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C.G. Jung Biography

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“Giving laws, bettering, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways. Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous. Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it. Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way. The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty.”

HumanityTrustDignity
Book:The Red Book: Liber Novus
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“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you - are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude.”

Soul
Book:The Red Book: Liber Novus
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“For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina catholica, just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or "sick" metals, etc. His attention is not directed to his own salvation through God's grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter.”

GodAlchemy
Author:C.G. Jung
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“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen or diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their souls. … It is rewarding to watch patiently the silent happenings in the soul, and the most and the best happens when it is not regulated from outside and from above. I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference.””

SoulFaithConsciousnessPsychologySelf AwarenessSelf RealizationSelf AcceptanceBeliefsPsychology Of Self
Book:Psychology and alchemy
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“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths.”

SoulEnlightenmentSpiritual AwakeningCarl Gustav Jung
Book:The Red Book: Liber Novus
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“I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. I I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul. Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul. From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul: he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man, which lets herself be judged and arranged, and whose circumference we can grasp. I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.”

SoulRed BookSpirit Of The Depths
Book:The Red Book: Liber Novus
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“When we enter this world, it is terribly raw and brutal and repugnant and of divine beauty. This is nature: cold as stone and splendid as the finest love. And I say to myself: This continues after death. This is still nature and things can happen which would make you aghast. For example, take a man who starts off as a young lad with very tender stirrings of the heart, but what has become of him after thirty or forty years? And Gott-fried Keller said the same of young girls, how innocent they looked and what then becomes of them later! One could say: They become this nature, they grow into it and become these devils that they precisely are also in eternal nature. And then the dead come into a different nature. They are born into it through death and assume the color and pitch of that nature. For “there” is also some sort of nature, it too is somehow of God. It is possible that the process of emanation, of God from the Godhead, is continued onward.”

GodDeathMemoir
Book:Jung's Life and Work: Interviews for Memories, Dreams, Reflections with Aniela Jaffé
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“He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self. The analogous passion of Christ signifies God's suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine set up a relationship of complimentarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way to realizing his wholeness. As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God's suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”

ReligionSufferingHumanityChristianityDivinitySubconsciousSymbolismEsotericIndividuation
Author:C.G. Jung
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“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”

ShadowMadnessCarl JungRed Book
Book:The Red Book: A Reader's Edition
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“It is the truth, a force of nature that expresses itself through me—I am only a channel—I can imagine in many instances where I would become sinister to you. For instance, if life had led you to take up an artificial attitude, then you wouldn't be able to stand me, because I am a natural being. By my very presence I crystallize; I am a ferment. The unconscious of people who live in an artificial manner senses me as a danger. Everything about me irritates them, my way of speaking, my way of laughing. They sense nature.”

SelfNaturePersonalityEssenceBeing
Author:C.G. Jung
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“As a doctor I constantly have to ask myself what kind of message the patient is bringing me. What does he mean to me? If he means nothing, I have no point of attack. The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. 'Only the wounded physician heals.' But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect.”

HealingPsychologyHumilityEmpathyWoundedHealer
Book:Memories, dreams, reflections
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“The relationship between doctor and patient, especially when a transference on the part of the patient occurs, or a more or less unconscious identification of doctor and patient, can lead to parapsychological phenomena. I have frequently run into this. One such case which was particularly impressive was that of a patient whom I had pulled out of a psychogenic depression. He went back home and married; but I did not care for his wife. The first time I saw her, I had an uneasy feeling. Her husband was grateful to me, and I observed that I was a thorn in her side because of my influence over him. It frequently happens that women who do not really love their husbands are jealous and destroy their friendships. They want the husband to belong entirely to them because they themselves do not belong to him. The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.”

Jealousy
Author:C.G. Jung
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“Sensation establishes what is actually given, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and finally intuition points to the possibilities of the whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts. In this way, we can orientate ourselves with respect to the immediate world as completely as when we locate a place geographically by latitude and longitude.”

Sensation
Book:Modern Man in Search of a Soul
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“Náboženské symboly jsou fenomény života, prostě skutečnostmi, nikoli názory. Když církev po takovou a takovou dobu lpí na tom, že Slunce obíhá kolem Země, ale v 19. století toto hledisko opouští, pak se může v tomto ohledu odvolat na psychologickou pravdu, že pro miliony lidí vskutku Slunce obíhalo kolem Země a teprve v 19. století dosáhlo větší množství lidí takové jistoty intelektuální funkce, že mohli uznat důkazy o planetární povaze Země. Bohužel neexistuje žádná pravda bez lidí, kteří ji chápou.”

SunJung
Book:Výbor z díla V. - Snové symboly individuačního procesu
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“The seed of a mountain pine contains the whole future tree in a latent form; but each seed falls at a certain time onto a particular place, in which there are a number of special factors, such as the quality of the soil and the stones, the slope of the land, and its exposure to sun and wind. The latent totality of the pine in the seed reacts to these circumstances by avoiding the stones and inclining toward the sun, with the result that the tree’s growth is shaped. Thus an individual pine slowly comes into existence, constituting the fulfillment of its totality, its emergence into the realm of reality. Without the living tree, the image of the pine is only a possibility or an abstract idea. Again, the realization of this uniqueness in the individual man is the goal of the process of individuation.”

PsychologySpiritual Growth
Book:Man and His Symbols
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“About this time I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a "specter of the Brocken," my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.”

PsychologyShadowUbermensch
Book:Memories, dreams, reflections
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“Člověk se přirozeně nemůže od dětství osvobodit, aniž by se jím podrobně nezabýval, jak již dlouho víme z Freudových výzkumů. Čistě intelektuálním věděním přitom nelze ničeho dosáhnout. Účinné je pouze rozpomenutí se, které je zároveň znovuprožitím. Mnohé zůstane nevyřešené díky rychlému plynutí let a přemáhajícímu proudu věmů z právě odhalovaného světa. Od toho se člověk neosvobodil, nýbrž jenom vzdálil. Vrátí-li se tedy z pozdějších let zpátky k dětským vzpomínkám, nalezne tam ještě živé části vlastní osobnosti, které se ho pevně chytí, připojí se k němu a prosytí jej znovu pocitem dřívějších let. Tyto části jsou ale dosud ve stavu dětství, a proto silné a bezprostřední. Pouze jsou-li opět spojeny s dospělým vědomím, mohou pozbýt svůj infantilní apekt a mohou být upraveny. Vždy musí být nejprve prozkoumáno toto "osobní nevědomí", to znamená musí dojít k jeho uvědomění, jinak nelze otevřít vstup ke kolektivnímu nevědomí.”

ChildhoodJung
Book:Výbor z díla V. - Snové symboly individuačního procesu
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“Although man can forget in the long- (perhaps too long) guarded feelings of youth, in the dreamy state of stubbornly held remembrances, that the wheel rolls onward, nevertheless mercilessly does the gray hair, the relaxation of the skin and the wrinkles in the face tell us, that whether or not we expose the body to the destroying powers of the whole struggle of life, the poison of the stealthily creeping serpent of time consumes our bodies, which, alas! we so dearly love.”

AlasSerpent Of TimeStealthily Creeping
Book:Psychology of the Unconscious
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“I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more “scientific.” But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima.”

FeminineMasculinityFemininityMasculineAnima
Book:The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
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