We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 244.
The growing one is the TREE OF LIFE. It greens by heaping up growing living matter. ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 351.
If the God alights from matter, we feel the emptiness of matter as one part of endless empty space. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 288.
But Mercurius is the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter, the god of revelation, lord of thought and sovereign psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 292.
For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 312.
Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in "the chains" of Physis, and she desires "beyond physical necessity." She must be called back by the "counsel of the spirit" from her lostness in matter and the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 472.
Matter is an hypothesis. When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-Weltanschauung, in contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 762.
atom and the nuclear bomb bring us a new view of matter. As physical man cannot develop any further, it would seem that this particular evolution ends with man. Like the caterpillar dissolves and turns into a butterfly, it is conceivable that the physical body of man could change into a more subtle body. It might not be necessary for him to die to be clothed afresh and be transformed. ? ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 63.
Matter may be stimulated by the inner psychic process, understood archetypally, to produce something analogous. A latent tension, for example, can manifest itself in creaking wood. Matter plays along with the psychic process. There is a story that says that when Mohammed ascended into Heaven the stone in the Temple of Jerusalem wanted to go too. The archetype manifests itself in the outer world as sympathia. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
And Gerhard Dorn cries out, "Transform yourselves into living philosophical stones!" There can hardly be any doubt that not a few of those seekers had the dawning knowledge that the secret nature of the stone was man's own self. This "self" was evidently never thought of as an entity identical with the ego, and for this reason it was described as a "hidden nature" dwelling in inanimate matter, as a spirit, daemon, or fiery spark. By means of the philosophical opus, . . . this entity was freed from darkness and imprisonment, and finally it enjoyed a resurrection. . . . It is clear that these ideas can have nothing to do with the empirical ego, but are concerned with a "divine nature" quite distinct from it, and hence, psychologically speaking, with a consciousness-transcending content issuing from the realm of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 154.
The part of the unconscious which is designated as the subtle body becomes more and more identical with the functioning of the body, and therefore it grows darker and darker and ends in the utter darkness of matter. . . . Somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked. And that is the [subtle body] where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls "psyche." ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.
There is no position without its negation. In or just because of their extreme opposition, neither can exist without the other. It is exactly as formulated in classical Chinese philosophy: yang (the light, warm, dry, masculine principle) contains within it the seed of yin (the dark, cold, moist, feminine principle), and vice versa. Matter therefore would contain the seed of spirit and spirit the seed of matter…. Nevertheless, the symbol has the great advantage of being able to unite heterogeneous or even incommensurable factors in a single image. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i; para. 197.
To put it in modern language, spirit is the dynamic principle, forming for that very reason the classical antithesis of matter-the antithesis, that is, of its stasis and inertia. Basically it is the contrast between life and death. The subsequent differentiation of this contrast leads to the actually very remarkable opposition of spirit and nature. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.
Spirit and matter may well be forms of one and the same transcendental being. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; ¶ 392.
The collective unconscious is simply Nature — and since Nature contains everything it also contains the unknown. ... So far as we can see, the collective unconscious is identical with Nature to the extent that Nature herself, including matter, is unknown to us. I have nothing against the assumption that the psyche is a quality of matter or matter the concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that 'psyche' is defined as the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Letters II, Page 450
Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. ~Carl Jung; CW 13; Para229.
Matter in alchemy is material and spiritual, and spirit spiritual and material. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Page 140.
The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things. ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page xxv.
The spirit shows its effective power only in the reshaping of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.
In archetypal conceptions and instinctual perceptions, spirit and matter confront one another on the psychic plane. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 420.
If so, the position of the archetype would be located beyond the psychic sphere, analogous to the position of physiological instinct, which is immediately rooted in the stuff of the organism and, with its psychoid nature, forms the bridge to matter in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 420.
As long as it is so difficult for us to understand the secrets of an atom or of the living protoplasm, we are surely not fit to touch upon a question like that of a continuation of life beyond material visibility. We don't even understand it when it is in matter, how could we hope to have any insight into it without matter? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 241-242.
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.
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.
The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, pages 94-5.
The alchemists returned in matter to the mother, the first carrier of the feminine unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 117.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He has a secret purpose: to free the world soul (the Deus absconditus) bound in matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 166.
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.
It was, indeed, a great problem to the Middle Ages, this problem of the Trinity and the exclusion, or the very qualified recognition, of the feminine element, of the earth, the body, and matter in general, which were yet, in the form of Mary's womb, the sacred abode of the Deity and the indispensable instrument for the divine work of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 72.
Even among professing Christians there are very few who think seriously about the Trinity as a matter of dogma and would consider it a possible subject for reflection—not to mention the educated public. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 112.
There can hardly be any doubt that not a few of those seekers had the dawning knowledge that the secret nature of the stone was man's own self. This "self" was evidently never thought of as an entity identical with the ego, and for this reason it was described as a "hidden nature" dwelling in inanimate matter, as a spirit, daemon, or fiery spark. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 94.
Just as the alchemists knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could only happen "Deo concedente," so the modern psychologist is aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life or of matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 296.
…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.
It seems to me that we are at the end of an era. The splitting of the atom and the nuclear bomb bring us a new view of matter. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 63.
We discover that this matter has another aspect, namely, a psychic aspect. And so it is simply the world from within, seen from within. It is just as though you were seeing into another aspect of matter. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
The psyche is nothing different from the living being. It is the psychical aspect of the living being. It is even the psychical aspect of matter. It is a quality. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 27.
The anima comes out of an emotional act, taking place in darkness, the compensation for the crime against the fire; the anima is the compensating element that must be extracted from matter. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32.
One must therefore assume that the effective archetypal ideas, including our model of the archetype, rest on something actual even though unknowable, just as the model of the atom rests on certain unknowable qualities of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
And when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within, because the psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon that takes place in so-called living bodies, is a quality of matter, as our bodies consist of matter. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
The realm of the psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality. At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71
If space and time are psychically relative, then matter is too (telekinesis!) and then causality is only Statistically true, which means that there are plenty of acausal exceptions, q.e.d. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 126-127.
Inasmuch as we attribute to the Holy Spirit the faculty of procreating in matter, we must unavoidably grant it a nature capable of contact with material existence, i.e., a chthonic aspect, as the alchemists did; otherwise it could not influence Physis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 267-268.
Rather, we have every reason to suppose that there is only one world, where matter and psyche are the same thing, which we discriminate for the purpose of cognition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
From the fact that matter has a mainly quantitative aspect and at the same time a qualitative one, even though this appears to be secondary, you draw the weighty conclusion, which I heartily applaud, that, besides its obviously qualitative nature, the psyche has an as yet hidden quantitative aspect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 351-352.
Matter and psyche are thus the terminal points of a polarity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 351-352.
"In Mercurio" spirit and matter are one. This is a mystery nobody is ever going to solve. It is real, but we are unable to express its reality. It is neti-neti in other words: beyond our grasp, although it is a definite experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396
The "way" is not an upward-going straight line, f.i. from earth to heaven or from matter to spirit, but rather a circumabulatio of and an approximation to the Centrum. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396
I think you are correct in assuming that synchronicity, though in practice a relatively rare phenomenon, is an all-pervading factor or principle in the universe, i.e., in the Unus Mundus, where there is no incommensurability between so-called matter and so-called psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400
Hoyle has the rotundum, the doctrine of the Anthropos, the cosmic wisdom of matter, which he naturally confuses with consciousness, and so fails to do justice to the problem of suffering. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.
It [Synchronicity] is not meant as anything substantive, for what the psyche is, or what matter is, eludes our understanding. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
We are still in the body and thus under the rule of heavy matter. Also it is equally true that matter not moved by the spirit is dead and empty. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 459-460
It is legitimate to ask yourself what it is that carries the qualities of the archetypal and synchronistic, and to pose the question, for instance, of the intrinsic nature of the psyche or of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
Nobody has ever known what this primal matter is. The alchemists did not know, and nobody has found out what is really meant by it, because it is a substance in the unconscious which is needed for the incarnation of the god. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 886
Soul and body are not two things. They are one. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355
It is a vessel which we can never empty, and never fill. It has a potential existence only, and when it takes shape in matter it is no longer
what it was. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 301
It is for this reason that the alchemists believed in the truth of “matter,” because “matter” was actually their own psychic life. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 228
With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
If we designate the Assumptio as a fact in time and space we ought to add that it happens really in eternity and everywhere, and what we perceive of it through our senses is corruptible matter, i.e., we don't see it, but we infer or believe in the idea. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568
Your [J.B. Rhine’s] experiments have established the fact of the relativity of time, space, and matter with reference to the psyche beyond any doubt. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 495
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.
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 organism confronts light with a new structure, the eye, and the psyche confronts the natural process with a symbolic image, which apprehends it in the same way as the eye catches the light. And just as the eye bears witness to the peculiar and spontaneous creative activity of living matter, the primordial image expresses the intrinsic and unconditioned creative power of the psyche. The primordial image is thus a condensation of the living process. ~Carl Jung CW, Para 748
Nowhere and never has man controlled matter without closely observing its behaviour and paying heed to its laws, and only to the extent that he did so could he control it. The same is true of that objective spirit which today we call the unconscious it is refractory like matter, mysterious and elusive, and obeys laws which are so non-human or suprahuman that they seem to us like a crimen laesae majestatis hiimanae. If a man puts his hand to the opus, he repeats, as the alchemists say, God's work of creation. The struggle with the unformed, with the chaos of Tiamat, is in truth a primordial experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 286
Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic all forms of the psychic, even "unreal" ideas and thoughts which refer to nothing "external." We may call them "imagination" or "delusion," but that does not detract in any way from their effectiveness. Indeed, there is no "real" thought that cannot, at times, be thrust aside by an "unreal" one, thus proving that the latter is stronger and more effective than the former. Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas, which are yet denied all reality by our world-blinded consciousness. Our much vaunted reason and our boundlessly overestimated will are sometimes utterly powerless in the face of "unreal" thoughts. The world powers that rule over all mankind, for good or ill, are unconscious psychic factors, and it is they that bring consciousness into being and hence create the sine qua non for the existence of any world at all. We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche. ~Carl Jung CW 8, Para 747
All that is not encompassed by our knowledge, so that we are not in a position to make any statements about its total nature. Microphysics is feeling its way into the unknown side of matter, just as complex psychology is pushing forward into the unknown side of the psyche. Both lines of investigation have yielded findings which can be conceived only by means of antinomies, and both have developed concepts which display remarkable analogies. If this trend should become more pronounced in the future, the hypothesis of the unity of their subject-matters would gain in probability. Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. But this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental background. It is a remarkable fact, which we come across again and again, that absolutely everybody, even the most unqualified layman, thinks he knows all about psychology as though the psyche were something that enjoyed the most universal understanding. But anybody who really knows the human psyche will agree with me when I say that it is one of the darkest and most mysterious regions of our experience. There is no end to what can be learned in this field. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 2
So long as one knows nothing of psychic actuality, it will be projected, if it appears at all. Thus the first knowledge of psychic law and order was found in the stars, and was later extended by projections into unknown matter.
These two realms of experience branched off into sciences astrology became astronomy, and alchemy chemistry. On the other hand, the peculiar connection between character and the astronomical determination of time has only very recently begun to turn into something approaching an empirical science. The really important psychic facts can neither be measured, weighed, nor seen in a test tube or under a microscope. They are therefore supposedly indeterminable, in other words they must be left to people who have an inner sense for them, just as colours must be shown to the seeing and not to the blind. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 285
It remained for modern science to despiritualize nature through its so-called objective knowledge of matter. All anthropomorphic projections were withdrawn from the object one after another, with a twofold result firstly man's mystical identity with nature was curtailed as never before, and secondly the projections falling back into the human soul caused such a terrific activation of the unconscious that in modern times man was compelled to postulate the existence of an unconscious psyche. Instead of the lost Olympian gods, there was disclosed the inner wealth of the soul which lies in every man's heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 375
Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life. Therefore God breathed into Adam a living breath, that he might live. With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived; as Eve in the garden of Eden could not rest content until she had convinced Adam of the goodness of the forbidden apple. Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 56
If we try to extract the common and essential factors from the almost inexhaustible variety of individual problems found in the period of youth, we meet in all cases with one particular feature a more or less patent clinging to the childhood level of consciousness, a resistance to the fateful forces in and around us which would involve us in the world. Something in us wishes to remain a child, to be unconscious or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything strange, or else subject it to our will; to do nothing, or else indulge our own craving for pleasure or power. In all this there is something of the inertia of matter; it is a persistence in the previous state whose range of consciousness is smaller, narrower, and more egoistic than that of the dualistic phase. For here the individual is faced with the necessity of recognizing and accepting what is different and strange as a part of his own life, as a kind of "also-I." ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 764
When Nature is left to herself, energy is transformed along the line of its natural "gradient." In this way natural phenomena are produced, but not "work." So also man when left to himself lives as a natural phenomenon, and, in the proper meaning of the word, produces no work. It is culture that provides the machine whereby the natural gradient is exploited for the performance of work. That man should ever have invented this machine must be due to something rooted deep in his nature, indeed in the nature of the living organism as such. For living matter is itself a transformer of energy, and in some way as yet unknown life participates in the transformation process. Life proceeds, as it were, by making use of natural physical and chemical conditions as a means to its own existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 80
He has not yet torn his original experience into antithetical parts. In his world, spirit and matter still interpenetrate each other, and his gods still wander through forest and field. He is like a child, only half born, still enclosed in his own psyche as in a dream, in a world not yet distorted by the difficulties of understanding that beset a dawning intelligence. When this aboriginal world fell apart into spirit and nature, the West rescued nature for itself. It was prone by temperament to a belief in nature, and only became the more entangled in it with every painful effort to make itself spiritual. The East, on the other hand, took spirit for its own, and by explaining away matter as mere illusion—Maya—continued to dream in Asiatic filth and misery. But since there is only one earth and one mankind. East and West cannot rend humanity into two different halves. Psychic reality still exists in its original oneness, and awaits man's advance to a level of consciousness where he no longer believes in the one part and denies the other, but recognizes both as constituent elements of one psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 682
Without soul, spirit is as dead as matter, because both are artificial abstractions; whereas man originally regarded spirit as a volatile body, and matter as not lacking in soul. ~Carl Jung, CW13, Para 76n
If we were conscious of the spirit of the age, we should know why we are so inclined to account for everything on physical grounds; we should know that it is because, up till now, too much was accounted for in terms of spirit. This realization would at once make us critical of our bias. We would say most likely we are now making exactly the same mistake on the other side. We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a "metaphysical" mind or spirit, and so we overestimate material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind. As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of equilibrium. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 657
The extraverted tendency of the West and the introverted tendency of the East have one important purpose in common both make desperate efforts to conquer the mere naturalness of life. It is the assertion of mind over matter, the opus contra naturam, a symptom of the youthfulness of man, still delighting in the use of the most powerful weapon ever devised by nature the conscious mind. The afternoon of humanity, in a distant future, may yet evolve a different ideal. In time, even conquest will cease to be the dream. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 787
Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. ~Carl Jung CW 8, Para 747
Microphysics is feeling its way into the unknown side of matter, just as complex psychology is pushing forward into the unknown side of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 2
It remained for modern science to despiritualize nature through its so-called objective knowledge of matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 375
