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Carl Jung on “Human Body” – Anthology

Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316.

If you just have a dream and let it pass by you, nothing has happened at all, even if it is the most amazing dream; but if you look at it with the purpose of trying to understand it, and succeed in understanding it, then you have taken it into the here and now, the body being a visible expression of the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316.

Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316.

This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy….In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)

You must pay especially careful attention to your body because your intuitive extraversion, stretching over continents, pulls energies into its vortex which are drawn from the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 54-55

Each of us, every living being, is a small earth, one could say, because we are in intimate connection with the earth, we are partially earth, we are conscious of our earthly body, for instance. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

A subtle body, breath or smoke resembling, which can also be correctly described as anima. Anima is the feminine of animus, which is identical with the Greek word anemos which means wind or breath. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939

You notice that the meditation is not on the spirit of the Buddha, but on the Body of the Buddha; the highest truth grows from the deepest roots of the body and not from the spirit. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 28

So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body. This has only a distant Relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

But when Przywara says that man is a “medium formale materiale”, that is, a mediator between a formal and a material nature, we can again assent. Man is a peculiar psychic unity of experience of body and spirit, torn in two pieces by the intellect. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

This is equally true of the concept of matter or body. We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter. Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.

It is surely inaccurate to say that man is a body which becomes spirit. It is true that consciousness can reach far into the body and that this may have some effect on the processes themselves, but in a very limited degree. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940

But there is something which can be proved from everyday experience, not body becoming spirit, but body becoming conscious, man becomes conscious of his body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940

We must have a psychic image of the body, in order to become conscious of it, we must translate the Physical fact of the body into a psychic experience. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940

We find the idea of the soul as the form giving principle already in the Middle Ages, it is the soul which forms the body and the outer life. So in meditating on the Anima Christi you are meditating on Christ’s form. The same idea is to be found in the East. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture17th Nov 1939

Your dream unquestionably refers to the archetypal problem of the extrusion of the soul from the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 306-307

One is forced to conclude ‘that in your case the soul is only loosely seated in your body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 306-307

However, the friendly lion in the dream seems to indicate that the looseness of the soul is not exactly desirable, since the lion compensates your condition in a very obvious way: the Zurich lion represents your localized instinct, firmly rooted in your earth, just as the lion’s soul-as with all animals -is securely fixed in its body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 306-307

Moreover you seem prone to eczema, which not infrequently indicates that one is not properly inside one’s body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 306-307

If you devote yourself, intentionally and intellectually, to dangerous problems such as the squaring of the circle, this is yet another indication of a tendency to get away from the body, because this problem symbolizes an irrational state of wholeness which cannot be contrived but can only be experienced. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 306-307

It is death to the soul to become unconscious. People die before there is death of the body, because there is death in the soul. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 90.

When you see that a certain spark of life has gone from the eye, the physical functioning of the body somewhere has gone wrong. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 91.

Probably in absolute reality there is no such thing as body and mind, but body and mind or soul are the same, the same life, subject to the same laws, and what the body does is happening in the mind. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 20

Assimilation of the shadow gives a man body, so to speak; the animal sphere of instinct, as well as the primitive or archaic psyche, emerge into the zone of consciousness and can no longer be repressed by fictions and illusions. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 452

It is clear enough from this material what the ultimate aim of alchemy really was: it was trying to produce a corpus subtile, a transfigured and resurrected body, i.e., a body that was at the same time spirit. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 511

There the main concern is the “diamond body,” in other words, the attainment of immortality through the transformation of the body. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 511

Just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 19

Dreams throw very interesting sidelights on the inter-functioning of body and psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 502

The deposit of man’s whole ancestral experience—so rich in emotional imagery—of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337

Thus, the alchemical process also begins with such a division into the four elements, by which the body is put back into its primordial state and so can undergo transformation. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 367.

Man knows only a small part of his psyche, just as he has only a very limited knowledge of the physiology of his body. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 253

Therefore we say that if you give the little finger to the devil, he takes the whole arm, and finally the whole body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 93-94

Only if you first return to the body, to your earth, can individuation take place, only then does the thing become true. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1314

Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316

If you just have a dream and let it pass by you, nothing has happened at all, even if it is the most amazing dream; but if you look at it with the purpose of trying to understand it, and succeed in understanding it, then you have taken it into the here and now, the body being a visible expression of the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316

The body is the past, our earth, the world of heretofore, but out of it rises a new light which is not identical with the body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 374

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

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.

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.

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

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 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

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.

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.

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

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

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

In reply to your question about levitation I myself have never observed the levitation of a living body. But apparently such things do happen. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 627-628

Up to this time we have spoken of the subject as though it were unchanging in time, but as we know, the body is a four-dimensional entity, the fourth dimension being time. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 136

Also, Christmas day is a Mithraic feast. In early days, Christmas came on the 8th of January, and was a day taken over from the Egyptians, being the day celebrating the finding of the body of Osiris. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 113

Analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body, such as those things occurred to the ancients. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 87

But in these days we live by our brains alone and ignore the very definite laws of our body and the instinctive world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567

We are still in the body and thus under the rule of heavy matter. Also it is equally true that matter not moved by the spirit is dead and empty. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 459-460

Since archetypes are instinctual forms, they follow a universal pattern, as do the functions of the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451

But he [Rilke] doesn’t have what it takes to make a man complete: body, weight, shadow. His high ethos, his capacity for abnegation, and perhaps also his physical frailty naturally led him towards a goal of completeness, but not of perfection. Perfection, it seems to me, would have broken him. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 381-382.

We distinguish an organic and an inorganic world, for example. The one is alive, the other is dead; the one has psyche, the other not. But who can guarantee that the same vital principle which is at work in the organic body is not active in the crystal? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

We can only project a conception of him that corresponds to our own constitution: a body perceived by the senses and a spirit (= psyche) directly conscious of itself. After this model we build our God-image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

Coming now to cosmogony, we can assert nothing except that the body of the world and its psyche are a reflection of the God we imagine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.

But if we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit –the two being really one-then we can understand why it is that the attempt to transcend the present level of consciousness must give its due to the body. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Page 220

If you want to be quite accurate, both statements, viz. that the psyche is founded upon an organic process of the body, or that the psyche is independent of the body, are unanswerable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.

I am personally convinced that our mind corresponds with the physiological life of the body, but the way in which it is connected with the body is for obvious reasons unintelligible. To speculate about such unknowable things is mere waste of time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.

To give body to one’s thoughts means that one can speak them, paint them, show them, make them appear clearly before the eyes of everybody.… ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 193-194.

It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not as a body moving with time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

One might assume the psyche gradually rising from minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

Energy is mass and mass is extended. At all events, a body with a speed higher than that of light vanishes from sight and one may have all sorts of doubts about what would happen to such a body otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

Your view is rather confirmed, as it seems to me, by the peculiar fact that on the one hand consciousness has so exceedingly little direct information of the body from within, and that on the other hand the unconscious ( i.e., dreams and other products of the “unconscious”) refers very rarely to the body and, if it does, it is always in the most roundabout way, i.e., through highly “symbolized” images. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

At all events the assumption of a perceptual body postulates a corresponding perceptual space that separates the mind from physical space in the same way as the subtle body causes the gap between the mind and the physical body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

They belong to you, and you have painted them as a support for your own individuation process. They shouldn’t be here, and nowhere else but with yourself, as they represent the approximation of the two worlds of spirit and body or of ego and self. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 179.

So the identity with the body is one of the first things which makes an ego; it is the spatial separateness that induces, apparently, the concept of an ego. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 15.

Time in itself consists of nothing. It is only a modus cogitandi that is used to express and formulate the flux of things and events, just as space is nothing but a way of describing the existence of a body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 176.

The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Par. 330.

So the identity with the body is one of the first things which makes an ego; it is the spatial separateness that induces, apparently, the concept of an ego. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 15.

An alchemical text says: “The mind should learn compassionate love for the body.” ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.

The body as a whole, so it seems to me, is a pattern of behavior, and man as a whole is an Archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letter to Medard Boss, 27June1947.

It was, indeed, a great problem to the Middle Ages, this problem of the Trinity and the exclusion, or the very qualified recognition, of the feminine element, of the earth, the body, and matter in general, which were yet, in the form of Mary’s womb, the sacred abode of the Deity and the indispensable instrument for the divine work of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 72.

After all, the essential thing is not the shadow but the body which casts it. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Page 64.

The levitation of St. Francis is a typical example. You can see yourself from a foot above, from the ceiling or from the ground. The Yogin himself levitates because he is so identified with his contemplation that he loses the weight of his body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 210.

If we seek our connection with the snake we come to the spinal cord and that points to the animal soul of man which leads him down into the darkness of the body, into the instinct which one meets in animal form in the outer world. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199-200.

The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 240.

The age of the body is something we often swindle ourselves about, but this swindle does not help the psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 213.

Disintegration is consciously undertaken in our text with the purpose of emptying the ego consciousness and integrating a central consciousness, the totality of the personality; it is undertaken because the problem of the body has come up. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page62.

All this means that in time and space I am only here in my body, I cannot be identical with Buddha, but if I can rid myself of all my personal contents, if I can distribute them as Devatas all over the universe, I can sit in the heaven of the gods and reach eternal peace. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page 62.

The text tells us that the body of the sleeper is imagined to be the body of the Buddha, we should understand that as the diamond body. So it is the transformation of the ordinary body into the eternally durable body that is meant. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 9Dec38, Page 43.

a) The Dharma Kaya = the world of absolute truth.
b) The Sambhoga Kaya = the world of subtle bodies.
c) The Nirmana Kaya = the world of created things.
One could also call these three: Self, anima and body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 35.

So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body. This has only a distant relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.

The body, therefore, is also a psychological condition, a peculiar form of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.

So we see that what we call spirit and body are psychic conditions, limited psychic functions, and the body tells us as little about what matter really is, as the spirit about the thing in itself which is behind the spiritual condition. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.

We can experience the body psychically, a prana-body, a subtle body, and there are certain exalted and ecstatic conditions in which we can experience spirit. So what we experience of spirit and body are really psychic modalities. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.

Body and spirit, thought of as two poles, combine correctly with each other if man depends correctly upon God, because they are reconciled through His unity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 227.

Prana conceives of the body as a sort of system of pipes, going into the limbs and connecting the centres. These centres are not mystical but psychical centres of experience. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter. Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

How I experience the body from within is a totally different question. I am inside the body as a psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

If you want to know how the body can be experienced psychically you must turn to eastern Yoga; medieval philosophy also knew something of the matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.

If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225

Man is a peculiar psychic unity of experience of body and spirit, torn in two pieces by the intellect. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 226.

The coniunctio in alchemy is a union of the masculine and feminine, of the spiritual and material principles, from which a perfect body arises, the glorified body after the Last Judgement, the resurrection body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 159.

This means an eternal body, or the subtle body, which is designated in alchemy as the philosopher’s stone, the lapis aethereus or invisibilis. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 159.

The Chinese philosophy of yoga is based upon the fact of this instinctive preparation for death as a goal, and, following the analogy with the goal of the first half of life, namely, begetting and reproduction, the means towards perpetuation of physical life, it takes as the purpose of spiritual existence the symbolic begetting and bringing to birth of a psychic spirit body (‘subtle body’), which ensures the continuity of the detached consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.

The creation and birth of this superior personality is what is meant by our text when it speaks of the ‘holy fruit’, the ‘diamond body’, or refers in other ways to an indestructible body. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 123.

And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.

According to the Hui Ming Ching, the ancient sages knew how to bridge the gap between consciousness and life because they cultivated both. In this way the shelf, the immortal body, is ‘melted out’, and in this way ‘the great Tao is completed’. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 95.

If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing, Diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. ~Hui Ming Ching, Cited Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 95.

According to the Hui Ming Ching, the ancient sages knew how to bridge the gap between consciousness and life because they cultivated both. In this way the shelf, the immortal body, is ‘melted out’, and in this way ‘the great Tao is completed’. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 95.

…it must be pointed out that just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 84.

We can therefore assume, psychologically speaking, that the object which is to be transformed in alchemy is connected with the human body: it is a mystery of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.

There is another possibility, that of the subtle body, a fine material veil of the soul, which cannot exist so to speak without a body. This is the “corpus glorificationis” (glorified body), the transfigured body, which is our future portion. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 115.

The earth, in the alchemistic sense, means the body and in a double sense: chemical bodies (substances), minerals etc., and the human body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 101.

But it is the lower man that keeps on living with the body and who is nothing else but the life of the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 435-437.

Such a thing is possible only when there is a detachment of the soul from the body. When that takes place and the patient lives on, one can almost with certainty expect a certain deterioration of the character inasmuch as the superior and most essential part of the soul has already left. Such an experience denotes a partial death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 435-437.

But it is the lower man that keeps on living with the body and who is nothing else but the life of the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 435-437.

In spite of the fact that the majority of people do not know why the body needs salt, everyone demands it nonetheless because of an instinctive need. It is the same with the things of the psyche. That is the working of the intellect. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.

The psychic seems to me to be in actual fact partly extra-spatial and extra-temporal. “Subtle body” may be a fitting expression for this part of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 522-523.

Occasionally we must also inquire whether something that wants to go upwards has not taken a false route downwards into the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 403.

It is a fact that the body very often apparently survives the soul, often even without a disease. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 437-438.

Sport represents an exceptional valuation of the human body, as does also modern dancing. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 218-220.

We shall also see that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body in the name of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 218-220.

The psyche is distinctly more complicated and inaccessible than the body. It is, so to speak, the half of the world which comes into existence only when we become conscious of it. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflection, Page 132.

Body and spirit are to me mere aspects of the reality of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 198-200.

Body is as metaphysical as spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 198-200.

Ask the modern physicist what body is, they are coming fast across to the recognition of the reality of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 198-200.

And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 325, Para 618.

This living being appears outwardly as the material body, but inwardly as a series of images of the vital activities taking place within it. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 325, Para 619.

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.

The earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 28, note 194.

Analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients. If I were going to symbolize it I would choose the Annunciation. ~Carl Jung, Seminar 1925, p. 111.

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.

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.

Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the body’s form. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 49.

Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought. ~Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; and CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 475.

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 126

If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no out-flowing. Diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. Kindle light in the blessed country ever close at hand, And there hidden, let thy true self always dwell. ~Carl Jung; The Secret of the Golden Flower.

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.

Because a child is . . . small and its conscious thoughts scarce and simple, we do not realize the far-reaching complications of the infantile mind that are based on its original identity with the prehistoric psyche. That original mind is just as much present and still functioning in the child as the evolutionary stages of mankind are in its embryonic body. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 89.

The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul

It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of a few little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware. ~Carl Jung; On the Psychology of the Unconscious; CW 7; Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 35.

The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality. . . . Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world. ~Carl Jung; The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype.

. . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit – the two being really one. ~Carl Jung; The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man; CW 10: 195.

Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. ~Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; CW 8: 475.

The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; para 291.

[The soul] is of divine nature and therefore immortal; that there is a power inherent within it which builds up the body, sustains its life, heals its ills. ~Carl Jung; CW 8.

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; Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, vol. 1, p. 441.

[The alchemist Gerhard] Dorn . . . says, “In the body of man there is hidden a certain substance of heavenly nature known to very few ~Carl Jung; “Psychology and Religion” in CW 11, page 93, note 47.

It seems to me that we are at the end of an era. The splitting of the atom and the nuclear bomb bring us a new view of matter. As physical man cannot develop any further, it would seem that this particular evolution ends with man. Like the caterpillar dissolves and turns into a butterfly, it is conceivable that the physical body of man could change into a more subtle body. It might not be necessary for him to die to be clothed afresh and be transformed. ? ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 63.

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.

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.

On the whole my illness proved to be a most valuable experience which gave me the inestimable opportunity of a glimpse behind the veil. The only difficulty is to get rid of the body, to get quite naked and void of the world and the ego-will. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 355-357

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in “the chains” of Physis, and she desires “beyond physical necessity.” She must be called back by the “counsel of the spirit” from her lostness in matter and the world. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 472.

If we now recall to what a degree the soul has humanized and realized itself, we can judge how very much it today expresses the body also, with which it is coexistent. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 544.

What does power avail us? We do not want to rule. We want to live, we want light and warmth, and hence we need yours. Just as the greening earth and every living body needs the sun, so we as spirits need your light and your warmth. A sunless spirit becomes the parasite of the body. But the God feeds the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.

Yet we cannot remain in this state, since all the powers of our body are consumed like fat in the flames. Hence we must strive to free the self from the God, so that we can live. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.

But when the mother, my soul, was pregnant with the God, I did not know it. It even seemed to me as if my soul herself was the God, although he lived only in her body. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.



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Carl Jung on “Human Body” – Anthology

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