Quotes from C.G. Jung

Paul Klee, who may be regarded as the poet among modern painters, says: "It is the artist's mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.

Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: "Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation.

As a matter of fact, primitive man is no more logical or illogical than we are. His presuppositions are not the same as ours, that is what distinguishes him from us.

In cases of extreme mass hysteria (which was in the past called "possession"), the conscious mind and ordinary sense perception seem eclipsed. The frenzy of a Balinese sword dance causes the dancers to fall into trances and, sometimes, to turn their weapons against themselves.

In the act of sacrifice the consciousness gives up its power and possessions in the interests of the unconscious.

That gives peace, when people feel that they are living [as] actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.

Mircea Eliade stated that for yoga and S?khya philosophy to which it is related, in contrast to other Indian schools of thought, "the world is real (not illusory—as it is, for example, for Ved?nta). Nevertheless, if the world exists and endures, it is because of the 'ignorance' of spirit."16 What distinguishes yoga is its essentially practical cast.

According to the central concepts of Taoism, tao is divided into a fundamental pair of opposites, yang and yin. Yang signifies warmth, light, maleness; yin is cold, darkness, femaleness. Yang is also heaven, yin earth. From the yang force arises shen, the celestial portion of the human soul, and from the yin force comes kwei, the earthly part. As a microcosm, man is a reconciler of the opposites. Heaven, man, and earth form the three chief elements of the world, the san-tsai.

La verdad suprema es una y la misma con lo contrario al sentido.

It is the same problem as in Job. As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter. Any uncertainty about the God-image causes a profound uneasiness in the self, for which reason the question is generally ignored because of its painfulness. But that does not mean that it remains unasked in the unconscious.

It's erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it's always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent.

Though "instincts" or "drives" can be formulated in physiological and biological terms they cannot be pinned down in that way, for they are also psychic entities which manifest themselves in a world of fantasy peculiarly their own. They

Life has addressed a question to me... or conversely, I myself am a question.

Man is never helped in his suffering by what he thinks for himself, but only by revelations of a wisdom greater than his own. It is this which lifts him out of his distress.

This paraphrase not only sounds rationalistic but is meant to be so, for despite every effort the modern mind no longer understands our two-thousand-year-old theological language unless it "accords with reason." As a result, the danger that lack of understanding will be replaced by lip-service, affectation, and forced belief or else by resignation and indifference has long since come to pass.

Whether the untamed, extravagant, disproportionate energy shows itself in sensuality—in abjectissimo loco—or in an overestimation and deification of the most highly developed function, it is at bottom the same: barbarism. But naturally one has no insight into this so long as one is still hypnotized by the object of the deed and ignores how it is done.

But just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious, can arise from it.

the meaning of life is not exhaustively explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

Here is the dwelling of night; whereas the lobby stood for the daylight world and its superficiality.

The goal of contemplating the processes depicted in the mandala is that the yogi shall become inwardly aware of the deity. Through contemplation, he recognizes himself as God again, and thus returns from the illusion of individual existence into the universal totality of the divine state.

They sometimes behave like the Delphic oracle that told King Croesus that if he crossed the Halys River he would destroy a large kingdom. It was only after he had been completely defeated in battle after the crossing that he discovered that the kingdom meant by the oracle was his own.

Exactly. Magic happens to be everything which eludes comprehension.

Even the most absurd things are nothing other than symbols for thoughts which are not only understandable in human terms but dwell in every human breast. In intensity we do not discover anything new and unknown; we are looking at the foundations of our own being, the matrix of those vital problems on which we are all engaged.

For thousands of years, rites of initiation have been teaching spiritual rebirth; yet, strangely enough, man forgets again and again the meaning of divine procreation.