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Anima • Quotes
8 months ago
In every man and woman there is an inner being whose primary function in the psyche is to serve as the psychopomp
The one who guides the ego to the inner world, who serves as mediator between the unconscious and the ego.
The anima is the mover, the instigator of change, whose fascination drives, lures,
and encourages the male to all the adventures of the soul and spirit, of action and creation in the inner and the outward world.
The witness doesn’t evaluate; doesn’t judge your actions. It merely makes note of them.
It’s a subtle thing, the watcher watching him/herself watching.
It’s actually two planes of consciousness simultaneously-the witness and the ego.
The witness is connected to the soul plane.
Destiny is our mythical sense of life. We get the feeling about our life that something is meant,
Something is wanted, something is living alongside my life nudging, urging, sometimes grabbing the wheel and setting another course.
Everything that happens to us, properly understood, leads us back to ourselves;
It is as though there were some unconscious guidance whose aim it is to deliver us
From all ties and all dependence and make us dependent on ourselves.
We think of Beatrice leading Dante up to paradise, but he experienced that only after he had gone through hell.
Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right to paradise;
She puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
The ego is the defensive shell we pull around our lives. It is afraid; it is threatened and grasping.
It acts in an overly protective way and is very competitive. The soul, on the other hand, has no barriers.
As the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, The soul has no limits. The soul is a pilgrim journeying toward endless horizons.
There are no exclusion areas; the soul suffuses everything. Furthermore,
The soul is in touch with the eternal dimension of time and is never afraid of what is yet to come.
Your soul is both of you and of the world. The world cannot be full until you become fully yourself.
The soul corresponds to a niche, a distinctive place in nature,
Like a vibrant space of shimmering potential waiting to be discovered, claimed, occupied.
Jung found that the psyche is androgynous: made up of both masculine & feminine.
Thus, every man and every woman comes equipped with a psychological structure
That in its wholeness includes the richness of both sides, both natures, both sets of capacities and strengths.
To replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy will only be neurotic in another direction.
Valuing the feminine and the masculine equally is the only path toward greater wholeness and fuller humanity.
Jung's conviction was that to achieve wholeness, one first has to go through the experience of fragmentation and experience the many parts of which the psyche is composed.
The normal ego prefers stability and single-mindedness to the challenge of plurality and fragmentation, and that is why Jung argued that the sooner we can overcome the normal ego,
and aspire to the realisation of the Self, the more whole we might become and the less terrified we would be of the fragmented parts that rise to meet us from the unconscious.
Sometimes, he argued, the Self is symbolised in dreams and artwork as androgynous, because it points to a wholeness that transcends the ego and its gender.
Theologically, he felt the divine should be imagined as both masculine and feminine, so that human beings could focus upon a higher symbol that combines the opposites.
The anima is a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings & moods,
Prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and last but not least his relation to the unconscious.
If the feminine archetypal principle is not consciously admitted into masculinity, it will be unconsciously,
And usually negatively, admitted. Hence, rather than integrate the feminine,
The rationalistic male consciousness will be invaded by irrational psychic contents.
Typically, the feminine aspects in men are denied and/or projected completely onto actual women.
Denying the presence and importance of the feminine leads to undervaluing actual women and being dismissive towards them.
It is feminine qualities that bring meaning into life: relatedness to other human beings, ability to soften power with love,
Awareness of our inner feelings & values, respect for our environment, a delight in earth's beauty, and the introspective quest for inner wisdom.
If the encounter with the shadow is the apprentice-piece in the individual's development,
Then that with the anima is the master-piece.
We either embrace the mystery of this journey, or we run from it.
And something within us always knows the difference.
The creative process has a feminine quality,
And the creative work arises from unconscious depths
We might truly say from the realm of the Mothers.
In allowing the soul to achieve an existence that is independent of the conscious intellect,
Jung indicated a way of restoring the sacred beliefs of our ancestors,
Perhaps allowing us to imagine ways of bridging the barriers
That the more sophisticated cultures have erected between us.
Sometimes you no longer recognize yourself. You want to overcome it, but it overcomes you.
You want to set limits, but it compels you to keep going. You want to elude it, but it comes with you.
You want to employ it, but you are its tool; you want to think about it, but your thoughts obey it.
Finally the fear of the inescapable seizes you, for it comes after you slowly and invincibly.
There is no escape. Now you'll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it's all useless.
The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way. But the way is my own self, my own life founded upon myself.
I am still a victim of my thinking. When can I order my thinking to be quiet, so that my thoughts, those unruly hounds, will crawl to my feet?
How can I ever hope to hear your voice louder, to see your face clearer, when all my thoughts howl?
My soul wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me.
Above all she wants to be ever present. But I'm ashamed of my soul. I don't want to be divine but reasonable.
The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity.
It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous.
There are many who skate through life unperturbed, some with luck, some with naiveté, and some with sheer opacity of soul.
None of this shipwreck talk will make any sense to any of them. But there are those out there who picked themselves up off the floor,
Those who emerged from the crash, those who listened when something inside demanded they persist,
And from then forward they knew that something supports them from within when the outer world has fallen apart.
To know what supports us when nothing supports us is a genuine treasure.
A dark night of the soul doesn't merely plunge you into darkness, it also batters you, so that you might well feel emotionally beaten and lacerated.
The alchemists described this process as mortification, emotional suffering that leaves you feeling destroyed.
As the word implies mors, mortis means death, mortification entails dying to your will and ego.
Ultimately it works in your favour, but during the process you may feel deeply discouraged.
This mortification, the feeling of being overwhelmed and torn apart, prepares you for new ideas and a fresh start.
You can't be renewed unless past behaviour and thinking are shredded and packed away. But this can't happen without torment.
The ideas and styles that have become familiar to you are you. To give them up is to have your very identity ripped apart and disposed of.
You try to hang on, and that's where the torture focuses. People say they want to change, but when it comes down to the heart of the process, they resist strongly, and there is a battle.
When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver/mercury, but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter.
Conceptually, Jung said that alchemy worked because it was a work of psyche. Without realizing it, alchemists projected their psyches into the matter in their laboratories.
The lead was their heavy depressed souls. The quest for gold was a desire to experience the divine or in Jung's terms, to be connected to the major archetype of wholeness, the Self.
Some scholars regard the transmutation of lead into gold as a metaphor for the transformation of the Self.
The gold, they say, is you when you become fully realised or enlightened. But according to traditional procedure, there are actually two transformations.
First you make a philosopher's stone, then you use it to transmute base metal. The first step-the forming of the stone-is the transformation of self.
The second step is the transforming of something that is not the Self. The gold isn't you. It's something outside of you that you desire.
The philosopher's stone is a means, not an end. In fact, if you don't want to use it for something, you won't be able to form it.
You can't succeed with the alchemical transformation of the Self unless you desire something that is not yourself. Wanting to be gold is vainglorious.
Inner gold is the highest value in the human psyche. It is our soul, the Self, the innermost part of our being. It is us at our best, our twenty-four-carat gift to ourselves.
Everyone has inner gold. It isn't created, but it does have to be discovered. When I speak about gold this way, I am also speaking about god.
These are two ways to describe the mystery. When we awaken to a new possibility in our lives, we often see it first in another person.
A part of us that has been hidden is about to emerge, but it doesn't go in a straight line from our unconscious to becoming conscious.
It travels by way of an intermediary, a host. We project our gold onto someone, and suddenly we're consumed with that person.
The first inkling of this is when the other person appears to be so luminous that he or she glows in the dark.
That's a sure sign that something is changing in us and we are projecting our gold onto the other person.
When we observe the things we attribute to the other person, we see our own depth and meaning.
Our gold goes first from us to them. Eventually it will come back to us.
Projecting our inner gold offers us the best chance for an advance in consciousness.
The word psyche means two things in Greek. Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul.
But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren't so different, after all, are they?
A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing,
And then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens
And out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That's what happens to souls as well.
They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes,
And bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them,
And one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly.
More Quotes:
General
Unconscious
Synchronicities
Dreams
Active Imagination
Mythology
Shadow
Anima
Individuation