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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 world is an evolving community in which self-identity is found less in oneself than in one's ongoing relations to others. The ideal of human interpersonal relations is not individual self-fulfillment in distinction from another but mutual transformation through self-gift to the other and reception of the other as gift.
Jung also contributed to our thinking about the terms "psyche" and "soul," which are often used interchangeably. Your psyche is the totality of your psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious. He defined soul as something like your unique personality, the parts of your psyche that are unique to you and connected to your spiritual Source - the absolute. And he saw all of life, including your psyche, soul, the people and world around you, and everything created and creative, as immersed in that Source, the unified spiritual field. He called it the pleroma, a Greek word meaning "the whole completeness of divine nature.” He also called it the collective unconscious. Still another name for it is love.
Primitive society is regulated by an unconscious egoism and altruism; both attitudes are wisely given their due. This unconscious order breaks up at once if any disturbances ensues which has been remedied by a conscious act.
Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.
It may well be said that the contemporary cultural consciousness has not yet absorbed into its general philosophy the idea of the unconscious and all that it means, despite the fact that modern man has been confronted with this idea for more than half a century. The assimilation of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two poles still remains a task for the future.
The collective unconscious is common to all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called the “sympathy of all things”.
When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying, desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape, Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.
All cereal nature means wheat, all treasure nature means gold, all generation means man…
Non foras ire, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Go not outside; truth dwells in the inner man.
Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries.
For the habitual churchgoers struck me as being far less of a community than the "worldly" folk. The latter may have been less virtuous, but on the other hand they were much nicer people, with natural emotions, more sociable and cheerful, warmer-hearted and more sincere.
Along with this recollection there came to me, for the first time, the conviction that there are archaic psychic components which have entered the individual psyche without any direct line of tradition.
Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they alway remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together amiably wriggling their tails totally unaware the the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.
Jung was even convinced that what he calls the unconscious somehow links up with the structure of inorganic matter — a link to which the problem of so-called "psychosomatic" illness seems to point. The concept of a unitarian idea of reality (which has been followed up by Pauli and Erich Neumann) was called by Jung the unus mundus (the one world, within which matter and psyche are not yet discriminated or separately actualized). He paved the way toward such a unitarian point of view by pointing out that an archetype shows a "psychoid" (i.e., not purely psychic but almost material) aspect when it appears within a synchronistic event — for such an event is in effect a meaningful arrangement of inner psychic and outer facts.
The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. 'Lower down,' that is to say, as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e. in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world’.
… all official religious doctrines actually belong to the collective consciousness (what Freud called the super-ego); but once, long ago, they sprang from the unconscious. This is a point that many historians of religion and theologians challenge. They choose to assume that there was once some sort of "revelation."
… mass repression leads to the same result as individual repression; that is, to neurotic dissociation and psychological illness. All such attempts to repress the reactions of the unconscious must fail in the long run, for they are basically opposed to our instincts.
In all cultures, the labyrinth has the meaning of an entangling and confusing representation of the world of matriarchal consciousness; it can be traversed only by those who are ready for a special initiation into the mysterious world of the collective unconscious.
A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.
Disagreement functions as a vehicle of mental life in society, but it is not a goal; agreement is equally important. Because psychology basically depends upon balanced opposites, no judgment can be considered to be final in which its reversibility has not been taken into account.
The further we delve into the origins of a "collective image" (or, to express it in ecclesiastical language, of a dogma), the more we uncover a seemingly unending web of archetypal patterns that, before modern times, were never the object of conscious reflection. Thus, paradoxically enough, we know more about mythological symbolism than did any generation before our own. The fact is that in former times men did not reflect upon their symbols; they lived them and were unconsciously animated by their meaning.
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