he was a prophet. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 201.

In other words, individuation, becoming conscious of the Self, is divine suffering. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 201.

At last I discovered that they [The East] call the unconscious consciousness, indeed enlightenment. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 204.

Man is a peculiar psychic unity of experience of body and spirit, torn in two pieces by the intellect. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 226.

Natural science holds that man has developed, through long generations of pre-human ancestors. This is, of course, a process of nature, not a human activity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 212.

The child's psyche is unconscious, an animal psyche if you like to express it that way, and very gradually a conscious condition develops. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213.

Consciousness is produced from a quite specific unconsciousness, which anticipates things that consciousness will only later recognise and understand. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213.

We are thought from our psyche before we know it, we can bring empirical facts to prove this. So the statement that "man was created" seems to me very important. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213.

If I discover that I have been anticipated, it makes an enormous impression upon me; I could not in that moment clearly define the meaning of my life but I feel it as something living. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 214.

A certain line of thought, for instance, is developed through a series of dreams; and I discover that I am the duplicate of my unconscious anticipation of myself; at the same moment I am filled with a sense of purpose as if a secret arrangement of my fate existed. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 214.

One living experience is worth a great many intellectual formulations and a psychology must be founded on this fact. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 214.

If man does not reverence and submit to the unconscious, which created his consciousness, he loses his soul, that is, he loses his connection with soul and unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 214.
We think we have conjured away this danger when we call it God, for Christianity has forgotten the dark side of God. The old Church knew that God was dangerous. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

But gradually God was only spoken of as the good God but the Church knew, and perhaps still knows, that God is dangerous. But it preaches in mild murmurs, for it is not popular to speak as Luther spoke of the deus absconditus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

The principle of evil is just as autonomous and eternal as the principle of good. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

An old alchemist said that God was obviously displeased with his work on the second day when he had separated the waters above from the waters below, thus creating the Binarius (two) which is the devil. On all the other days "God saw that it was good" but not on the second day. (Compare Gen. I. 6-8.) ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.

As God is the union, the reconciliation, of all the opposites, it is natural that both the good and evil principles should be in him potentially, should originate in him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.
It is much more important to be contented and peaceful than to be intellectual. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 214.

We could say that the universe only exists in order that this fruit may ripen; in order that the Self may come into being and reach its own place, which is simply a psychic process of becoming. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 220.

That is, as man himself is created for a purpose, he may use all created things for that purpose, and in order to do so freely he must be indifferent and unconcerned about them. One might almost think that this attitude was similar to that of Buddhism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 220.

We meet with the possibility of a very dangerous misunderstanding here, because if we call becoming conscious becoming spirit, we think that consciousness is spirit and thus mix up the intellect and the spirit. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221.

We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter. Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

How I experience the body from within is a totally different question. I am inside the body as a psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

If you want to know how the body can be experienced psychically you must turn to eastern Yoga; medieval philosophy also knew something of the matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

The Indian teaching of Prana formulates this, it makes people aware that they can, so to speak, stream into certain limbs and, if one experiments on these lines, one finds it is possible to achieve very peculiar results. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

The body, therefore, is also a psychological condition, a peculiar form of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.

So we see that what we call spirit and body are psychic conditions, limited psychic functions, and the body tells us as little about what matter really is, as the spirit about the thing in itself which is behind the spiritual condition. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.

We can experience the body psychically, a prana-body, a subtle body, and there are certain exalted and ecstatic conditions in which we can experience spirit. So what we experience of spirit and body are really psychic modalities. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.

Body and spirit, thought of as two poles, combine correctly with each other if man depends correctly upon God, because they are reconciled through His unity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 227.

Prana conceives of the body as a sort of system of pipes, going into the limbs and connecting the centres. These centres are not mystical but psychical centres of experience. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

That is how we should understand the pleroma, the fullness, which is the origin of the existence of the world, where everything is contained but in potentia, as a possibility, anything can come out of it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 254.

If we want to know the truth about ourselves we must realise that we are capable of great virtue and also of the worst vice. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13, Page 245.

Consciousness has increased but historical evidence shows that morality has not. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XIV, Page 247.

In old Egypt, for instance, there was no concept of sin in our sense at all. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XIV, Page 247.

Western man comes in from outside, so to speak, from the quaternity of the world into the unity of God, whereas eastern man goes out from the divine unity into the quaternity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XIV, Page 252.

The ideal in some Christian circles is to be always cheerful, of good courage, to be friends with all the world and to live above all conflict; for Christ has taken the conflict on Himself, so why should I trouble with it? That is no imitation of Christ, it is a device to avoid the essential Christian conflict. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XVI, Page 258.

It is very remarkable that this conception of the divine water should have existed in Greek philosophy before the days of John the Baptist. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 75.

"It is by the revelation of the highest and greatest God that I have attained this art, and only through diligent study, wakefulness, and through constantly reading the authentic books.” ~Carl Jung, Citing an Alchemist, ETH Lecture V. Page 161.

Through diligent study and religious exercises, one can attain an art or knowledge which exists somehow beside Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 161.

Paracelsus says that man has a mind in order that he may understand the truths which are made known in the Gospel, and only for this purpose. But on the other hand man has also a "lumen naturae" (a natural light), a source of knowledge hidden in nature, from which he can draw enlightenment. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 162.

I use the word "Gnosis" intentionally, because alchemy retained, or rediscovered, a great many things which played a very important role in the early days of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 162.

Christianity really arose from the spirit of Gnosticism, but came into conflict with it later, because the Gnostics threatened to dissolve Christianity with their philosophical speculations. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 162.

This whole effort is not an undertaking for the many, it does not contain social thoughts, it is essentially an individual matter, and, whether it is practised by one, ten or even a thousand people, each works alone. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 165.

And indeed it is as individuals that we are part of the world, and we cannot experience anything except as an individual. We may feel safer and more protected in a crowd, yet the truth is that the individual is more unsafe and in greater danger in a crowd than anywhere else. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 165.

He has a secret purpose: to free the world soul (the Deus absconditus) bound in matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 166.

Eastern texts show us how processes, which we have forgotten or never knew, can in the course of thousands of years become an elaborate technique. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11Nov1938, Page 20.

Indians think of thought as something thinly substantial, thought is not vaporous to them, as it is to us. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11Nov1938, Page 25.

A mandala is a technical term for a magic circle which is used for meditation, but it is also used in a lower form for purpose of witchcraft; the witches' circle was well known in the Middle Ages.
The Dharma Kaya = the world of absolute truth.
The Sambhoga Kaya = the world of subtle bodies.
The Nirmana Kaya = the world of created things.
One could also call these three: Self, anima and body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 35.

The prayer or mantra which is repeated while they walk round these stupas is "om mani padme hum". Om is a primeval sound, you find it in every culture which is still growing on its original foundations, and we ourselves make the same sound to express natural pleasure, we m-m about food , for instance. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 36.

Mani means pearl or great treasure, padme is the lotus and hum, like om, has no definite meaning, it is a sound like the humming of bees. So we find the pearl and the lotus sandwiched between a singing sound and a humming sound. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 36.

The East regards the psychic as half physical, it is not immaterial for them as it is for us, it is definite, it has a given concreteness; so that you can actually create a Buddha through imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 37.

The light of the mandala, and therefore the mandala itself, is already the Buddha, although he himself is not yet visible. The mandala is not just the seat of the Buddha, it is identical with him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 39.

The State consists of a mass of individuals and only the individual gives it meaning and value. What is collectivity without the individual? No god can be made out of such an idol. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 40.
We get, it is true, a foggy idea of such terms as Dhyana and Samadhi, the words sound wonderful to us, but such words are no mere concepts, and they mean nothing unless one has oneself experienced the states they denote. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 9Dec38, Page 41.

We find the same idea in the Indian Atman, a word which is related to the German Atem (breath]; it is the breath of life, which goes through everything, corresponding to the Buddha essence. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 9Dec38, Page 41.

The lapis philosophorum of the alchemists is the same thing as the Vajra, it is the thing which is produced in the laboratory of a man's life and which is far more durable than he is. These thoughts run parallel both in the East and West. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 9Dec38, Page 43.

The text tells us that the body of the sleeper is imagined to be the body of the Buddha, we should understand that as the diamond body. So it is the transformation of the ordinary body into the eternally durable body that is meant. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 9Dec38, Page 43.

The Yogin tries to establish a fourfold consciousness and the fifth in the centre, uniting all, is Buddha consciousness. The quaternity is dissolved in the essence of the Yogin, and the fourfold image of consciousness disappears. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 16Dec1938, Page 51.

But the East thinks in circles, and then 5 is not just the next figure but the centre, it is the quinta essentia, the essence of all. We used to think like this in the Middle Ages also, but scientific thinking put a stop to it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 54.

The meditation on the syllables of the mantra leads to identification with the highest Self. This condition, sometimes reaching ecstasy, is dangerous to the Yogin, for if the human being believes that he is the absolute he may explode. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 55.

Kant himself emphasises that God, the Highest Being, is in no way affected by what we know about him. So the Yogin analyses what he knows about Buddha and takes the last word in the Mantra: "Aham" for this purpose. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 55.

As we have already seen that Karma is the sum-total of what we bring over from former lives, our debit and credit account, merits and losses. Sangskara is the sum-total of the mind that we have created in former existences. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Pages 55-56.

Very highly developed people can remember their former lives, even back into animal lives. Buddha remembered innumerable lives and spoke freely of them. There are curious cases of this kind to be found even now. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 56.

The East is absolutely convinced that we actually lived former lives but such assertions are open to doubt. We call the same thing hereditary tendencies, our disposition, certain things run in the family, etc. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 56.

In the West we are always using our intuition on outward things, but the East turns their Sangskara-skandha inwards. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 56.

When people are foolish enough to imitate the East their bodies rise up against them and teach them better. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 56.

There must be a long preparation to be Buddha, if we do not realise this we are taking part in a holy ceremony with dirty hands. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 56.

The eastern gods all have two aspects, Kwannon, the well-known goddess of kindness, is also the goddess of hell. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 57.

Rupa-skandha = Thinking.
Vedana-skandha = Sensation.
Samjna-skandha = Feeling.
Sangskara-skandha = Intuition.
Vijniina-skandha = Buddha Vajra-sattva . Knowledge. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 52.
The meaning of this passage age is that through active imagination the Yogin succeeds in making his senses and functions independent. It is the purification of the senses. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page 59.

Disintegration is consciously undertaken in our text with the purpose of emptying the ego consciousness and integrating a central consciousness, the totality of the personality; it is undertaken because the problem of the body has come up. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page 62.

All this means that in time and space I am only here in my body, I cannot be identical with Buddha, but if I can rid myself of all my personal contents, if I can distribute them as Devatas all over the universe, I can sit in the heaven of the gods and reach eternal peace. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page 62.

The Yogin's Buddha is a subjective and objective image. It lies in the Yogin's power to create him or to leave him uncreated and yet the Buddha has an objective existence. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 65.

We know that twice two are four, for instance, but we cannot call that our subjective knowledge. We simply take over such facts ready-made and play chess with them; for we can to some extent use the fact that twice two are four for our own purposes even though it does not belong to us. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 65.

We do not suffer from the delusion that a cherry could not hang on its stalk without our help, yet it never occurs to us that we are just as powerless in our own dreams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 65.

The idea of a normal man, perfectly healthy, is in itself an illusion. All mankind is liable to illness for we are not our own masters. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 65.

People cannot stand having unnatural virtue around them all day, it makes them feel inferior and they may even be come criminals in order to compensate it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 66.

In India it has given way to Hinduism, in which Buddha is merely the ninth, that is the last, incarnation or avatar of Vishnu. The Hindus believe that the time of Buddha has passed and that a tenth avatar of Vishnu in the form of a white horse will soon appear. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 68.

As Buddha and his teaching are still recognized within the frame of the Hindu religion, you find traces of him everywhere; but his achievement, amazing consciousness and highest integrity are no longer to be found in India today, though Rishis and Yogins still make private efforts to reach its illumination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 68.

There is one tribe in Central Australia which spends two thirds of its time in religious ritual - and how much do we? We look down on them as primitives, but their way is far more meaningful than ours. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 69.

I do not know why India was not able to keep Buddhism, but I think probably its present polytheistic religion is a better expression of the Indian soul today than the one perfect Buddha. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 69.

This round motif should be kept clearly in your mind, for it is an exceedingly important symbol in the West as well as in the East. It is especially women who produce such symbols in the West. This is not the case in the East, the mandalas are made by men, the feminine has remained unconscious. We find an exception to this rule in the matriarchal South of India. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI., 3Feb1939, Page 70.

Plato's idea is identical with the eastern idea of the Atman or Purusha. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 70.

We are very much afraid of the word magic, it has a bad name, for its meaning has degenerated and it has a purely superstitious sound in our ears. But magical was originally simply psychical, the ancients did not know of the existence of the psyche, so not being able to call anything psychic they used the word magic. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 71.

Mandalas are sometimes made with the express purpose of evil, to do people harm. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 71.

The European who practises Yoga does not know what he is doing. It has a bad effect upon him, sooner or later he gets afraid and sometimes it even leads him over the edge into madness. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 71.

We are in a bad situation in the West for we are living as decapitated heads. The intellect is indispensable in order to understand, but you must feel yourselves that our text is not just related to the head, it arises from whole man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 71.

As the Yogin is a man his conscious is masculine, so the male Devatas represent his conscious thoughts , religious, philosophical and personal. He has already been freed from his masculine conscious, but to be really freed he must also externalize his feminine unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 72.

While we are in avidya, we act like automatons, we have no idea what we are doing. Buddha regarded this as absolutely unethical. Avidya acts in the sense of the concupiscentia and involves us in suffering, illness and death. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 74.

Here is a piece of the superior wisdom of the East. The Yogin realizes that all the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Devatas with which he has filled the heavens are Maya illusion just as the world itself is Maya. All this plurality is illusion. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 74.

It is not that the things do not exist but that our perception of them is nothing but illusion. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 75.

We do not know what a spirit is any more than we understand matter. We are really enclosed in a psychic world of images. We label everything as physical or spiritual but the only reality is purely psychic. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 75.

Women played a considerable part in alchemy, and worked at it themselves. This is not the case in Indian Yoga, with the exception of Tantrism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24Feb1939, Pages 92.

We must know how the human psyche came into being for in the unconscious the old ways are always trodden again. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

We find all the ancient forms of the human psyche in dreams and in such texts as the Shri-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

The unconscious comes into action through the attitude of the conscious in active imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

The official example of Yoga in the West is the exercitia spiritualia of St. Ignatius of Loyola. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

It is only within the last few years that a few Lamas have become interested in giving their texts to the world. This is largely due to Sir John Woodroffe and to the American Evans Wentz who succeeded in getting in touch with such people, and in interesting them in the translation and publication of some of their texts. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

Divinitas sancti spiritus has a peculiar relation to Mary, for the Sapientia Dei or Sophia was identified by the early Church with Mary. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

We can understand thinking, feeling and sensation but intuition is another thing. We do not know how we arrive at an intuition, it is perception by way of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 99.

Alchemical philosophy is an instrument and a way to the inner transformation of man, a problem which is practically unknown today. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 99.

Christ is spoken of as being born or hidden in a rose, or as a sea bird resting in a flower of the sea. This is a direct analogy to Buddha appearing in the Lotus in the Amitabha Land with geese and swans about him. Pages 100-101.

Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew. This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.

The method of actual phantasying is seldom advisable for young people as it tends to hinder them in their task of getting into reality, and the young need actual experience. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Page 212.

The age of the body is something we often swindle ourselves about, but this swindle does not help the psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 213.

The task in these cases is to look for the meaning, for there is a meaning in both love and sex, and in every instinctive urge. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 213.

This system of images is also born in human beings, it is the archetypes, the potential force in man, but it only comes to the surface when the moment for it is ripe, then the archetype functions as an urge, like an instinct. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 213.

In the collective unconscious the archetypes and the instincts are one and the same thing. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 213.

The same instinct that moved you at the age of fifteen may be moving you again when much older and yet there is something showing that the whole process which is happening in the unconscious is different, the images are becoming liberated from the active instinct. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 214.

The East understands active phantasying and its inner meaning far better than we do. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 238.

The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 240.

The child born in a country takes something of that land, it is the secret influence of the place. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 241.

It is as if the dream were quite uninterested in the fate of the ego, it is pure Nature, it expresses the given thing, it mirrors the state of our consciousness with complete detachment; it never says "to do it in such and such a way would be well”, but states that it is so. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198.

These signs appear in Gnosticism, St. Paul's sayings are undoubtedly connected with Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.

On Gnostic gems we find the symbol of the vase, the vase of sin. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.

The Gnosis is a disturber of the peace of the Church, but it is full of psychological truths, many yet undiscovered. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.

This leads us over to the secret gnosis of the Middle Ages, when it takes the form of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198

If we seek our connection with the snake we come to the spinal cord and that points to the animal soul of man which leads him down into the darkness of the body, into the instinct which one meets in animal form in the outer world. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199-200.

We do not know why the Christian "Weltanschauung" exists, and why it is so insisted upon. The real reason is that these things lie under it, these essential roots of man; they belong to the secret teaching and had to be hidden, the Church was built over them and because of this people have become cut off from their roots. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 200.

Complexes can also be called fragmentary souls. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1May1935, Pages 201.

All dreams originate in the unconscious though occasionally a dream can be induced by suggestion or hypnosis. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1May1935, Pages 202.

Dreams can spring from physical or psychic causes, a dream can be caused by hunger, fever, cold, et cetera, but even then the dreams themselves are made of psychic material. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1May1935, Pages 202.

Everyone has complexes, there is nothing to be ashamed of in that; it would in fact be highly suspicious if we found someone who had no complexes, for these are the fires of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1May1935, Pages 203.

Miracles are symbols for a heightened understanding of life; learning to fly without wings, telepathy, Yoga practices, etc., all belong psychologically to this heightened consciousness. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1May1935, Pages 203.

Dreams as a whole are without purpose, like nature herself, it is wiser to regard them as such. The third question asks if we can dream of experiences undergone by our ancestors. I cannot be sure of this. There are so many curious sources from which we dream, that we cannot say for certain where anything comes from. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198.

Where there are complexes there are always phantasies, for complexes are continually trying to find a solution. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 208.

Phantasies and dreams do not of themselves enlarge consciousness, they have to be understood and here the great difficulty begins. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 208.

In India free phantasying is not permitted, phantasying there is based on dogmatic pictures which are called Yantras, contemplation pictures, mandalas, which have the object of attracting the attention and forming a guide to phantasy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 208.

Our method aims at allowing the complex to express itself and reveal its structure, but Yoga aims at fettering it in dogma. This is almost universally the case in Indian Yoga. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 208

Taoism degenerated terribly but has lately undergone a renaissance while Confucianism is at present degenerating. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 209.

Taoism has also a kind of Yoga but it is less well known than the Indian. The Chinese Yoga is very much less founded on dogma, the Yogin is left to find his own way through his difficult experiences. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 209.

The purpose of the meditation of the alchemists is also spiritualis, but in contrast to the other methods of meditation which we studied here - those of Yoga, Mahayana Buddhism and the Ignatian excercises - the subject of meditation in alchemy is something unknown, and not a known dogmatic formula. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 174.

The "Aurora Consurgens" asks the question: "What is the science? It is the gift and sanctuary of the Deity, it is a divine thing, and is hidden by the Wise in symbolical words and in many ways." ~Cited in ETH Lectures, Page 175.

We can therefore assume, psychologically speaking, that the object which is to be transformed in alchemy is connected with the human body: it is a mystery of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.

There are certain disturbances of the unconscious, in the sympathetic system, which produce symptoms exactly like organic disturbances. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.

Mercury is the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and entered matter as an emanation of God, and since then it is concealed in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 180.

Moreover the colour attributed to the Holy Ghost in the Middle Ages was green, because when the spirit of life is poured over the earth the latter becomes green. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 183.

Therefore the trans-substantiated wine, which becomes the blood of Christ in the Mass, is the anima, that is the soul, of Christ. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 189.

He says directly that man has two lights: the one is the spirit and the other the light of nature. Man has a spirit in order to be able to understand the divine revelation, and a soul in order to recognise the world in the light of nature. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 193.

Apparently God the Father is thought of here as the soul, the anima mundi, which is the centre of the world, and which at the same time enfolds the whole world, or rather the universe including the starry heavens. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.

This is a Platonic idea; the anima, as animation par excellence, is the principle of movement. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.

We think: "How peculiar that person is", but no one is peculiar really. People seem odd to us when they possess qualities which we do not see in ourselves. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.

We think of a chaos as complete confusion, but to the alchemists it was a confusion of definite qualities and of special factors. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 201-202.

"Go to the streams of the river Nile and there thou wilt find a stone which has a spirit. Take this stone, divide it and put thy hand inside it and draw out its heart: for its soul is in its heart." ~Ostanes cited by Carl Jung, ETH, Page 205.

According to the conception of Paracelsus, every man receives this inner image of the heavens at the moment of his birth, and has, therefore, his own individual firmament within himself. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 209.

The West is the land of the dead, the sun sinks in the West, it is there that the day, and life itself, sink, so to speak, into eternity. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 210.

Mylius also calls it "perpetua" (perpetual). It is eternal and "susceptible", that is, it receives the eternal images which God impresses on it, and therefore all living beings find their origin in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 210.

The idea is that primeval man possessed a substance, a sort of earth, out of which Paradise could grow, and Adam (or primeval man) carries the secret of this earth in himself. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.

The snake in alchemy is the "mercurial serpent", the old Gnostic image for the Nous, the mind, where the spirit was represented as a serpent, as the Agathodaemon (the good daemon), or directly called the serpent of the Nous. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 215.

This serpent does not represent "reason" or anything approaching it, but rather symbolises a peculiar autonomous mind which can possess one completely, a spirit of revelation which gives us "Intuitionen" (intuitions). ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 215.

Since the time of the old Gnostics, the serpent has been the symbol for the brain and its appendages; that is, for the lower centres of the brain and for the spinal cord, partly on account of its shape, but also from introspective reasons. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 216.

One could say, in a certain sense, that the unconscious was the invisible, psychical part of the tangible and visible nervous system, just as one might say consciousness was the invisible part of the brain. ~Carl Jung, ETH, , Page 216.

Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter. We cannot climb above our own heads, a fact which should be a warning to all those people who try to explain the nature of God. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 216.

…the serpent is the hypostatic, underlying materia (the essence of matter), which sinks into the water, or is as it were in the water, and, through illusion, it deceives the senses. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 219.

To put it more simply: the prima materia can be won from the centre of a stone or substance, but then it is no longer designated as a substance but as an agent. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 221.

Therefore the prima materia is called "monad", "ens reale" and "forma interna", that is, it is the inner form which gives things their existence, and is, therefore, the cause of all existence. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 221.

And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 221.

We could define the unconscious as a psychical existence in ourselves of which we are unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 224.

Even today the majority of people have no idea what psychology is; they have a personal psychology and some metaphysical convictions. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 224.

And it is a curious fact that, all over the earth wherever we find astrology, the stars have essentially the same meaning. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 225.

While a man sees something in the sky, there is no chance of his seeing it in himself, and so naturally he will attribute his own actions to the stars. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 225.

The well-known sentence in the Lord's Prayer, "Deliver us from evil", meant, as it was first understood, deliver us from the evil principle of the Heimarmene. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 225.

The beautiful old name, Elizabeth, is a remnant of the same idea. It originated in Babylon and means: "My deity is the seven", that is, these even planets, for only seven were known in those days. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 225-226.
The things, which impress us from outside, can only do so because of our inner attitude. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 226.

You can put the most marvellous things before the eyes of a stupid person and they will make no impression on him, for all impressions come from inside ourselves. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 226.

The elements are of an earthly nature, the physical and chemical constituents of our bodies. These are the earth in us, so to speak, and the stars represent the beginning of psychical life, the influence of the stars in the condition of the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 229.

Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 230.

These are, so to speak, the re-animated souls of the ancestors which have been lying dormant in the unconscious, and the alchemists call these units or souls the sleepers or the dead in Hades who are resurrected by the "holy waters" (that is the miraculous water of alchemy, the fertilising Mercury). ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 230.

The earth, in the alchemistic sense, means the body and in a double sense: chemical bodies (substances), minerals etc., and the human body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 101.

That with which we are concerned is not God, the creature is the image of the human mind, neither alive nor dead. ~Dorneus cited in ETH Lectures, Page 103.

This is a passage, where you can see for yourselves that ideas, which are in full bloom in the East, are also to be found in medieval meditations, ideas which touch the foundation and origin of our existence. ~Dorneus cited in ETH Lectures, Page 103.

Who would have thought that the alchemists, popularly supposed to be searching for gold, were really promising themselves freedom from illusion, exaggerated emotion, passion, excess and all possible vices ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 108.

The "Processing" is the alchemistic procedure; this, Taoism and the Book of Changes are all the same thing, according to Wei Po-Yang. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 109.

This book [I Ching] lies just under the threshold of Chinese consciousness, it is rationally despised under European influence, but every Chinese believes in it at bottom and is perfectly right to do so, for it is an extraordinarily intelligent book. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 109.

Divine grace is not, so to speak, conjured up, the priest does not make a sort of magic incantation in the prayer of consecration to compel the intervention of divine grace; but the Mass itself is a divine intervention, of which man should become aware. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 110.

The spirit is usually expressed by a serpent which proves that this spirit is not Just the human mind, but an animal or reptile mind. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.

We must assume, therefore, that the spirit has two aspects in alchemy, the human mind as we know it, and the serpent mind, which we can only say is unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.

The snake is a personification of the unconscious, for, as early as the Gnostics, it was used as a symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, where the vegetative psyche is localized. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.

Therefore the Chinese alchemistic treatises, as far as we know them, do not differ in any essential way from the western treatises, in fact in places they agree with each other almost word for word. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 112.


The most pronounced intuitives have what the Scotch call second sight, they can, for instance, foretell the weather, many animals also have this last power. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 100.

Often when people behave in an exceedingly unexpected manner the appearance of an archetype is the explanation ; archetypes go back not only through human history, but to our ancestors the animals, that is why we are able to understand animals so well and make friends with them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 177.

Primitives are really human animals living on the lap of the earth and from its sap. We are merely enlightened! ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 200.

One of the aims of some kinds of Yoga is to understand the voice of all animals, but we are not convinced in the West that horses and dogs have such important thoughts. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 17.

This was the case with our dreamer, fate is not devilish but elfish and chose this moment to bring a new influence into his life. Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 25Jan1935.

Consciousness is essentially the psyche's organ of perception, it is the eye and ear of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 98.