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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
The more the critical reason dominates the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.
Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves.
Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.
The intellect, of course, would like to aggregate to itself some scientific, physical knowledge of the affair, or, preferably, to write the whole thing off as a violation of the rules. But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!
People who rely totally on their rational thinking and dismiss or repress every manifestation of their psychic life often have an almost inexplicable inclination to superstition. They listen to oracles and prophecies and can be easily hoodwinked or influenced by magicians and conjurers. And because dreams compensate one's outer life, the emphasis such people put on their intellect is offset by dreams in which they meet the irrational and cannot escape it.
Modern man does not understand how much his "rationalism" (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas has put him at the mercy of the psychic "underworld." He has freed himself from "superstition" (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in world-wide disorientation and dissociation.
The safe basis of real intellectual knowledge and moral understanding gets lost if one is content with the vague satisfaction of having understood by "hunch." One can explain and know only if one has reduced intuitions to an exact knowledge of facts and their logical connections.
We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense... In fact, the terrors that stem from our elaborate civilization may be far more threatening than those that primitive people attribute to demons.
From the very beginning, therefore, homo sapiens understood instinctively that myth and logos had separate jobs to do. He used logos to develop new weaponry, and myth, with its accompanying rituals, to reconcile himself to the tragic facts of life that threatened to overwhelm him, and prevent him from acting effectively.
Where myth looks back to the imaginary world of the sacred archetype or to a lost paradise, logos forges ahead, constantly trying to discover something new, to refine old insights, create startling inventions, and achieve a greater control over the environment.
…the heroes of Western modernity would be technological or scientific geniuses of logos, not the spiritual geniuses inspired by mythos. This meant that intuitive, mythical modes of thought would be neglected in favour of the more pragmatic, logical spirit of scientific rationality.
Unlike myth, logos must correspond to facts; it is essentially practical; it is the mode of thought we use when we want to get something done; it constantly looks ahead to achieve a greater control over our environment or to discover something fresh.
…logos had never been able to provide human beings with the sense of significance that they seemed to require. It had been myth that had given structure and meaning to life, but as modernisation progressed and logos achieved such spectacular results, mythology was increasingly discredited.
Fearful and destructive unreason has always been part of the human experience, and it still is.
We learned that a rational education did not redeem humanity from barbarism, and that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university.
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