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Unconscious • Quotes
8 months ago
Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can't control it fully, so we can't will to create what we want from it.
The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the sources of life.
Psychologically, the ocean is the counterpart of the unconscious into which the sun of consciousness sets and out of which it comes.
The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives.
Our egos are not aware that outside the limits of their little islands, outside the narrow perimeters of their vision,
There is a whole universe of realities and truths contained in the vast sea of the unconscious that our egos can’t perceive.
Consciousness, no matter how extensive it may be, must always remain the smaller circle within the greater circle of the unconscious,
An island surrounded by the sea; and, like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of living creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.
We may long have known the meaning, effects, and characteristics of unconscious contents without ever having fathomed their depths and potentialities,
for they are capable of infinite variation and can never be depotentiated. The only way to get at them in practice is to try to attain a conscious attitude
Which allows the unconscious to co-operate instead of being driven into opposition.
Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious.
That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious.
Over time, Jung concluded that there was within each of us a deep resilience guided by some locus of knowing,
Independent of ego consciousness; a center that produces our dreams to correct us, symptoms to challenge us, and visions to inspire us.
How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter,
Into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters,
Unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?
Experience shows that the objective psyche is independent in the highest degree.
Were it not so, it could not carry out its most characteristic function: the compensation of the conscious mind. The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot,
But the unconscious does not which is why St. Augustine thanked god for not making him responsible for his dreams. The unconscious is an autonomous psychic entity;
Any efforts to drill it are only apparently successful, and moreover are harmful to consciousness. It is and remains beyond the reach of subjective arbitrary control,
In a realm where nature and her secrets can be neither improved upon nor perverted, here we can listen but may not meddle.
The basis and substance of Jung's entire life and work lie in the encounter of the single individual with his own god or daimon,
His struggle with the overpowering emotions, affects, fantasies and creative inspirations and obstacles which come to light from within.
For Jung and the tradition of analytical psychology,
Careful observation and attention to all that presents itself within the psyche
Is the most appropriate means of educating and expanding consciousness.
For Jung, the unconscious is not speaking about the external social world, but about the internal psychic plane,
Which cannot be known directly. It is real in its own right and symbols are the nearest we can get to approaching this unknown realm.
My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious.
Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation,
And the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.
Once the exploration of the unconscious has begun, the individual is confronted with the abysmal contradictions of human nature,
And this confrontation, in turn, leads to the possibility of a direct experience of light and darkness.
The experience of being swallowed, pulled underwater, or consumed is what it actually feels like when you encounter the power of unconscious.
When you are going through this process of transformation, the ordinary world appears very different.
Whoever sets foot in this realm submits his conscious ego-personality to the controlling influence of the unconscious.
The deeper you go, and the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance.
The one thing our unconscious will not tolerate is evasion of responsibility.
The unconscious pushes us into one suffering after another until we are finally willing to wake up,
See that it is we who are choosing these impossible paths and take responsibility.
Whenever one finds himself in a state of conflict with someone or with a situation,
He should entertain the hypothesis that the psyche has propelled him into that situation in order to generate consciousness.
Anyone who undergoes a development of consciousness is immediately assailed by a sense of
Abandonment and excommunication from most of the values that formerly sustained one.
The old kingdom dissolves beneath and one is left to feel exiled and without any container for life.
Failure to adapt to this inner world is a negligence entailing
Just as serious consequences as ignorance and ineptitude in the outer world.
One must simply listen, in order to learn what the inner totality the Self
Wants one to do here and now in a particular situation.
The unconscious is useless without the human mind. It always seeks its collective purposes and never your individual destiny.
Your destiny is the result of the collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed.
Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialities of the energies in your own system.
The energies are committed in a certain way, and that commitment out there is coming toward you.
I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature.
Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images
Which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism.
Our consciousness revolves around the unconscious, not the other way around.
The center of a human being lies in the unconscious. It was an error of 19th century to say: center of the world is the ego.
The ego is, so to speak, a clown acting as if it were the leading actor.
If I tame you, beast, I give others the opportunity to tame their beasts.
The taming begins with you, my I, nowhere else.
The psyche is a world in which the ego is contained. Maybe there are fishes who believe that they contain the sea.
We must rid ourselves of this habitual illusion of ours if we wish to consider metaphysical assertions from the standpoint of psychology.
In modern Western society we have reached a point at which we try to get by without acknowledging inner life at all.
We act as though there were no unconscious, as though we could live full lives by fixating ourselves completely on the external, material world.
As the ego does not represent the whole psyche, so the Western mind cannot speak for the whole world.
The spiritual dimension is an extremely significant dimension in the human psyche and also in life.
If we suppress it, the way Western culture has been doing it, we will be paying a very serious toll for it.
We are really acting against our deepest nature.
We only believe that we are masters in our own house because we like to flatter ourselves. Actually, however, we are dependent to a startling degree
Upon the proper functioning of the unconscious psyche and must trust that it does not fail us.
The ego has to acknowledge the existence of the unconscious, and that the position presented by the unconscious is worthy of consideration.
This is no small requirement for the ego is normally terrified by the prospect of not being in control of its own psychic life.
Although ego consciousness is indispensable, it is not supreme ruler of psychic life.
Religious function of the psyche addresses the ego when it is out of balance with larger reality
And attempts to relate consciousness to central organizing principles of higher consciousness.
Although the ego is most comfortable with consciousness, it must be willing to examine its own disposition
And to entertain possibility that it is not complete or infallible.
The ego must be open to the notion that there are perspectives other than the conscious one.
Whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face.
Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself.
The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely,
The face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona,
The mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.
Most people confuse self-knowledge with knowledge of their conscious ego-personalities.
Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself.
But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents.
A complex develops when the ego is unable to contain and consciously relate to, and thus integrate, some unconscious content.
In other words, the ego cannot embody an archetype which is seeking expression. The unconscious content then accrues substance
In the form of related affects, images, memory traces and expectations – around its core, like a crystal that precipitates out of a solution.
According to Jung, everybody knows that people have complexes;
What is not so well known is that complexes can have us, can contradict the desires of our ego.
Jung described complexes as islands of consciousness, split off from the ego-mainland. It's a useful metaphor.
When you're emotional, caught in a complex, you're cut off from rational ego resources;
The complex rules the personality as long as you stay on the island.
When the storm dies down you swim back to the mainland and lick your wounds, wondering what got into you.
Unconscious content not brought into the Gnosis of consciousness
Is forced to live it-self out by way of compulsive acts performed by the ego.
Unconscious contents, as a rule, cannot stand to be observed.
They react violently to being known because this destroys or relativizes
The autonomy/omnipotence they enjoy while operating unconsciously.
The point is not to deny our ego, but to extricate ourselves from our exclusive preoccupation with it.
A person caught in a complex is driven by forces he or she does not understand.
Anything that remains unconscious has the power to control us
And anything that we bring into consciousness, we have the chance to control.
In psychic illnesses it is patently clear that the impairment and disturbance of consciousness are far from being experienced as unrelievedly painful.
In neurotic and particularly in hysterical reactions, the failure of the ego and its suffering are frequently accompanied by a smile of pleasure
The triumphant grin of the unconscious at having taken possession of the ego.
When I see a man in a savage rage with something outside himself,
I know that he is, in reality, wanting to be savage toward his own unconscious self.
From the psychological point of view, demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious,
Spontaneous irruptions of unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process.
Complexes are comparable to demons which fitfully harass our thought and actions;
Hence in antiquity and the Middle Ages acute neurotic disturbances were conceived as possession.
Jung taught that if you are overly identified with one part of the personality, then the psyche will provide a corrective compensation.
The less one pays attention, the more forceful the message will become in nightmares, phobias, or bad luck.
The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering: it is as when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of a dam to a raging torrent.
It is dangerous to suppress it because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis.
Neurosis is an inner cleavage. The state of being at war with one self.
What drives people to war with themselves is the intuition
Or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another.
Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears.
Always one wishes to hear of grand political and economic schemes, the very things that have landed every nation in a morass.
Therefore it sounds grotesque when anyone speaks of hidden doors, dreams, and a world within.
What has this vapid idealism got to do with gigantic economic programmes, with the so-called problems of reality?
But I speak not to nations, only to the individual few, for whom it goes without saying that cultural values do not drop down like manna from heaven,
But are created by the hands of individuals. If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual,
Because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first.
For this I need—because outside authority no longer means anything to me—a knowledge of the innermost foundations of my being,
In order that I may base myself firmly on the eternal facts of the human psyche.
Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings?
They also are part of our life, and sometimes more truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day.
Whoever denies the existence of the unconscious is in fact assuming that our present knowledge of the psyche is total.
And this belief is clearly just as false as the assumption that we know all there is to be known about the natural universe.
Most people can’t face inner conflict at all; they impose a kind of artificial unity on life
By clinging to the prejudices of their ego and repressing the voices of the unconscious.
In the West, the conscious standpoint arbitrarily decides against the unconscious,
Since anything coming from inside suffers from the prejudice of being regarded as inferior or somehow wrong.
Man's greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, if not actually mistrusted and despised.
It's only psychological too often means: it is nothing. Where, exactly, does this immense prejudice come from?
We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom,
But we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.
Our knowledge is not reliable; it is partial and undermined by the fact that the unconscious has a separate truth dimension,
Of which we are mostly oblivious. Ironically, the deeper truth resides in what we habitually dismiss as illusion, fantasy, myth and distortion.
Symbolism is the archetypical language of the soul/psyche.
Ego-consciousness is literally incapable of understanding the unconscious mind
Because it can only understand thought line by line, here a little there a little.
A symbol does not define or explain;
It points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp,
And cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language.
I take careful account of the symbols produced by the unconscious.
They are the one thing capable of convincing the critical mind of modern man.
They are convincing for a very old-fashioned reason:
They are overwhelming, which is precisely what Latin word “convincere” means.
If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor along with consciousness,
And if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible,
Then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position.
Every dark thing one falls into can be called an initiation. To be initiated into a thing means to go into it.
The first step is generally falling into the dark place and usually appears in a dubious or negative form falling into something, or being possessed by something.
The shamans say that being a medicine man begins by falling into the power of the demons; the one who pulls out of the dark place becomes the medicine man,
and the one who stays in is the sick person. You can take every psychological illness as initiation.
Even the worst things you fall into are an effort at initiation, for you are in something which belongs to you, and now you must get out of it.
The Medicine Man occupied the honored role of priest and physician to his tribe.
They understood that healing was done by the intercession of celestial spirits.
Music was used as the bridge between these planes.
Thus we see why music was religious in nature,
And music was looked upon as a sacred art.
The intuitive is a type that doesn't see,
Doesn't see the stumbling block before his feet,
But he smells a rat for ten miles.
Intuition needs to look at things from afar or vaguely in order to function,
So as to get a certain hunch from the unconscious, to half shut the eyes and not look at facts too closely.
If one looks at things too precisely, the focus is on facts, and then the hunch cannot come through.
That is why intuitives tend to be unpunctual and vague.
An extremely introverted type of person tends to deny reality and place a lot of importance upon a relationship to the unconscious.
An extraverted person places emphasis upon outer world and consciousness.
It is advantageous to not be too extreme as we have both sides within.
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Mythology
Shadow
Anima
Individuation