Photo Credit: Borrowed from dreamthisday.com

Carl Jung

"One does not become enlightened 
by imagining 
figures of 
light, 
but by 
making the 
darkness
conscious."

Photo Credit: Borrowed from runningcauseican'tfly.blogspot

Quotes from Jung’s Matter of Heart

“The psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the sine qua non of the world as an object. It is in the highest degree odd that Western man, with but very few and ever fewer exceptions, apparently pays so little regard to this fact.

Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject of all knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed to the point of seeming nonexistence.”

C. G. Jung, 1946

Collected Works 8, para. 357

“Not nature but the “genius of mankind” has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.”

C. G. Jung, 1952

C. W. 11, para. 734

“Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves.

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.

That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.”

C. G. Jung, 1959

C. W. 9, II, para. 126

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. All my works, all my creative activities, have come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.”

C. G. Jung, 1961

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (paperback, p. 183).

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.

Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. All my works, all my creative activities, have come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.”

C. G. Jung, 1961

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (paperback, p. 183)

“Biographies should show people in their undershirts. Goethe had his weaknesses, and Calvin was often cruel. Considerations of this kind reveal the true greatness of a man. This way of looking at things is better than false hero worship!”

C. G. Jung, 1946

C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 165

“The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual.

This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals.

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. We make our own epoch.”

C. G. Jung, 1934

C. W. 10, para. 315

“In our time, when such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals, and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without. Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy.”

Emma Jung, 1955

Anima and Amimus, p. 87

“After my wife’s death in 1955, I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden, was myself! I could no longer hide myself behind the “maternal” and the “spiritual” towers. So, in that same year, I added an upper story to this section, which represents myself, or my egopersonality. I had started the first tower in 1923, two months after the death of my mother. These two dates are meaningful because the tower, as we shall see, is connected with the dead.

At Bollingen, I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. Here I am, as it were, the “age-old son of the mother.” That is how alchemy puts it, very wisely, for the “old man,” “the ancient,” whom I had already experienced as a child, is personality No. 2, who has always been and always will be. He exists outside time and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen.”

C. G. Jung, 1961

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (paperback, p. 225).

“There are no other similar beings like man that are articulate and could give account of their functioning.”

C. G. Jung

“Man’s relation to God probably has to unergo a certain important change: instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child’s prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship and commerce with God. His goodness means grace and light and His dark side, the terrible temptation of power.

Man has already received so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet.

Let us hope that God’s good spirit will guide him in his decisions because it will depend upon man’s decision whether God’s creation will continue.

Nothing shows more drastically than this possibility how much of divine power has come within the reach of man.”

C. G. Jung, 1956

Letters, Vol. II, p. 316