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General • Quotes
8 months ago
Something of the hermit's temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity,
to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.
What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist?
Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.
What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation:
An irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths.
True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in god, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling.
But vocation acts like a law of god from which there is no escape.
The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation.
He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths.
Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called.
If one is not to surrender to the easy assurances of the herd, then, as Jung said, he has to go on the quest;
Then he has to find out what his soul says; then he has to go through the solitude of a land that is not created.
To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.
It is a tormenting tension and it must be borne, but the choice is clear.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened.
But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires.
It is never a mistake to search for what one requires. Never.
What happiness to sit in intimate conversation with someone of like mind, warmed by candid discussion of the amusing and fleeting ways of this world but,
Instead, you sit there doing your best to fit in with whatever the other is saying, feeling deeply alone.
My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.
It was my temper to avoid a crowd, and to attach myself fervently to a few.
When I am among the many, I live as the many do and I do not think as I really think; after a time, it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself
And rob me of my soul and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody. I then require the desert so as to grow good again.
All humans go through the desert? For sure. The desert is a metaphorical image. You can be on your journey through the desert living in New York.
The passage through the desert is a time of doubt, anxiety, and a state of depression. But, if we think in terms of spiritual growth,
This would be a rite of passage necessary for human beings to evolve to a higher level of consciousness, to consolidate an increased awareness of the ego.
You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you.
To follow your own star means isolation, having to find a completely new way instead of going along well-trodden path everyone else runs along.
That's why there has been a tendency in men to project uniqueness and greatness of their own inner self on outer personalities
And become the servants, the devoted servants, admirers, and imitators of outer personalities.
In many so-called primitive cultures it is a requirement of tribal initiation to spend a lengthy period alone in the forests or mountains,
A period of coming to terms with the solitude and nonhumanity of nature so as to discover who, or what, one really is.
A discovery hardly possible while the community is telling you what you are, or ought to be.
He may discover, for instance, that loneliness is the masked fear of an unknown which is himself,
And that the alien-looking aspect of nature is a projection upon the forests of his fear of stepping outside habitual and conditioned patterns of feeling.
This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. That is what I go out to seek.
It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.
To be wild is not to be crazy like a criminal or psychotic, but mad as the mist and snow.
The marks of wildness are a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and a vivacious curiosity in the face of the unknown.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but nature more.
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible.
One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude;
To lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning,
You don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you.
This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.
This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there.
But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
Solitary men. Some men are so accustomed to being alone with themselves that they do not compare themselves with others at all
But spin out their life of monologue in a calm and cheerful mood, conversing and indeed laughing with themselves alone.
We must therefore allow certain men their solitude and not be so stupid, as we so often are, as to pity them for it.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude,
He will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
Constraint is always present in society, like a companion of whom there is no riddance.
Genuine tranquility of the heart and perfect peace of mind, the highest blessings on earth after health,
Are to be found only in solitude and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion.
Whoever has sat down, year in and year out, day and night, alone in an intimate dispute and conversation with his soul,
Whoever has become a cave bear or digger for treasure or guardian of treasure and dragon in his own cavern.
It can be a labyrinth but also a gold mine - such a man's very ideas finally take on a distinct twilight colouring.
Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
I: I dread the madness that befalls the solitary.
My soul: I have long predicted solitude for you. You need not be afraid of madness.
To be liberated is to be able to see human life in the same way as you see all other life.
And to do that you have to be able to live, as it were, on two levels: the level of involvement and the level of detachment.
It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.
We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.
When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world. I would prescribe silence.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
The wise man believes profoundly in silence, the sign of a perfect equilibrium.
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
Learn the art of silence; the wise man that holds his tongue, says more than the fool who speaks.
He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.
Mankind is made of two kinds of people: wise people who know they're fools, and fools who think they are wise.
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
As Lao-tzu said, the wise man hides his virtue and appears on the surface like a fool,
For true grace does not appear as grace and thus is grace; false grace is so aware of itself as grace that it is not grace.
Zen produces thousands of Bodhisattvas who do not advertise themselves.
The wise attend to the inner truth of things and are not fooled by outward appearances. They ignore matter and seek the spirit.
It is an excellent thing to live modestly, shun luxury and wealth and not lust after fame and fortune. Rare has been the wise man who was rich.
Let us not envy a certain class of men for their enormous riches;
They have paid such an equivalent for them that it would not suit us;
They have given for them their peace of mind, their health, their honor, and their conscience.
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living.
It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned.
The fullness of life requires more than just an ego; it needs spirit.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
You are not dead yet.
It is not too late to open your depths by plunging into them
And drink in the life that reveals itself quietly there.
The voice of the intelligence is soft and weak, said Freud. It is drowned out by the roar of fear.
It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame.
It is hissed away by hate, and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.
Even people who seem eminently intelligent will judge others yet have no knowledge of themselves.
It makes no sense to lack self-knowledge while understanding those around you.
He who knows himself must be said to be the man of real knowledge.
To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.
It is to measure oneself against truth, and not the other way around.
The first product of self-knowledge is humility.
The greatest battle is to do battle with oneself.
The greatest adventure and the most difficult task
Is to enter into the darkness of one’s own being and to come to know oneself.
Little good will come to you from outside.
What will come to you lies within yourself.
But what lies there!
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
You are afraid of burning in your own fire.
It has become clear to me that aging itself does not bring wisdom.
It often brings regression to childishness, dependency and bitterness over lost opportunities.
Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.
Aeschylus, the first great tragedian, observed that the gods ordained a solemn decree that from suffering alone comes wisdom.
Such earned wisdom brings greater dignity and depth to our lives, and we are blessed by the spiritual enlargement that is its byproduct.
It's such a perfect arrangement for wisdom to hide away in death.
Everyone runs away from death so everyone runs away from wisdom,
Except for those willing to pay the price and go against the stream.
Each initiatory passage requires we become lost to all we know.
The keys that unlock the doors of wisdom have to be found in the darkness or else fashioned from some loss.
If the keys were in the light everyone would have already found them.
Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.
Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.
All true wisdom is only to be learned far from the dwellings of men out in the great solitude, and is only attained through suffering.
Privation and suffering are the only things that can open the mind of man to those things that are hidden from others.
To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.
It seems that in our time suffering is the royal road to the sacred. Perhaps it was always so, but in our society,
Where talk of the gods has been banished and those who discuss this subject are thought to be crazy,
The breaking apart of the personality that comes with illness or suffering is necessary for such an encounter.
Without the suffering, which seems the epiphenomenal requisite for psychological and spiritual maturation, one would remain unconscious, infantile, and dependent.
Yet many of our addictions, ideological attachments, and neuroses are flights from suffering.
One in four North Americans identify with fundamentalist belief systems, seeking therein to unburden their journey with simplistic,
black-and-white values, subordinating spiritual ambiguity to the certainty of a leader and the ready opportunity to project life's ambivalence onto their neighbors.
Another twenty-five to fifty percent give themselves to one addiction or another, momentarily anesthetizing the existential angst, only to have it implacably return on the morrow.
The remainder have chosen to be neurotic, that is, to mount a set of phenomenological defenses against the wounding of life.
Such defenses too entrap the soul in an ever-reflexive response to life which grounds one not in the present but in the past.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
Wisdom is not and never has been something for the many, because foolishness forever will be the main thing the world craves for.
Wisdom has three subjective characteristics: it grows and never vanishes, it chastises and disciplines, and it will not approach anyone who is not interested in it.
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
When we connect with our ancestors and put their wisdom into action, we are evolving our collective consciousness.
We are transporting the ancient truths of our collective past and birthing them into our future.
What we create out of those truths extends the wisdom of all those who have gone before us, and it provides a guide for all those who will follow.
The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.
If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of my life grows from it and conjoins the below with the above.
When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
Because you separated good from evil according to your best appraisal and aspired only to the good and denied the evil that you committed nevertheless and failed to accept,
Your roots no longer suckled the dark nourishment of the depths and your tree became sick and withered.
He who accepts what approaches him because it is also in him, quarrels and wrangles no more, but looks into himself and keeps silent.
He sees the tree of life, whose roots reach into hell and whose top touches heaven.
It is created by the man who understands that language and is spread by those who do not.
So it is liable to be tainted by others. Whereas spirituality is pure and directly leads to the source: the soul.
Many of us realise that what we call spirituality has limitations: it can be about seeking, doing, questing.
This can become exhausting and run out of energy. Many of us seek but do not find, and why?
Because to find we have to allow ourselves to be found.
Jung's message is that the modern individual must explore the unconscious
And discover the spiritual contents that can be discerned in the interior life.
A test of our spirituality may be found in our encounter with depth. Whatever pulls us deeper into life, even painfully so,
Opens us to the great life that courses beneath history and below the surface of everyday appearance.
A sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If one has no sense of reverence,
No feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe,
It generally indicates an ego inflation that cuts conscious personality from nourishing springs of unconscious.
Jung demonstrated that ritual and ceremony are important avenues to the unconscious:
Ritual is a means of approaching the inner world that human race evolved early in its history.
The use of ritual goes back to the earliest dawn of time among our prehistoric ancestors.
Remember, a symbolic or ceremonial experience is real and affects one as much as an actual event.
The best rituals are physical, solitary, and silent: These are the ones that register most deeply with the unconscious.
The path of spiritual practice implores us to do the simplest yet most difficult thing: to sit still and just be present.
Our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence
And I feel that we need a lot more wonder and a lot more silence in our lives.
The highest to which man can attain is wonder;
And if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content.
We descend into darkness voluntarily when we meditate or engage in any kind of spiritual practice,
Dream work, active imagination, shamanic journeying, creative endeavor and so on.
We descend involuntarily through depression and crises.
Cultivating a living relationship with the mysteries of psyche and psychoid depends
On our ability to go into the darkness, dim the light of the ego, and attend to what appears.
The heroes and leaders toward peace in our time will be those men and women who have the courage
To plunder into the darkness at the bottom of the personal and corporate psyche and face the enemy within.
In going down into the underworld a person of integrity can draw the skeletons out of the closet fairly easily,
But he will likely fight to the end of his neurotic strength to hide the divinity of his own being.
The saviour does not come down from heaven but out of the depths of the earth,
I.e., from that which lies below consciousness.
He who goes to himself, climbs down.
The only journey is the journey within.
The true way does not lead upward, but toward the depths.
Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.
Do not look forward so much, but back and into yourself, so that you will not fail to hear the dead.
Community with the dead is what both you and the dead need.
A great cold comes over whoever in the excess of his personal striving
Has recognized the demands of the dead and seeks to satisfy them.
Man does not know he carries the stars hidden in himself
And he is the microcosm and thus carries within him the whole firmament.
It would seem that we stand between two infinitely vast universes:
The cosmos of the outer world still chary of revealing its many secrets,
And the microcosm of the inner world of the psyche, equally possessive of its mysteries.
The inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one.
Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there but never here and there.
The soul has its own peculiar world. Only the Self enters in there,
Or the man who has completely become his self,
He who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts.
Deep within each of us is a spark of the divine just waiting to be used to light up a dark place.
The only thing is we have the free choice of using it or not.
That’s part of the mysterious truth of who we human beings are.
It is far easier to walk in shoes too small for us than to step into the largeness that the soul expects and demands.
I: what misunderstood fear torments me?
My soul: that is your disbelief, your doubt. You do not want to believe in the size of the sacrifice that is required.
But it will go on to the bitter end. Greatness requires greatness. You still want to be too cheap.
Most of us believe in transformation, death and rebirth but we still don't want to undergo the death.
We want to change without being changed sort of remodelled for that new look
But without the muss and fuss that a complete change brings.
We can’t really understand a person,
Unless we have the chance of knowing who that person has been,
And what that person has done and liked, and suffered, and believed.
Jung said to me: you can't analyze people really if you don't know how they live.
If you haven't gotten a whiff of the country in which they live,
If you haven't gotten a feeling of the atmosphere in which they normally live, you can't understand them.
Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology.
He would be better advised to put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world.
There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells,
In the salons of the elegant, the stock exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects,
Through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body,
He would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him,
And he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.
For psychotherapy to be effective a close rapport is needed,
So close that the doctor cannot shut his eyes to the heights and depths of human suffering.
Psychic world is based on the emotions, which are irrational. Emotion has its origins in classical Greek world: pathos/pathology.
If psychotherapy does not touch emotional levels, it does not touch what is deeply paralyzed and ill, hence there is no transformation.
A healed person is automatically a healer.
And his or her strength is the greater for having been through dark times
And having brought a conscious solution as a gift to the world.
Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.
Jung claimed that a spiritual life lies buried in the unconscious
And this could be dug up and brought before consciousness with therapeutic results.
He used this method with clients in his practice and he believed the same method could be applied to societies and nations.
Each person enters the world imbued with inner nobility born both of ancestry and of eternity.
Yet it is also the nature of this world that the innermost qualities of a person
Remain mostly hidden from family and self until extraordinary circumstances call them forth.
This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world,
It will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.
The psyche continually prods us to make something of ourselves. This is a heroic task that awaits our response.
There is an inner reality within each of us that is like a great treasure lying hidden waiting to be discovered.
Someone who finds this inner treasure and recognizes its value,
Will happily give up all other goals and ambitions in order to make it real in their life.
The unconscious brings a left-out, despised part and yet a weird treasured part of us to the table.
If we cannot make space for it, it will break in and cause havoc.
The unconscious has its own ways of revealing what is destined in a human life
Just at that time when it is ready to be integrated.
Wherever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality,
Most people are overcome by fright, and many run away. The risk of inner experience,
The adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings.
An overly intellectual attitude, and a demand for proof or reason, can kill off the life of the spirit
And prevent us from experiencing its healing field.
In our highly intellectualised world this is a persistent danger.
Jung maintained that psychology must go deeper than the intellect
Because the totality of the psyche can never be grasped by intellect alone.
Like it or not, the psyche seeks an expression that will embrace its total nature.
In psychology one has not really understood something until one has lived it. Just having a term for something means nothing.
It needs to touch the heart or affect one’s life. A word has to get under our skin, sink in deep, so that it becomes part of us, that we live in it.
Only when this is the case, when it is about more than words, does one know what the heart says and what the spirit thinks.
When the word enters deeply into one’s psyche rather than remaining at the intellectual level, only then is one faced with the problem of a conscious individuation process
A very difficult and often painful task. Everyone who experiences psychology in this way is isolated from others to a certain extent.
Not just from the hardheaded fools, but also from intelligent people who have a different attitude and usually also have prejudices.
All those who consciously undergo and want to pursue the process of individuation should be aware that this path can be isolating
And that there is a certain danger when coming into contact with the huge inner world.
But it is only when you allow yourself to be touched directly that deep life-changing consequences arise, and only then can one’s totality unfold.
This is the true effect of psychology. Until then, it is mainly limiting.
I’m forever mindful of Jung’s oft-quoted admonition:
Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.
Not theories, but your creative individuality alone must decide.
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling.
Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
Jung observed that usually behind the wound lies the genius of the person
Where we are hurt often quickens consciousness and resolve to persist, even prevail.
Key is not what happens to us but how it is internalized and whether those messages expand or diminish our resilience.
Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness
For it is in the healing of our psychic wounds that we come to know ourselves.
If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter.
This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually.
The main question is not, how can we hide our wounds?
So we don't have to be embarrassed, but how can we put our woundedness in the service of others?
The wound is the place where the light enters you.
Many people in therapy have learned that the way out of a depression is through it, asking not what I, the ego consciousness, want, but what the soul wants.
Only the reorienting of conscious energies in service to other values will lift the depression.
Clients in psychotherapy come to get rid of their depression as quickly as possible.
But Jung took them by their necks and dumped them into their depression, saying in essence,
You must get through it, not above and away from it.
The psyche uses depression to get our attention, to show that something is deeply wrong.
Once we understand your therapeutic value and follow your Ariadne thread through our private maze,
Then depression may even seem like a kind of friend.
We live in a world that wishes to rid us as quickly as possible of suffering through a behavioral change or a pill.
But stop and think for a moment about the word psychopathology. Psyche is the Greek word for soul.
Pathos refers to suffering. Logos means word or expression. So psychopathology is literally the expression of the suffering of the soul.
Wouldn't it make sense to stop and pay attention? And remember also the etymology of the word therapy.
Therapeuein means to listen or attend to psyche, the soul-to pay attention to rather than suppress psychopathology and to ask, what is the soul trying to say to me?
Deeply ingrained in the infantile psyche is the conscious or unconscious assumption that the cure for depression is to replace it with pleasant, happy feelings,
whereas the only valid cure for any kind of depression lies in the acceptance of real suffering.
The word suffer in its original sense means to allow,
So to suffer creatively is simply to allow what is, to stop fighting it, and instead to affirm your life.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.
Nobody is going to save you from your own mind.
Nobody can get into the heart of your experience and fix anything for you.
If you want to make your own internal experience more hospitable, only you can do that work.
If a person just refuses to think that he has an inside problem, he’s not going to work the thing out.
Nobody can do it for him. You have to learn how to recognize your own depths.
In one ancient language, the word memory derives from a word meaning mindful,
In another from a word to describe a witness, in yet another it means, at root, to grieve.
To witness mindfully is to grieve for what has been lost.
If the soul in depression is nurtured properly, the results will be new life for the psyche.
This process is similar to what the alchemists understand as mortification.
Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, this is what I need.
It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge.
If you bring love to that moment - not discouragement - you will find the strength is there.
Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures
Followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. When we grow wiser
We learn that the disasters of life are often the genius of the unconscious, forcing our egos into a new experience of the Self.
Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.
From a spiritual point of view, suffering is sometimes the sandpaper that awakens people.
Once you start to awaken spiritually, you reperceive your own suffering and start to work with it as a vehicle for further awakening.
The greater the doubt, the greater the awakening; the smaller the doubt, the smaller the awakening. No doubt, no awakening.
Psychological scars and emotional traumas exist where life tried to break a person open to the heights and depths of the human soul.
The places where we each suffer in life can become the metaphorical ground on which we reflect upon our informal initiations.
The thing common to all initiations is that they teach us that we are not in control:
We will fall on bended knee, or flat on the ground, as many times as is needed.
Jung believed that the psyche was purposeful; that we have a natural urge to grow to wholeness.
Whatever trauma may happen to us, there is something within that remains whole, beautiful and true.
Jung said, it was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one’s own destiny.
If we don't accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops,
And I believe that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality.
A neurosis is a much greater curse! In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something.
One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. After much reflection,
I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result because avoidance is much worse.
You have to try to figure out what the addictive substance means symbolically.
Otherwise, it will hold an almost religious significance.
People are driven to addiction because there is no collective container for their natural spiritual needs.
You do not know which devils are greater, your vices, or your virtues.
But of one thing you are certain, that virtues and vices are brothers.
It seems that if I am afraid, then I am stuck with fear. But in fact I am chained to fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it.
When I do not try to get away I discover that there is nothing stuck or fixed about the reality of the moment.
When I am aware of this feeling without naming it, it changes instantly into something else, and life moves freely ahead.
The feeling no longer perpetuates itself by creating the feeler behind it.
Jung once said, find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.
The ego is fashioned like the metal between the hammer and the anvil.
Discipline is a bad word in our culture.
People associate it with having to do what they're told.
But discipline is quite a lovely word.
It comes from the same root as disciple, and it means
Seeing yourself through the eyes of the teacher who loves you.
Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it.
The one who is wise learns only from his own guilt.
He will ask himself: who am I that all this should happen to me?
To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.
There's no death! Death is very much like sunset. It's only an appearance.
For, when the sun sets here, it rises elsewhere. In reality, the sun never sets.
Likewise, death is only an illusion, an appearance.
For, what's death here-is birth elsewhere.
For life is endless.
As long as you identify with that which dies, there is always a fear of death.
What our ego fears is the cessation of its own existence.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap
Of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.
There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Life is endless, so we never die; we were never really born.
We just pass through different phases, different dimensions.
We reincarnate into this physical plane to learn our spiritual lessons.
There is no end. We are souls, not just bodies, eternal beings of light and love.
Whoever you are! Motion and reflection are especially for you, the divine ship sails the divine sea for you.
Whoever you are! You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past, for none more than you is immortality.
There are also dreams which symbolically indicate the end of bodily life
And the explicit continuation of psychic life after death.
The unconscious believes quite obviously in a life after death.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through.
Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love and then we return home.
When we know again the reason for which we were born, and what is, in fact, our task upon this earth,
And when we know again what the real meaning of our lives is, then we can once more get on with living our lives.
Jung major questions included: are we related to something infinite or not?
Do forces beyond reason impact on our bodies, minds and behaviour?
Is meaning inherent in existence or is it added by ourselves? Are gods real or do we merely invent them?
Jung's Red Book is full of pain, crises, despair and hopeful vision, reflecting the profound internal suffering of a man
Who was both a rational thinker and poetic visionary and who could not, for many decades, find a way of reconciling these opposites within himself.
At the time of his writing the Red Book, Jung wanted to find out what happened when he switched off ordinary consciousness
And allowed expression to remote parts of his psyche. The spirit of the depths pointed him toward the recovery of his soul.
In the Red Book, Jung is advocating doing what christ did; the following your myth, finding out what it is, going into the wilderness,
Experiencing suffering, experiencing your own wisdom and if you have to suffer on the cross, then so be it, that is what you do.
Jung suffered a prophetic burden, by which I mean he was frequently misunderstood,
Often willfully so, sometimes viciously attacked, and experienced intellectual loneliness and isolation.
C.G. Jung was a healer of souls and a healer of the culture. This efficiency and wisdom was the result, not of heredity, environment, education,
But of his having walked the road to the land of shadows where the secret knowledge of the soul dwells.
To walk this road, and to find one's objective, means to go contrary to the world and to the notions of the reasonable and the probable.
I have said to Jung that sometimes it seemed to me as if Jungian psychology were a highly dangerous poison, the poison of truth.
He agreed that to take it up and then leave it again is absolutely destructive poison.
Once one has had enough realisation of what goes on inside one and of what it is all about,
Then one can only escape at the price of becoming highly neurotic.
Let it rain, let the wind blow, let the waters flow and the fire burn.
Let each things have its development, let becoming have its day.
It will burn inside you like a terrible, inextinguishable fire.
But despite all the torment, you cannot let it be, since it will not let you be.
From this you will understand that your god is alive
And that your soul has begun wandering on remorseless paths.
You feel that the fire of the sun has erupted in you.
Something new has been added to you, a holy affliction.
It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers,
And which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.
The art of poetry meant much to Jung. He was especially fascinated by those works of art which he referred to as the visionary type,
Because in them the poet gives voice to things from the collective unconscious, like a seer and prophet.
Through all the ages poets and artists have often been prophets, because their work, or the material for it,
Comes to them from the same depths of the collective unconscious in which the major transformations of a particular era are in process of creation.
The artist does not follow an individual impulse, but rather a current of collective life
Which arises not directly from consciousness but from the collective unconscious of the modern psyche.
All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely.
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments,
All is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
We must let a work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist.
To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it shaped him.
Then we also understand the nature of the primordial experience.
Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.
Any beautiful lands like these are power spots because they help you put your own nature in accord.
And art is supposed to do this also. Cézanne says somewhere, art is a harmony parallel to nature.
The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity.
To see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible.
We say that it is this way, and it is. We build roads by going on.
Our life is the truth that we seek. Only my life is the truth, the truth above all.
We create the truth by living it.
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.
The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices
And chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
A hero is someone who can take off the armor, who can be vulnerable and show up anyway,
Experiencing what is really happening without trying to resist or run away.
I saw that an act of heroism can be an action that happens on the inside without anyone else noticing.
He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.
I did as my soul advised, and formed in matter the thoughts that she gave me.
My soul gave me ancient things that pointed to the future.
She gave me three things: the misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion.
I: Is magic a misfortune?
My soul: Yes, for those who possess it.
Magic is deeply embedded in the human psyche. More than that, it is a projection of the human psyche.
Though it has, effectively, been banished from the land, still it surfaces in thought and language:
In dreams, in madness, in superstition and ritual.
The gifts of darkness are full of riddles.
If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars.
Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness.
Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night.
The darker the night, the brighter the stars.
Submit to the riddles and the thoroughly incomprehensible.
There are dizzying bridges over the eternally deep abyss.
I have united with the serpent of the beyond.
I have accepted everything beyond into myself.
From this I have built my beginning.
How holy, how sinful, how everything hot and cold flows into one another!
Madness and reason want to be married, the lamb and the wolf graze peacefully side by side.
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
If we enter into it, that chaos can resurrect us into a higher wisdom,
Rooted in the wisdom of the creative process.
The chaos that we fear is the very thing that can free us.
Right at the core of Jung's life and experience, easily visible although tempting enough to ignore,
Lies an awareness that one comes face to face with the reality of the sacred not through sanity but in the terrifying depths of madness.
And there-in the confrontation with madness is where our normal, collective sanity is seen for the even more horrifying insanity that it really is.
Then, every fixed idea one ever had about anything comes permanently crashing down;
And the search begins to find some language that can say what everybody thirsts for but almost nobody wants to hear.
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
You bear the mark of the fire and men are horrified at you.
They do not see the fire, they do not believe your words,
But they see your mark and unknowingly suspect you to be the messenger of the burning agony.
You will be a river that pours forth over the lands. It seeks every valley and streams toward the depths.
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind,
And evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.
It seems that everything that has ever happened to us is still alive somewhere in the depths of our psyche.
once in memory, always in history.
And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.
There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do.
If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.
It's as if a king has sent you to some other country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do.
So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat.
It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots.
It's like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.
More Quotes:
General
Unconscious
Synchronicities
Dreams
Active Imagination
Mythology
Shadow
Anima
Individuation