˜Zarathustra: Tis night:alas, that I have to be light! And thirst for the nightly! And lonesomeness!

Thus Spake Zarathurstra

XXXI. THE NIGHT-SONG.

’Tis night: now do all gushing fountains speak louder. And my soul also is a gushing fountain.

’Tis night: now only do all songs of the loving ones awake. And my soul also is the song of a loving one.

Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me; it longeth to find expression. A craving for love is within me, which speaketh itself the language of love.

Light am I: ah, that I were night! But it is my lonesomeness to be begirt with light! Ah, that I were dark and nightly! How would I suck at the breasts of light!
And you yourselves would I bless, ye twinkling starlets and glow-worms aloft!—and would rejoice in the gifts of your light.

But I live in mine own light, I drink again into myself the flames that break forth from me.

I know not the happiness of the receiver; and oft have I dreamt that stealing must be more blessed than re- ceiving.

It is my poverty that my hand never ceaseth bestowing; it is mine envy that I see waiting eyes and the bright- ened nights of longing.

Oh, the misery of all bestowers! Oh, the darkening of my sun! Oh, the craving to crave! Oh, the violent hunger in satiety!

They take from me: but do I yet touch their soul? There is a gap ’twixt giving and receiving; and the smallest gap hath finally to be bridged over.

A hunger ariseth out of my beauty: I should like to injure those I illumine; I should like to rob those I have gifted:—thus do I hunger for wickedness.

Withdrawing my hand when another hand already stretcheth out to it; hesitating like the cascade, which hesi- tateth even in its leap:—thus do I hunger for wickedness!

Such revenge doth mine abundance think of: such mischief welleth out of my lonesomeness.

My happiness in bestowing died in bestowing; my virtue became weary of itself by its abundance!

He who ever bestoweth is in danger of losing his shame; to him who ever dispenseth, the hand and heart be- come callous by very dispensing.

Mine eye no longer overfloweth for the shame of suppliants; my hand hath become too hard for the trem- bling of filled hands.

Whence have gone the tears of mine eye, and the down of my heart? Oh, the lonesomeness of all bestowers!

Oh, the silence of all shining ones!

Many suns circle in desert space: to all that is dark do they speak with their light—but to me they are silent.

Oh, this is the hostility of light to the shining one: unpityingly doth it pursue its course.

Unfair to the shining one in its innermost heart, cold to the suns:—thus travelleth every sun.

Like a storm do the suns pursue their courses: that is their travelling. Their inexorable will do they follow: that is their coldness.

Oh, ye only is it, ye dark, nightly ones, that extract warmth from the shining ones! Oh, ye only drink milk and refreshment from the light’s udders!

Ah, there is ice around me; my hand burneth with the iciness! Ah, there is thirst in me; it panteth after your thirst!

’Tis night: alas, that I have to be light! And thirst for the nightly!

And lonesomeness! ’Tis night: now doth my longing break forth in me as a fountain,—for speech do I long.

’Tis night: now do all gushing fountains speak louder. And my soul also is a gushing fountain.

’Tis night: now do all songs of loving ones awake. And my soul also is the song of a loving one.— Thus sang Zarathustra.

Carl Jung: Well, if you don’t call it art, but call it the creative impulse.

Yes, that is most characteristic of the Egyptian civilization.

The people, even the Pharaoh, lived in mud huts, and the gods had the most gorgeous stone buildings which would last through many thousands of years.

The real beings lived in mud huts that completely disappeared, while the unreal beings, as we would say, lived in wonderful palaces built for eternity.

Babylonia was along that line too, but the Greeks, not to speak of later civilizations, built their worldly houses much more solidly.

The creative instinct in Egypt was a matter of the nation; we do not know the name of a single great Egyptian artist.

There were great artists but their names are unknown.

It is a Greek invention that we know the name of Homer, for instance.

Mesopotamia is like Egypt in that respect, the names of their poets and artists are unknown; they had great poetry and great art, but there was no individual expression of it.

We see something of that in Japan where they had certain great names but the disciples of those great fellows like Hiroshige or Hokusai renounced their own names and called themselves simply Hiroshige number two, three, four, etc. hiding themselves, becoming anonymous.

They carried on the name of the master, while they themselves completely disappeared.

That is still a remnant of the ancient consciousness of creative men; they felt so utterly identical with their people that they didn’t even have a name; it created and man was merely an exponent of it.

To create was a sort of craft; he created not even knowing that he was creating something beautiful.

Many an old craftsman who produced a marvelous piece of art was utterly unconscious of the fact.

I am rather convinced that the great composer Bach was such a fellow.

He did not know what he was really producing.

He composed nice chants for the church and other things, but I am very doubtful if he knew that he was the composer Bach.

One would assume that he knew it, but it is just as difficult as to know in what time we are living.

At this point I must always tell the story of that knight in the thirteenth century who was caught by his enemies and thrown into a dungeon for several years.

Finally he got sick of that eternal prison and beating his fists down upon the table he said, "I wonder when these damned Middle Ages will come to an end!" Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 655 – 656

Well, if you don’t call it art, but call it the creative impulse.

Naturally, the creative impulse has always been the maker of the individual.

You see, creative impulse does not appear in everybody in the same strength: certain individuals are picked, they have a particular gift.

They create something which is striking and they are then the innovators, and stick out like old man Prometheus, that great sinner against the gods.

He was an individual and he was punished for it, but he was made to stand out through his creative impulse.

Naturally, the creative impulse is forever the maker of personality and uses that individual form, that distinction.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that, in the process of individuation, everybody should become aware of his creative instinct, no matter how small it is. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 668.

Carl Jung: So this is probably a historic detail in the life of Zarathustra.

We must go a little into the history of that Zoroastrian belief because it plays a certain role in the symbolism of the book. Zarathustra is almost
a legendary figure, yet there are certain notions about him which prove that he must have been a real person who lived in a remote age.

It is not possible to place him exactly either geographically or chronologically, but he must have lived between the seventh and ninth centuries
B.c. probably in north-western Persia.

He taught chiefly at the court of a king or prince named Vishtaspa.

(The Greek form of this name is Hystaspes, which you may remember was the name of the father of Darius I.)

The story says that Zarathustra first became acquainted with the two ministers at the Court of Vishtaspa, and through them with the noble queen whom he converted, and then through her he converted the king.

This is psychologically a very ordinary proceeding, it usually happens that way.

One of the most successful propagandists of early Christianity in high circles was the Pope Damasus I, whose nickname was matronarum auriscalpius, meaning the one who tickles the ears of the noble ladies; he used to convert the nobility of Rome through the ladies of the noble families.'

So this is probably a historic detail in the life of Zarathustra.

Then in contradistinction to certain other founders of religions, he married and lived to be quite old.

He was killed by soldiers, while standing near his altar, on the occasion of the conquest of his city. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 4-5

A few Quotations from Dr. Jung's Zarathustra Seminars

1. 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

2. Soul and body are not two things. They are one. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355

3. Men are rarely split off from sexuality, because it is too evident for them, but what they lack is Eros, the relational function. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 313.

4. Even a ghost, if he wants to make an effect on this earth, always needs a body, a medium; otherwise he cannot ring bells or lift tables or anything that ghosts are supposed to do. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 168

5. You cannot be redeemed without having undergone the transformation in the initiation process. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502.

6. The term self is often mixed up with the idea of God. I would not do that. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.

7. You [the Self] should not storm at me. If you kill me, where are your feet?" That is what I (the ego) am. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.
8. You could think of it [Self] as an intermediary, or a hierarchy of ever-widening-out figures of the self-till one arrives at the conception of a deity. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.

9. You can never get to yourself without loving your neighbour—that is indispensable; you would never arrive at yourself if you were isolated on top of Mt. Everest, because you never would have a chance to know yourself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1020

10. And if you lose yourself in the crowd, in the whole of humanity, you also never arrive at yourself; just as you can get lost in your isolation, you can also get lost in utter abandonment to the crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1020

11. You cannot individuate if you are a spirit; moreover, you don’t even know how spirit feels because you are in the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202

12. So if you speak of individuation at all, it necessarily means the individuation of beings who are in the flesh, in the living body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202

13. It is just an illusion when you think the right thought in your head means a reality; it is a reality as far as a thought reality reaches; the thought itself is real, but it has not become a reality in space. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202

14. If you fulfil the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502

15. But if you hate and despise yourself—if you have not accepted your pattern— then there are hungry animals (prowling cats and other beasts and vermin) in your constitution which get at your neighbours like flies in order to satisfy the appetites which you have failed to satisfy. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502

16. You see, life wants to be real; if you love life you want to live really, not as a mere promise hovering above things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508

17. Life inevitably leads down into reality. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
18. Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508

19. It is a general truth that one can only understand anything in as much as one understands oneself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 742

20. It does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896

21. Every light, every fire comes to an end, and there would be utter darkness, but there is still left the light of the self, which is the supreme light. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 792.

22. There is no morality, no moral decision, without freedom. There is only morality when you can choose, and you cannot chose if you are forced. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 262

23. The self would be the preceding stage, a being that is more than man and that definitely manifests; that is the thinker of our thoughts, the doer of our deeds, the maker of our lives, yet it is still within the reach of human experience. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1348

24. I could say just as well that you could never attain the self without isolation; it is both being alone and in relationship. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 797.

Carl Jung: "Zarathustra Seminar" - Quotations

A revelation always means a revealing will, a will to manifest which is not identical with your own will and which is not your activity. You may be overcome by it; it falls upon you. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 876.

Every light, every fire, comes to an end, and there would be utter darkness, but there is still left the light of the self, which is the supreme light. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 792.

So the self is not only an unconscious fact, but also a conscious fact: the ego is the visibility of the self. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.

The self would be the preceding stage, a being that is more than man and that definitely manifests; that is the thinker of our thoughts, the doer of our deeds, the maker of our lives, yet it is still within the reach of human experience. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978

The term self is often mixed up with the idea of God. I would not do that. I would say that the term self should be reserved for that sphere which is within the reach of human experience, and we should be very careful not to use the word God too often. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.

It [Self] is a restricted universality or a universal restrictedness, a paradox; so it is a relatively universal being and therefore doesn’t deserve to be called “God.” ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978

One man alone cannot reach the self. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 787

The unconscious is that which we do not know, therefore we call it the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1348

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

You cannot be redeemed without having undergone the transformation in the initiation process. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502.

The term self is often mixed up with the idea of God. I would not do that. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.

You could think of it [Self] as an intermediary, or a hierarchy of ever-widening-out figures of the self-till one arrives at the conception of a deity. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.

You can never get to yourself without loving your neighbour—that is indispensable; you would never arrive at yourself if you were isolated on top of Mt. Everest, because you never would have a chance to know yourself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1020

And if you lose yourself in the crowd, in the whole of humanity, you also never arrive at yourself; just as you can get lost in your isolation, you can also get lost in utter abandonment to the crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1020

You cannot individuate if you are a spirit; moreover, you don’t even know how spirit feels because you are in the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202

So if you speak of individuation at all, it necessarily means the individuation of beings who are in the flesh, in the living body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202

It is just an illusion when you think the right thought in your head means a reality; it is a reality as far as a thought reality reaches; the thought itself is real, but it has not become a reality in space. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202

If you fulfil the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502

But if you hate and despise yourself—if you have not accepted your pattern— then there are hungry animals (prowling cats and other beasts and vermin) in your constitution which get at your neighbours like flies in order to satisfy the appetites which you have failed to satisfy. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502

You see, life wants to be real; if you love life you want to live really, not as a mere promise hovering above things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508

Life inevitably leads down into reality. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508

Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508

If you carefully sterilize everything that you do you make an extract the impurity and leave it at the bottom, and once the water of life is poisoned, it doesn't need much to make everything wrong. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1058

Every light, every fire comes to an end, and there would be utter darkness, but there is still left the light of the self, which is the supreme light. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 792.

There is no morality, no moral decision, without freedom. There is only morality when you can choose, and you cannot choose if you are forced. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 262

The self would be the preceding stage, a being that is more than man and that definitely manifests; that is the thinker of our thoughts, the doer of our deeds, the maker of our lives, yet it is still within the reach of human experience. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1348

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that, in the process of individuation, everybody should become aware of his creative instinct, no matter how small it is. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 667

And mind you, the animus is as terrible a reality as the anima. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 295

Through being creative one creates the thing that has come into existence in this moment, that was in a potential existence before. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 73

Inasmuch as you say these creative forces are in Nietzsche or in me or anywhere else, you cause an inflation, because man does not possess creative powers, he is possessed by them. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 57.

There is little difference between Nietzsche’s life and the life of a saint; he forsook his ordinary life, and went into the woods. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 57

You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse. It even destroys people’s organic health. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654.

All people who claim to be spiritual try to get away from the fact of the body; they want to destroy it in order to be something imaginary, but they never will be that, because the body denies them; the body says otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 64.

I could say just as well that you could never attain the self without isolation; it is both being alone and in relationship. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 797.

The spirit can easily be anything, but the earth can only be something definite. So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 66

Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your real way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 66

You don’t see the archetypal world, but live like a pressed flower in the pages of a book, a mere memory of yourself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.

The great lure of the archetypal situation is that you yourself suddenly cease to be. You cease to think and are acted upon as though carried by a great river with no end. You are suddenly eternal. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 240.

The indispensable condition is that you have an archetypal experience, and to have that means that you have surrendered to life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972

If your life has not three dimensions, if you don’t live in the body, if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.

The archetype itself is an exaggeration and it reaches beyond the confines of humanity. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.

Man’s greatest triumph was that God himself incarnated in man in order to illumine the world; that was a tremendous increase of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 967

It is a general truth that one can only understand anything in as much as one understands oneself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 742

It does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896

Inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.

Thought is a disembodied something because it has no spatial qualities. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.

What is light without shadow? What is high without low? You deprive the deity of its omnipotence and its universality by depriving it of the dark quality of the world. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 967

Our shadow is the last thing that has to be put on top of everything, and that is the thing we cannot swallow; we can swallow anything else, but not our own shadow because it makes us doubt our good qualities. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1090.

The extension [of the body] in space, therefore, creates a pluralistic quality in the mind. That is probably the reason why consciousness is possible. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.

To ascribe infinite evil to man and all the good to God would make man much too important: he would be as big as God, because light and the absence of light are equal, they belong together in order to make the whole. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 929

If you yourself can provide for it, then you are the whole mystery of the church: you are the transubstantiation. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1012-1013

Do you think that somewhere we are not in nature, that we are different from nature? No, we are in nature and we think exactly like nature. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1277

So "I" is as if it were something abstract, yet in a vague way it coincides with your body; when you say "I" you beat your chest for instance, to emphasize the "I." ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 361.

So whatever comes from behind comes from the shadow, from the darkness of the unconscious, and because you have no eyes there, and because you wear no neck amulet to ward off evil influences, that thing gets at you, possesses and obsesses you. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1265.

You see, it is as if the self were trying to manifest in space and time, but since it consists of so many elements that have neither space nor time qualities, it cannot bring them altogether into space and time. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.

And those efforts of the self to manifest in the empirical world result in man: he is the result of the attempt. So much of the self remains outside, it doesn’t enter this three-dimensional empirical world. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.

The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.

It is even very important that the anima is projected into the earth, that she descends very low, for otherwise her ascent to the heavenly condition in the form of Sophia has no meaning…She is the one that is rooted in the earth as well as in the heaven, both root and branch of the tree. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 533.

We suffer very much from the fact that we consist of mind and have lost the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 251.

For the archetype is nothing human; no archetype is properly human. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.

Nietzsche’s idea is that out of that lack of order, a dancing star should be born. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 106
The relationship between religion and the unconscious is everywhere obvious: all religions are full of figures from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1351.

That center, that other order of consciousness which to me is unconscious, would be the self, and that doesn’t confine itself to myself, to my ego: it can include I don’t know how many other people. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 783.

If they are physicians they should treat their own neurosis, otherwise they are just vampires and want to help other people for their own needs. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 824-825

If you can stand yourself, then you might be capable of loving somebody else; otherwise, it is a mere excuse, just a lie. And that cannot be repeated often enough. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Page 699

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.

For what is the body? The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience of the body. So it is really one and the same thing. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355.

You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: the contact the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.

The substance is always the same, but a new value is given to it, and the new value is the treasure. That is the secret of alchemy for instance. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 653.

The ego says “I will,” the self says “thou shalt.” ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 568.

We cannot do away with the living man by making him spirit-he must live here-and we must really assume that inasmuch as there is life it makes sense, and that life in not properly lived when we deny half of life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 539.

God never was invented, it was always an occurrence, a psychological experience-and mind you, it is still the same experience today. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 916.

We know quite well that no man can ever become the self; the self is an entirely different order of things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 925.

You see, in the actual functioning of the psyche, it does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896.

You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation: you are all alone with yourself and the self doesn't exist. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 805.

Half of the psychogenetic diseases occur where it is a matter of too much intuition, because intuition has this peculiar quality of taking people out of their ordinary reality. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 808.

Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.

It is the idea that the self is not identical with one particular individual. No individual can boast of having the self: there is only the self that can boast of having many individuals. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 782.

So the first science was astrology. That was an attempt of man to establish a line of communication between the remotest objects and himself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1496.

Nature herself is unconscious and the original man is unconscious; his great achievement against nature is that he becomes conscious. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1286.

There is no real life without archetypal experiences. The ordinary life is two-dimensional-it consists of pieces of paper-but the real life consists of three dimensions, and if it doesn't it is not real life, but is a provisional life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 970.

Zeus was director of Olympus, but he was responsible to the great board of directors of the world, the moira, an invisible influence, the “Faceless Corporation” of Olympus, so even Zeus could not do what he wanted. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 917.

…You can dream other people's dreams, can get them through the walls. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1259.

For life comes to a man through the anima, in spite of the fact that he thinks it comes to him through the mind. He masters life through the mind but life lives in him through the anima. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1105.
Individuation is only possible with people, through people. You must realize that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 103.

Therefore my formula: for the love of mankind and for the love of yourself-of mankind in yourself-create a devil. That is an act of devotion, I should say; you have to put something where there is nothing, for the sake of mankind. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1322.

Life that doesn't overcome itself is really meaningless: it is not life; only inasmuch as life surpasses itself does it make sense. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1105.

In the shadow we are exactly like everybody; in the night all cats are grey-there is no difference. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1090.

But in reality God is not an opinion. God is a psychological fact that happens to people. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1037.

One could say that the stratification of our population was historical; there are certain people living who should not live yet. They are anachronistic. They anticipate the future. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1037.

The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.

If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body, if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.

Just as you cannot see the atomic world without applying all sorts of means to make it visible, so you cannot enter the unconscious unless there are certain synthesized figures. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1431-32.

Nature is awful, and I often ask myself, should one not interfere? But one cannot really, it is impossible, because fate must be fulfilled. It is apparently more important to nature that one should have consciousness, understanding, than to avoid suffering. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1416.

Voluptuousness, the lust principle, is Freud; passion for power is Adler; and selfishness-that is myself, perfectly simple. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1451.

You live inasmuch as these Mendelian units are living. They have souls, are endowed with psychic life, the psychic life of that ancestor; or you can call it part of an ancestral soul. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1401.

Therefore intuitives develop all sorts of physical trouble, intestinal disturbances for instance, ulcers of the stomach or other really grave physical troubles. Because they overleap the body, it reacts against them. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1391-1392.

Fire is the artificial light against nature, as consciousness is the light which man has made against nature. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1286.

Our mind is the scene upon which the gods perform their plays, and we don't know the beginning and we don't know the end. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1306.

What is meant is, that you should be with yourself, not alone but with yourself, and you can be with yourself even in a crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1484.

Therefore, the very foundation of existence, the biological truth, is that each being is so interested in itself that it does love itself, thereby fulfilling the laws of its existence. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1477.

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1473.

If a complete or divine consciousness were possible, there would be no projection, which means that there would be no world, because the world is the definiteness of the divine projection. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 132.

Of course you really don't make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.

Such things can happen: a projection is a very tangible thing, a sort of semi-substantial thing which forms a load as if it had real weight. It is exactly as the primitives understand it, a subtle body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1495.

Of course you really don't make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.

…Wolves occasionally eat human beings if they are very hungry, but we also eat animals and by the millions, so we have absolutely no ground for blaming those animals for eating a man occasionally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 538.

Life inevitably leads down into reality. Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508.

You see, if you are duly initiated, you surely lose all desire to found a religion because you then know what religion really is. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 503.

The collective unconscious is the foundation of life, the eternal truth of life, the eternal basis and the eternal goal. It is the endless sea from which life originates and into which life flows back, and it remains forever the same. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 380.

Go and preach Christ to yourself: You being to preach to yourself-you are the very first. For the man who wants to preach is one who wants to run away from his own problem by converting other people. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 254.

We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, 1472-1474

Soul and body are not two things. They are one. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355

Even a ghost, if he wants to make an effect on this earth, always needs a body, a medium; otherwise he cannot ring bells or lift tables or anything that ghosts are supposed to do. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 168

You [the Self] should not storm at me. If you kill me, where are your feet?" That is what I (the ego) am. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.

The forest philosophers didn’t go out into the forests in the beginning to try to find the self. They first live a full human life in the world and then comes the wood life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 797.

And that was the case in Buddha’s own existence; he was a prince, a man of the world, and he had a wife, he had concubines, he had a child —then he went over to the saintly life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 797.

As long as you can explain yourself to a human being you are not crazy.” C.G Jung, The Zarathustra Seminars Volume 1. Page 297

We have become participants in the divine nature. We are the vessel…of the deity suffering in the body of the “slave”(Phil. 2:5). ~ ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.

Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.

Carl Jung: For the more the mentality or the psyche leaves the body to itself, the more the body goes wrong.

Prof Jung:

Well, there is something in the idea that people who are too metaphysical are bothered by their bodies.

For the more the mentality or the psyche leaves the body to itself, the more the body goes wrong.

The two ought to live together.

That explains the bad state of health of intuitive people who don't even need to be metaphysical; it is enough that they are a bit too intuitive.

They live too much in mere possibilities, and then the digestion begins to suffer, they get chronic diseases, ulcers of the stomach or the duodenum, for instance.

Or they may get other disturbances of the body of an infectious nature; many organic diseases are due to this peculiar lack of attention.

People who have lived too much upon spiritual ideas should bring their attention back to their bodies.

So one can say it is always a wise thing when you discover a new metaphysical truth, or find an answer to a metaphysical problem, to try it out for a month or so, whether it upsets your stomach or not; if it does, you can always be sure it is wrong.

It is necessary to have metaphysical ideas-we cannot do without them-but it is also necessary to submit them very seriously to the test whether they agree with the human being: a good metaphysical idea does not spoil one's stomach.

For instance, if I hold a metaphysical conviction that we live on after death for fifty thousand years instead of fifty million-if that is a solution-! try what it means if I believe in fifty thousand years only; perhaps that is good for my digestion-or bad.

You see, I have no other criterion. Of course, it sounds funny, but I start from the conviction that man has also a living body and if something is true for one side, it must be true for the other.

For what is the body?

The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience of the body.

So it is really one and the same thing.

Therefore, a good truth must be true for the whole system, not only for half of it.

According to my imagination, something seems to be good-it fits in with my imagination-but it proves to be entirely wrong for my body.

And something might apparently be quite nice for the body, but it is very bad for the experience of the soul, and in that case I have a metaphysical enteritis.

So I must be careful to bring the two systems together; the only criterion is that both are balanced.

When life flows, then I can say it is probably all right, but if I get upset I know something must be wrong, out of order at least.

Therefore, people with one-sided convictions of a decidedly spiritual nature are forced by the body to pay attention to it.

I have seen many people who suffered from all sorts of ailments of the body simply on account of wrong convictions.


But it is a sickly thing to them, and gladly would they get out of their skin. Therefore hearken they to the preachers of death, and themselves preach backworlds.

Hearken rather, my brethren, to the voice of the healthy body; it is a more upright and pure voice.

More uprightly and purely speaketh the healthy body, perfect and square built; and it speaketh of the meaning of the earth.

Here you have it.

He trusts to the reaction of the healthy body.

The healthy body is the healthy life, and the healthy life is the life of the soul of man as much as his body, because soul and body are not two things.

They are one. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 354-355.

Carl Jung: if you love flies and lice, which you also have to do to a certain extent, they will simply eat you up in the end.

For instance, if you love flies and lice, which you also have to do to a certain extent, they will simply eat you up in the end.

But you have other animals that you have to love, so you must give each part of yourself a decent existence.

Then naturally the different kinds of animals will check each other.

The birds of prey will hinder a superabundance of mice or other little vermin.

The big animals of prey will eat many of the sheep and cows, so there will not be an overproduction of milk and butter and so on.

It is exactly the same in the human constitution: there are innumerable units with definite purposes, and each can overgrow all the others if you insist upon one particular unit.

But if you love yourself, you have to love the whole, and the part has to submit to the necessities of the whole in the interest of democracy.

You can say it is perfectly ridiculous, but we are ridiculous.

The management of the whole psychological situation, like the management of a country, consists of a lot of ridiculous things.

Like all nature, it is grotesque-all the funny animals you know-but they do exist and the whole is a symphony, after all.

If it is one-sided, you disturb the whole thing: you disturb that symphony and it becomes chaos.

Then it is also an excellent truth that one should not go roving about, as Nietzsche defines it:

“Such roving about christeneth itself "brotherly love"; with these
words hath there hitherto been the best lying and dissembling,
and especially by those who have been burdensome to everyone.”

Those are the people who go about and tell everybody how much they love them or what they ought to do for their own good, always assuming
that they know what is best for them.

Or the people who want to get rid of themselves, so they unburden themselves on others.

There are certain lazy dogs who want to get rid of their own destiny so they put it on somebody else by loving them.

They fall on the neck of someone saying, "I love you," and so they put the bag on his back; they call that love.

Or they go to someone and burden him with what he really ought to do and they never do.

They never ask themselves what is good for themselves, but they know exactly what is good for him.

Do it yourself first and then you will know if it is really good.

So here Nietzsche tells other people they ought to fly-as if he could.

He cheats them as he has cheated himself.

It is the same mechanism that he blames Christian love for. But there is Christian love and Christian love.

When someone applies Christian love in the right way, it is a virtue and of the highest merit; but if he misuses Christian love in order to put his own burdens on other people, he is immoral, a usurer, a cheat.

You see, if he loves other people with the purpose of making use of them, it is not love; he simply uses love as a pretext, a cover under which he hides his own selfish interests.

To really love other people, he must first give evidence that he can love himself, for to love oneself is the most difficult task.

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.

Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it.

But in the long run, it comes back on us.

You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love.

That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test.

So when Nietzsche blames Christian love, he is simply blaming his own type. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, 1472-1474

Carl Jung: When one has a vivid inner experience, one always feels tempted to write it down, give form to it and expression.

When one has a vivid inner experience, one always feels tempted to write it down, give form to it and expression.

Therefore, painting and drawing have been discovered as a means for the symbolic purposes; one simply feels the need, and also has a peculiar satisfaction if one succeeds in giving expression to an inner experience.

Many people who are not usually poets begin to write verses, and they write in a peculiar hieratic style.

They become solemn and poetic and express themselves in a high passionate manner, using all sorts of means to emphasize it because they feel they are experiencing something which needs that expression.

So Nietzsche at once drops out of his intellectual, aphoristic way of expression.

Zarathustra is a most passionate confession from beginning to end, and moreover it is an experience: his life itself flows into these chapters.

Therefore, each chapter is a new image in the process of initiation.

You know, those ancient initiation processes consisted of symbolic passages.

First, one is confronted, say, with a certain threat, or one is put into a dark room perhaps; and then one is exposed to all sorts of dangers, tests of courage are made-one must endure cold and heat and all sorts of things.

Those are all symbolic stages, imitating the processes one would presumably go through in an individual initiation.

These were all individual in the beginning, and from the condensation of the original representations, slowly a ritual was made; and then it all became artificial.

The most ridiculous forms were invented which nobody could take seriously.

For instance, in the Freemason initiation, one is put through tests which look a bit gruesome, but are not real at all.

It is like a sort of child's play.

Of course, one is serious, or tries to make it serious, but it is not: it doesn't even touch your skin.

Wilhelm2 told me that when the Japanese bombarded Kian Tchau, a Masonic lodge was hit by a shell and eventre, the whole wall of the house came down, the intestines were laid bare, and people went there to see the funny things inside.

Belonging to the initiation ceremonies, for example, was a sort of grating with most dangerous-looking iron spikes upon which the initiant had to kneel, and then the marvel happened that when he believed in God those spikes did not hurt him.

But upon examination it was found that those spikes where he had to kneel looked exactly like the others but were made of rubber; they were nice and soft, so instead of having his flesh lacerated, the initiant thought, how marvelous that God had helped him!

So the initiation may degenerate into mere fraud. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 461-462

Carl Jung: That is like the magic use of the sacred symbols.

That is like the magic use of the sacred symbols. Of course there is the right use and the wrong use.

You see, mandalas were first discovered by some old wise guy who lived in a cave or in the woods because he was bored with the crowd of fools that humanity consists of, and had discovered much more interesting things than

the ordinary small talk of the villages.

He sat apart and studied the miracles in his mind, and he had funny dreams also, and he came to the idea that things must be somehow in a circle like the horizon round himself.

So he made a circle, that was one thing; then he made a point in it, and thus he got nearer to the truth, and he went on filling the circle with pictures of the world.

Then he made four points for north, south, east, and west, and thought to himself, "Now everything is nicely arranged."

But then he was disturbed by curious, ordinary people who have spiritual appetites, and young people came along saying: "What about this?" and "What about that? He thinks in circles."

And he said: "Don’t get excited about that, just let things go as they naturally go." They thought this was exceedingly wise and so he was called the wise man.

Then certain people thought: Now could one perhaps acquire that wisdom?-we want to be as wise as he.

So they asked him about his wisdom.

He said, "Well, you see the world is like this," and he began to explain with circles and squares and all sorts of triangles, and they thought: "Now that is grand!

We must only make such squares and triangles and that will turn the trick, that will carry."

Therefore, they made mandalas and they stared at them, they contemplated them, they put themselves into them: Yes, it is true, the old man has filled them with truth.

And it is of course most convincing, because one believes that in stepping into those mandalas, one steps into the truth.

Yet, they didn’t know that they had stepped out of the truth.

That is the terrible thing: when one thinks a thing is obviously the truth, most convincing, and steps into it, then one steps out of it.

You see, they omitted one thing, the great rhinoceros of the alchemistic process: namely, that they are the truth, not the circle.

The old man made the circle out of himself: he is the truth. And they think it is the circle.

But they have stepped out of their truth.

The old man has never stepped into the circle: he made it, he is the circle.

It is a bit like the secret in Nietzsche’s lamentation over the lost god, in his poem called: "The Lamentation of

Ariadne."

You see, Ariadne is dissolved in pain and sadness when she discovers that Theseus, her lover and rescuer, has disappeared in the night, leaving her on the island of Naxos alone.

Then the god Dionysos appears, and he takes her by the ear and says:

"Thou hast small ears,
I but thou hast my ears;
I put a cunning word in,
I am thy labyrinth."

Now that is Zarathustra. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 188-189

Carl Jung on symbolism of the eagle carrying the serpent round its neck

I have here two interesting cases where that symbolism of the eagle carrying the serpent round its neck was discovered by other people besides Nietzsche.

The first contribution I owe to Mr. Baumann who is generous enough to let us see some of his pictures, where the fate of the serpent-or
the achievement of the eagle-is demonstrated.

It is the story of the relationship of the spiritual and the material principle as a part of the inner development, the drama interieur.

One can call it a sort of initiation process.

Or one can also express it in a reversed way, that all the initiation processes we know from history or by experience are the external manifestation of a natural inner process which is always happening in the mind.

Our dreams are like windows that allow us to look in, or to listen in, to that psychological process which is continually going on in our unconscious.

It is a process of continuous transformation with no end if we don’t interfere.

It needs our conscious interference to bring it to a goal—by our interference we make a goal.

Otherwise it is like the eternal change of the seasons in nature, a building up and a pulling down, integration and disintegration without end.

No crops are brought home by nature; only the consciousness of man knows about crops. He gathers the apples under the trees, for they simply disintegrate if left to themselves.

And that is true of our unconscious mental process: it revolves within itself.

It builds up and it pulls down; it integrates and disintegrates—and then integrates again.

It is like the seasons, or the eternal sunrise and sunset, from which nothing comes unless a human conscious- ness interferes and
realizes the result.

Perhaps one suddenly sees something and says, “This is a flower.” Now we have reached something.

But left to itself the process would come to nothing. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 236-237

Carl Jung:This of course refers to the tarantula dance, the madness caused by the tarantula.

“Revenge is in thy soul: wherever thou bitest, there ariseth blackscab; with revenge, thy poison maketh the soul giddy!”[Nietzsche]

This of course refers to the tarantula dance, the madness caused by the tarantula.

You see, that idea suggests something one very often encounters when people approach their inferior function; they have attacks of vertigo or nausea for instance, because the unconscious brings a peculiar sort of motion, as if the earth were moving under their feet, or as if they were on the deck of a ship rolling in a heavy swell.

They get a kind of seasickness; they develop such symptoms actually.

It simply means that their former basis, or their imagined basis, has gone certain values which they thought to be basic are no longer there-so they become doubtful and suspended in a sort of indefinite atmosphere with no ground under their feet, always afraid of falling down.

And of course the thing that is waiting for them underneath is the jaws of hell, or the depth of the water, or a profound darkness, or a monster-or they may call it madness.

And mind you, it is madness to fall out of one’s conscious world into an unconscious condition. Insanity means just that, being overcome by an invasion of the unconscious.

It is madness to fall out of one’s conscious world into an unconscious condition. Insanity means just that, being overcome by an invasion of the unconscious.
Consciousness is swept over by unconscious contents in which all orientation is lost.

The ego then becomes a sort of fish swimming in a sea among other fishes, and of course fishes don’t know who they are, don’t even know the name of their own species. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1088-1089

Nietzsche: Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient

“Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole.” [Nietzsche]

Nietzsche is realizing certain truths here which are highly important from a psychological point of view. "Physician, heal thyself" is particularly good teaching for our late Christianity.

You see, he assumes that the real cure is made where it is most needed and most immediate.

That is like the rainmaker of Kiau Tschou again.

He does not curse the earth or pray to heaven to behave and produce rain.

He says to himself that he was right when he left his village and when he got here he was wrong.

This place is out of order so he is the one that is wrong; that wrong is nearest to him, and if he wants to do anything for the chaotic condition, it must be done in him-he is the immediate object of himself.

So he asks for that little house and there he locks himself in and works on himself; he remains shut in until he

reconciles heaven and earth in himself, until he is in the right order, and then he has cured the situation: Tao is established.

That is exactly the same idea.

So the best cure for anybody is when the one who thinks about curing has cured himself; inasmuch as he cures himself it is a cure.

If he is in Tao, he has established Tao, and whoever beholds him beholds Tao and enters Tao.

This is a very Eastern idea.

The Western idea-particularly late Christianity-is of course to cure your neighbor, to help him, with no consid- eration of the question, "Who is the helper?"

Perhaps he is not a help, or perhaps he gives something which he takes back with the other hand.

There are plenty of people nowadays who join the life of the community, assume responsibility, and all that stuff, but I say, "Who is assuming responsibility?"

If my business is in a bad condition and a fellow comes along and says he will assume the responsibility and

run the whole thing, I naturally ask him who he is-and then I find he has been bankrupt.

Naturally I don’t want one who is himself a beggar and has given evidence of his own incompetence. Those people who are very helpful need help.
If they are physicians they should treat their own neurosis, otherwise they are just vampires and want to help other people for their own needs. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 824-825

Carl Jung on "Eastern Philosophy - or Yoga

Any Eastern philosophy—or Yoga, rather, for it is not philosophy in the Western sense —begins with the question, “Who am I? Who are you?”

That is the philosophic question par excellence which the Yogin asks his disciples.

For the goal, and the purpose of Eastern philosophy is that complete realization of the thing which lives, the thing which is.

And they have that idea because they are aware of the fact that man’s consciousness is always behind the facts; it never keeps up with the flux of life.

Life is in a way too rich, too quick, to be realized fully, and they know that one only lives completely when one’s mind really accompanies one’s life, when one lives no more than one can reflect upon with one’s thought, and when one thinks no further than one is able to live.

If one could say that of oneself, it would be a guarantee that one really was living. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1425-1426

Carl Jung: If you yourself can provide for it, then you are the whole mystery of the church: you are the transubstantiation.

That is what comes to the man who is outside the church: he has to learn to feed himself, with no longer a mother to push the spoon into his mouth.

There is no human being who can provide what is provided by the church.

The church provides for all that naturally; inasmuch as you are a member of the church you get the panis super substantialis [the most substantial bread]; in partaking of the communion, you receive the spiritual food and are spiritually transformed.

Do you think that any father or mother or godmother or aunt or any book can produce the miracle of transubstantiation?

If you yourself can provide for it, then you are the whole mystery of the church: you are the transubstantiation.

If you understand that, you can have the spiritual food every day; then you know what it costs and you understand what the church costs
and what the church means. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1012-1013

Carl Jung on the girl who could not hear her own footsteps

People who are not consciously aware of the body suffer from a certain unreality of life in that inter-relatedness through participation mystique; they don’t know when they are hungry, and they neglect the simple functions of the body.

I had a case, a girl of twenty-eight, who no longer heard her steps when she walked out in the street. That frightened her and she came to me.
She dreamt that she was riding in a balloon—not in the basket but on top, high up in the air—and there she saw me with a rifle shooting at her from below.

I finally shot her down.

She was that girl I have told you about who never had seen her body.

I suggested that she must bathe once in a while, and then she told me she had been brought up in a nunnery where the nuns taught her that the sight of the body was sin, that she should always cover her bath tub with a linen, so she never saw herself. I said: “Now go home and undress and stand before your long mirror and look at yourself.”

And when she came back, she said: “It was not so bad after all, only I think my legs are a bit too hairy!”

That is the truth, that is the way people think and feel when they have such symptoms. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 65.

Carl Jung: You see, inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence.

You see, inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence.

It is also a plurality which is gathered up in one mind, for the body is extended in space, and the here and the there are two things; what is in your toes is not in your fingers, and what is in your fingers is not in your ears or your stomach or your knees or anywhere else in your body.

Each part is always something in itself.

The different forms and localizations are all represented in your mind as more or less different facts, so there is a plurality.

What you think with your head doesn’t necessarily coincide with what you feel in your heart, and what your belly thinks is not what your mind thinks.

The extension in space, therefore, creates a pluralistic quality in the mind. That is probably the reason why consciousness is possible.
Different things are represented, and these are always supposed to be in a field of consciousness, in a sort of extension, that is.

Yet you feel that the whole, that plurality, is drawn together and referred to something you call "I"; it is referred to a center which you cannot say has extension, as little as you can say of a thought that it has extension.

Thought is a disembodied something because it has no spatial qualities.

So "I" is as if it were something abstract, yet in a vague way it coincides with your body; when you say "I" you beat your chest for instance, to emphasize the "I." Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.

Carl Jung: You can be anything if you are a spirit, because you have no form, no shape, you are just gas.

You can be anything if you are a spirit, because you have no form, no shape, you are just gas.

You can assume any form; you can be this or that; you can transform at will quite arbitrarily into God knows what.

“But you should not think like that,” or: “You should believe something, that will save you.” Believe if you can!

You see, that is just the trouble.

And why can’t you?

Because you have a body.

If you were a spirit you could be anywhere, but the damnable fact is that you are rooted just here, and you cannot jump out of your skin; you have definite necessities.

You cannot get away from the fact of your sex, for instance, or of the color of your eyes, or the health or the sickness of your body, your physical endurance.

Those are definite facts which make you an individual, a self that is just yourself and nobody else.

If you were a spirit you could exchange your form every minute for another one—but being in the body you are caught; therefore, the body is such an awkward thing: it is a definite nuisance.

All people who claim to be spiritual try to get away from the fact of the body; they want to destroy it in order to be something imaginary, but they never will be that, because the body denies them; the body says otherwise.

They think they can live without sex or feeding, without the ordinary human conditions; and it is a mistake, a lie, and the body denies their convictions. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 64

Carl Jung: The spirit can be anything, but the earth can only be something definite

Dr. Jung: Yes, he [Nietzsche] is talking here of super-terrestrial hopes, and that is of course an attempt to divert attention from the real individual life to spiritual possibilities beyond.

The spirit consists of possibilities-one could say the world of possibilities was the world of the spirit. The spirit can be anything, but the earth can only be something definite.
So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body.

Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply
blindfolded.

This is of course a somewhat one-sided teaching, and to a person who is nothing but the body, it is all wrong. You must not forget that by far the majority of people are nothing but body.

This teaching, therefore, is only valid for those who have lost it, who have been deceived by the spirit-like Klages, for instance, who defined the spirit as the enemy of the soul, the soul being the life of the body, because he assumed that most people had lost the reality of the body as he had lost it."

But as a matter of fact there are plenty of people who are entirely in the body, and to those one ought to preach early Christianity, or heathen gods at least, because they haven’t an idea of a spiritual possibility.

You know, a truth is never generally a truth. It is only a truth when it works, and when it doesn’t work it is a lie, it is not valid.

Philosophy and religion are just like psychology in that you never can state a definite principle: it is quite impossible, for a thing which is true for one stage of development is quite untrue for another.

So it is always a question of development, of time; the best truth for a certain stage is perhaps poison for an- other.

In such matters nature shows that it is thoroughly aristocratic and esoteric.

It is nothing that our liberal minds would hope or wish it to be: that one thing is true and the same everywhere, and such nonsense.

There is an extreme uncertainty about truth; we are confronted with the utter impossibility of creating any- thing which is generally true.

I often think, when I am analyzing, that if another patient should hear what I was saying to this one, he would jump right out of his skin: he could not stand it.

I talk stuff that is complete blasphemy to the other, and they often come just after one another. So I have to turn right round and talk black instead of white.

But it is absolutely necessary.

I learned long ago that there are steps, stages of evolution, a sort of ladder. There are different capacities and one has to teach accordingly.

If you teach generally you must be mighty careful to put things in such a way that they are either not under- stood, of if they are, that the understanding tumbles over on the right instead of the wrong side.

But even that does not always help.

Therefore, it is not a grateful metier to teach philosophy or religion or psychology. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 66-67

Carl Jung on the “Creative Impulse.”

You cannot put something on a table which is already laden; you must first clear those things away in order to put new ones in their
place.

And to build a house where an old house stands, you must first destroy the old house. Here the process of thought turns into an enantiodromia.
All that he has said has been true with the sole exception that Nietzsche takes it as the action of conscious- ness, while we know that our conscious valuation means just nothing.

Try it on your children or on other people, and you will see it is all bunk: it simply won’t work.

If you say to a child, "My deepest conviction is that this soup is very good," the child doesn’t think it is very good: he won’t eat it.

When my parents told me that something was very good and wonderful, I thought, "Not a bit of it, it bores me." "

Always doth he destroy who hath to be a creator" is true.

You cannot put something on a table which is already laden; you must first clear those things away in order to put new ones in their place.

And to build a house where an old house stands, you must first destroy the old house.

We must go a bit deeper and realize that with the instinct of creation is always connected a destructive some- thing; the creation in its own essence is also destructive.

You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse.

It even destroys people’s organic health.

It is dangerous because there is that extraordinary destructive quality in the creative thing.

Just because it is the deepest instinct, the deeper power in man, a power which is beyond conscious control, and because it is on the other side the function which creates the greatest value, it is most dangerous to interfere with it. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654.

Carl Jung: The self is by definition the totality of all psychical facts and content.

The self is by definition the totality of all psychical facts and contents.

It consists on one side of our ego consciousness that is included in the unconscious like a smaller circle in a greater one.

So the self is not only an unconscious fact, but also a conscious fact: the ego is the visibility of the self.

Of course, in the ego the self only becomes dimly visible, but you get under favorable conditions a fair idea of it through the ego-not a very true picture, yet it is an attempt.

You see, it is as if the self were trying to manifest in space and time, but since it consists of so many elements that have neither space nor time qualities, it cannot bring them altogether into space and time.

And those efforts of the self to manifest in the empirical world result in man: he is the result of the attempt. So much of the self remains outside, it doesn’t enter this three-dimensional empirical world.
The self consists, then, of the most recent acquisitions of the ego consciousness and on the other side, of the archaic material.

The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself.

It is also most dangerous, just as dangerous as an archetypal invasion because it contains all the archetypes: one could say an archetypal experience was the experience of the self.

It is like a personification of nature and of anything that can be experienced in nature, including what we call God. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.