Carl Jung on “Civilization” – YouTube
Carl Jung: CW 10 “Civilization in Transition”
Our cerebral consciousness is like an actor who has forgotten that he is playing a role. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 332
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 10, Para 618
But the full extent of these projections from the unconscious became known through analysis of those obscure and inexplicable feelings and emotions which give some intangible, magical quality to certain places, certain moods of nature, certain works of art, and also to certain ideas and certain people. This magic likewise comes from projection, but a projection of the collective unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 43
If it is inanimate objects that have the “magical” quality, often their mere statistical incidence is sufficient to prove that their significance is due to the projection of a mythological content from the collective unconscious. Mostly these contents are motifs already known to us from myths and fairytales. I would mention as an example the mysterious house where a witch or magician dwells, where some monstrous crime is being committed or has been committed, where there is a ghost, where a hidden treasure lies buried, and so on ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 43
The projection of this primordial image can be recognized when, one day, a person somehow comes upon this mysterious house when, in other words, a real but quite ordinary house makes a magical impression upon him. Generally, too, the whole atmosphere of the place seems symbolic and is, therefore, the projection of a coherent unconscious system ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 43
All kinds of objects and signs mark these places, and pious awe surrounds the marked spot. Thus does primitive man dwell in his land and at the same time in the land of his unconscious. Everywhere his unconscious jumps out at him, alive and real. How different is our relationship to the land we dwell in! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44
Feelings totally strange to us accompany the primitive at every step. Who knows what the cry of a bird means to him, or the sight of that old tree! A whole world of feeling is closed to us and is replaced by a pale aestheticism ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44
Nevertheless, the world of primitive feeling is not entirely lost to us; it lives on in the unconscious. The further we remove ourselves from it with our enlightenment and our rational superiority, the more it fades into the distance, but is made all the more potent by everything that falls into it, thrust out by our one-sided rationalism ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44
This lost bit of nature seeks revenge and returns in faked, distorted form, for instance as a tango epidemic, as Futurism, Dadaism, and all the other crazes and crudities in which our age abounds ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44
For the Chinese, “spirit” does not signify order, meaning, and everything that is good: on the contrary, it is a fiery and sometimes dangerous power. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 939
It is a fact that cannot be denied the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408
In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 49
If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one’s own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416
The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 130
The wise man 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. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152
The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 882
We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas—until we find to our distress that they will not come. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305
The mere act of enlightenment may have destroyed the spirits of nature, but not the psychic factors that correspond to them, such as suggestibility, lack of criticism, fearfulness, propensity to superstition and prejudice—in short, all those qualities which make possession possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 431
All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395
In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 315
Words like “Society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personified. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 554
It is not the will of individuals that moulds the destinies of nations, but supra-personal factors, the spirit and the earth, which work in mysterious ways and in unfathomable darkness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 921
But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326
Most men are erotically blinded—they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that this proposition must sound well-nigh unintelligible to the man of today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 43.
People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 40.
Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 49.
Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 43-44.
The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.
Just as man, as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence and his own spiritual and moral autonomy anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.
Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.
Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 135
Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177
And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177
The primitives I observed in East Africa took it for granted that “big” dreams are dreamed only by “big” men – medicine-men, magicians, chiefs, etc. This may be true on a primitive level. But with us these dreams are dreamed also by simple people, more particularly when they have got themselves, mentally or spiritually, in a fix. ~Carl Jung. CW 10, Page 324.
`Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 310.
The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like-and is then amazed that cowsheds “smell,” because the dictionary didn’t say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 882.
The struggle between light and darkness has broken out everywhere. The rift runs through the whole globe, and set the fire that is smoldering and glowing Germany ablaze wherever we look. The conflagration that broke out in Germany was the outcome of psychic conditions that are universal. Carl Jung, CW 10, para 485.
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 872.
. . . 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, CW 10, Page 195.
In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single “greatest man.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10: Page 175.
The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. The “modern” man has at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from his original, purely animal participation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 150
The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 327
We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior “soul” has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 130.
The marked tendency of the Western democracies to internal dissension is the very thing that could lead them to a more hopeful path. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 225.
Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid and violent animal. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 228
Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. ~Carl Jung: CW 10, Page 395.
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 944.
The development of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration must be understood as the symptom and symbol of a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its mark on our age. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 303-304.
It is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, par. 506.
Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.
Until now it has not truly and fundamentally been noted that our time, despite the prevalence of irreligiosity, is so to speak congenitally charged with the attainment of the Christian epoch, namely with the supremacy of the word, that Logos which the central figure of Christian faith represents. The word has literally become our God and has remained so” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, §554.
I tried to give a general view of the structure of the unconscious. Its contents, the archetypes, are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure—indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
We shall have to reckon with quite unusual difficulties in dealing with it, and the first of these is that the archetype and its function must be understood far more as a part of man’s prehistoric, irrational psychology than as a rationally conceivable system. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
Phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically we have grown up out of the dark confines of the earth; hence the factors that affected us most closely became archetypes, and it is these primordial images which influence us most directly, and therefore seem to be the most powerful. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.
I would like to suggest that every psychic reaction which is out of proportion to its precipitating cause should be investigated as to whether it may be conditioned at the same time by an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.
We should make the archetype responsible only for a definite, minimal, normal degree of fear; any pronounced increase, felt to be abnormal, must have special causes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 33.
People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Par. 491
The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177.
Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 144-145
Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505.
Where is a height without depth, and how can there be light that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 271.
Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian Idealism followed, not by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, but by the World War among Christian nations with its barbed wire and poison gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 76-77
When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the earth? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page, Para 988
Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it. If he does it from love or in the spirit of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234
Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 198.
A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361
From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361
It is the privilege and the task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 272
Consciousness is a precondition of being. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528
Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565
The attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289
The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times in his long history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290
Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1004
If the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536
In our strength we are independent and isolated, are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261
But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232
He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232
Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232
Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 231
When, towards middle life, the last gleam of childhood illusion fades—this it must be owned is true only of an almost ideal life, for many go as children to their graves—then the archetype of the mature man or woman emerges from the parental imago: an image of man as woman has known him from the beginning of time, and an image of woman that man carries within him eternally. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 74
A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since it neglects the positive meaning and value of these “infantile”—i.e., creative—fantasies. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355
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
A civilization does not decay, it regenerates. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 299
Was it not Meister Eckhart who said: “For this reason God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and often winks at them, mostly sending them to people for whom he has prepared some high destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440
Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440
I know people who feel that the strange power in their own psyche is something divine, for the very simple reason that it has given them an understanding of what is meant by religious experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 312.
They [Religions] express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul’s nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 367
Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 268
Unlived life is a destructive, irresistible force that works softly but inexorably. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 252
Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 564
Religion, as the careful observation and taking account of certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 512
A creed coincides with the established Church or, at any rate, forms a public institution whose members include not only true believers but vast numbers of people who can only be described as “indifferent” in matters of religion and who belong to it simply by force of habit. Here the difference between a creed and a religion becomes palpable. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 508.
Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112
Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112
The very fact that a man enters into a marriage on trial means that he is making a reservation; he wants to be sure of not burning his fingers, to risk nothing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112
Love is not cheap—let us therefore beware of cheapening it! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112
All our bad qualities, our egotism, our cowardice, our worldly wisdom, our cupidity—all these would persuade us not to take love seriously. But love will reward us only when we do. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112
I must even regard it as a misfortune that nowadays the sexual question is spoken of as something distinct from love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112
The two questions should not be separated, for when there is a sexual problem it can be solved only by love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112
It is one of the most difficult and thankless of tasks to say anything of importance about the civilized man of today … for the speaker finds himself caught in the same presuppositions and is blinded by the same prejudices as those whom he wishes to view from a superior standpoint. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 104
He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the present. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 149
All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 540
It is quite natural that with the triumph of the Goddess of Reason a general neuroticizing of modern man should set in, a dissociation of personality analogous to the splitting of the world today by the Iron Curtain. This boundary line bristling with barbed wire runs through the psyche of modern man, no matter on which side he lives. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 544
If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and all fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 575
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 944
A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 535
The principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the world is man. ~ Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 441
Let man but accumulate sufficient engines of destruction and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use. It is well known that fire-arms go off of themselves if only enough of them are together. ~Carl Jung, CW 10,
It is a fact that cannot be denied the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408
All psychological facts which cannot be verified with the help of scientific apparatus and exact measurement are assertions and opinions, and, as such, are psychic realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 839
Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 317
The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 325
One should never forget that one dreams in the first place, and almost to the exclusion of all else, of oneself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321
It is amazing how people get caught in words. They imagine that the name postulates the thing—just as if we were doing the devil a serious wrong when we call him a neurosis! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para
The personality of the patient demands all the resources of the doctor’s personality and not technical tricks. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 338
When the ego has been made a “seat of anxiety,” someone is running away from himself and will not admit it. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 360
The elementary fact that a person always thinks another’s psychology is identical with his own effectively prevents a correct understanding of feminine psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 240
Women are increasingly aware that love alone can give them full stature, just as men are beginning to divine that only the spirit can give life its highest meaning. Both seek a psychic relationship, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for its completion. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 269
The love of woman is not sentiment, as is a man’s, but a will that is at times terrifyingly unsentimental and can even force her to self-sacrifice. A man who is loved in this way cannot escape his inferior side, for he can only respond to the reality of her love with his own reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261
In the eyes of the ordinary man, love in its true sense coincides with the institution of marriage, and outside marriage there is only adultery or “platonic” friendship. For woman, marriage is not an institution at all but a human love-relationship. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255
Relationship is possible only if there is a psychic distance between people, in the same way that morality presupposes freedom. For this reason the unconscious tendency of woman aims at loosening the marriage structure, but not at the destruction of marriage and the family. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 273
Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises. There is no birth of consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 331
It is impossible to derive any philosophical system from the fundamental thoughts of primitive man. They provide only antinomies, but it is just these that are the inexhaustible source of all spiritual problems in all times and in all civilizations. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 144
Sexuality dished out as sexuality is brutish; but sexuality as an expression of love is hallowed. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234
in his long history. And just as for the individual a time of dissociation is a time for sickness, so it is in the life of nations. We can hardly deny that ours is a time of dissociation and sickness. The political and social conditions, the fragmentation of religion and philosophy, the contending schools of modern art and modern psychology all have one meaning in this respect. And does anyone who is endowed with the slightest sense of responsibility feel any satisfaction at this turn of events? If we are honest, we must admit that no one feels quite comfortable in the present-day world; indeed, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable. The word “crisis,” so often heard, is a medical expression which always tells us that the sickness has reached a dangerous climax. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290
Magic is the science of the jungle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 63.
Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just “fate.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871
The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565
So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros, It is a task he can’ not avoid. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 125.
All psychological facts which cannot be verified with the help of scientific apparatus and exact measurement are assertions and opinions, and, as such, are psychic realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 839
Since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 387
The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 150
None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 297
We should not try to “get rid” of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 179
But God himself cannot flourish if man’s soul is starved. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 275
Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505
The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 152.
No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 152.
If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one’s own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416.
The only thing that cannot be improved upon is morality, for every alteration of traditional morality is by definition an immorality. This bon mot has an edge to it, against which many an innovator has barked his shins. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 114
Nothing is so jealous as a truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 190.
“a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of the nations.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 459.
The victim is not the only sufferer; everybody in the vicinity of the crime, including the murderer, suffers with him. Something of the abysmal darkness of the world has broken in on us, poisoning the very air we breathe and befouling the pure water with the stale, nauseating taste of blood ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 410
True, we are innocent, we are the victims, robbed, betrayed, outraged; and yet for all that, or precisely because of it, the flame of evil glowers in our moral indignation. It must be so, for it is necessary that someone should feel indignant, that someone should let himself be the sword of judgment wielded by fate ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 410
Evil calls for expiation, otherwise the wicked will destroy the world utterly, or the good suffocate in their rage which they cannot vent, and in either case no good will come of it ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 410
When evil breaks at any point into the order of things, our whole circle of psychic protection is disrupted. Action inevitably calls up reaction, and, in the matter of destructiveness, this turns out to be just as bad as the crime, and possibly even worse, because the evil must be exterminated root and branch ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 411
In order to escape the contaminating touch of evil we need a proper rite de sortie, a solemn admission of guilt by judge, hangman, and public, followed by an act of expiation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 411
Nevertheless, it should be clear to everyone that such a state of degradation [such as the Nazi concentration camps] can come about only under certain conditions. The most important of these is the accumulation of urban, industrialized masses of people torn from the soil, engaged in one-sided employment, and lacking every healthy instinct, even that of self-preservation ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 413
Loss of the instinct of self-preservation can be measured in terms of dependence on the State, which is a bad symptom. Dependence on the State means that everybody relies on everybody else (= State) instead of on himself. Every man hangs on to the next and enjoys a false feeling of security, for one is still hanging in the air even when hanging in the company of ten thousand other people. The only difference is that one is no longer aware of one’s own insecurity ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 413
The increasing dependence on the State is anything but a healthy symptom; it means that the whole nation is in a fair way to becoming a herd of sheep, constantly relying on a shepherd to drive them into good pastures. The shepherd’s staff soon becomes a rod of iron, and the shepherds turn into wolves ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 413
In childhood, the love of one’s parents is a problem, and for the old man the problem is what he has made of his love. Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 198
We must, I think, understand love in this way if we are to do any sort of justice to the problems it involves. They are of immense scope and complexity, not confined to any particular province but covering every aspect of human life ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 198
The steady growth of the Welfare State is no doubt a very fine thing from one point of view, but from another it is a doubtful blessing, as it robs people of their individual responsibility and turns them into infants and sheep. Besides this, there is the danger that the capable will simply be exploited by the irresponsible, as happened on a huge scale in Germany ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 413
The citizen’s instinct of self-preservation should be safeguarded at all costs, for, once a man is cut off from the nourishing roots of instinct, he becomes the shuttlecock of every wind that blows. He is then no better than a sick animal, demoralized and degenerate, and nothing short of a catastrophe can bring him back to health ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 413
This invasion of love into all the collective spheres of life is, however, only a minor difficulty in comparison with the fact that love is also an intensely individual problem. For it means that every general criterion and rule loses its validity, in exactly the same way that religious beliefs, although constantly codified in the course of history, are always, in essence, an individual experience which bows to no traditional rule ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 198
It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—as apparently they do—to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536
The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528
A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361
What the Christian sacrament of baptism purports to do is a landmark of the utmost significance in the psychic development of mankind. Baptism endows the individual with a living soul. I do not mean that the baptismal rite in itself does this, by a unique and magical act. I mean that the idea of baptism lifts man out of his archaic identification with the world and transforms him into a being who stands above it. The fact that mankind has risen to the level of this idea is baptism in the deepest sense, for it means the birth of the spiritual man who transcends nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 136
It is not ethical principles, however lofty, or creeds, however orthodox, that lay the foundations for the freedom and autonomy of the individual, but simply and solely the empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the “world” and its “reason.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 509
The tremendous compulsion towards goodness and the immense moral force of Christianity are not merely an argument in the latter’s favour, they are also a proof of the strength of its suppressed and repressed counterpart —the antichristian, barbarian element. The existence within us of something that can turn against us, that can become a serious matter for us, I regard not merely as a dangerous peculiarity, but as a valuable and congenial asset as well. It is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 20
Thus, the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth. Not without reason do we date our era from the age of Augustus, for that epoch saw the birth of the symbolical figure of Christ, who was invoked by the early Christians as the Fish, the Ruler of the aeon of Pisces which had just begun. He became the ruling spirit of the next two thousand years. Like the teacher of wisdom in Babylonian legend, Cannes, he rose up from the sea, from the primeval darkness, and brought a world-period to an end. It is true that he said, “I am come not to bring peace but a sword.” But that which brings division ultimately creates union. Therefore his teaching was one of all-uniting love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 293
Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us—that is, trust and loyalty. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 521
For thousands of years the mind of man has worried about the sick soul, perhaps even earlier than it did about the sick body. The propitiation of gods, the perils of the soul and its salvation, these are not yesterday’s problems. Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelatio of the soul’s nature. From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off; only the individual consciousness that has lost its connection with the psychic totality remains caught in the illusion that the soul is a small circumscribed area, a fit subject for “scientific” theorizing. The loss of this great relationship is the prime evil of neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 10 Para 367
The reality of good and evil consists in things and situations that just happen to you, that are too big for you, where you are always facing death. Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just “fate.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871
Grounds for an unusually intense fear of death are nowadays not far to seek: they are obvious enough, the more so as all life that is senselessly wasted and misdirected means death too. This may account for the unnatural intensification of the fear of death in our time, when life has lost its deeper meaning for so many people, forcing them to exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 696
We distinctly resent the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces, for it is not so long ago that we made our escape from that frightening world of dreams and superstitions, and constructed for ourselves a picture of the cosmos worthy of our rational consciousness—that latest and greatest achievement of man. We are now surrounded by a world that is obedient to rational laws. It is true that we do not know the causes of everything, but in time they will be discovered, and these discoveries will accord with our reasoned expectations. There are, to be sure, also chance occurrences, but they are merely accidental, and we do not doubt that they have a causality of their own. Chance happenings are repellent to the mind that loves order. They disturb the regular, predictable course of events in the most absurd and irritating way. We resent them as much as we resent invisible, arbitrary forces, for they remind us too much of Satanic imps or of the caprice of a deus ex machina. They are the worst enemies of our careful calculations and a continual threat to all our undertakings. Being admittedly contrary to reason, they deserve all our abuse, and yet we should not fail to give them their due. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 113
“The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast,” says Seni to Wallenstein—a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we knew even a little about the secrets of the heart. But for this, so far, men have had little understanding. Nor would I dare to assert that things are any better today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9
Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods “factors,” which comes from facere, ‘to make.’ The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. ~Carl Jung CW 10 Para 49
It is dangerous to avow spiritual poverty, for the poor man has desires, and whoever has desires calls down some fatality on himself. A Swiss proverb puts it drastically: “Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 28
In our strength we are independent and isolated, and are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para
Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. Everything has become relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, with democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty. And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177
The “present” is a thin surface stratum that is laid down in the great centres of civilization. If it is very thin, as in Tsarist Russia, it has no meaning, as events have shown. But once it has attained a certain strength, we can speak of civilization and progress, and then problems arise that are characteristic of an epoch. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 266
The time is as great as one thinks it, and man grows to the stature of the time. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 945
The man of the present must work for the future and leave others to conserve the past. He is therefore not only a builder but also a destroyer. He and his world have both become questionable and ambiguous. The ways that the past shows him and the answers it gives to his questions are insufficient for the needs of the present. All the old, comfortable ways are blocked, new paths have been opened up, and new dangers have arisen of which the past knew nothing. It is proverbial that one never learns anything from history, and in regard to present-day problems it usually teaches us nothing. The new path has to be made through untrodden regions, without presuppositions and often, unfortunately, without piety. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239
Sometimes, when we look back at history, it seems as though the present time had analogies with certain periods in the past, when great empires and civilizations had passed their zenith and were hastening irresistibly towards decay. But these analogies are deceptive, for there are always renaissances. What does move more clearly into the foreground is Europe’s position midway between the Asiatic East and the Anglo-Saxon—or shall we say American?—West. Europe now stands between two colossi, both uncouth in their form but implacably opposed to one another in their nature. They are profoundly different not only racially but in their ideals. In the West there is the maximum political freedom with the minimum personal freedom; in the East it is just the opposite. We see in the West a tremendous development of Europe’s technological and scientific tendencies, and in the Far East an awakening of all those spiritual forces which, in Europe, these tendencies hold in check. The power of the West is material, that of the East ideal. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 237
Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 870
If you want to learn the greatest lesson India can teach you, wrap yourself in the cloak of your moral superiority, go to the Black Pagoda of Konarak, sit down in the shadow of the mighty ruin that is still covered with the most amazing collection of obscenities, read Murray’s cunning old Handbook^ for India, which tells you how to be properly shocked by this lamentable state of affairs, and how you should go into the temples in the evening, because in the lamplight they look if possible “more (and how beautifully!) wicked”; and then analyse carefully and with the utmost honesty all your reactions, feelings, and thoughts. It will take you quite a while, but in the end, if you have done good work, you will have learned something about yourself, and about the white man in general, which you have probably never heard from anyone else. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1013
How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him
