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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 images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Your regular explorations into your unconscious will prompt reciprocal responses from it via dreams, synchronicities, and insights into your personality and relationships. Your ego will trust that you are known and loved by something beyond yourself. This will reduce your anxiety and the chaotic activity of your monkey mind, and it will help you savor the blessings of each holy moment.
Yes, there is love in the unconscious. But first we must make manifest and heal what has been hidden and ignored. How do we take part in this transformation? For the unconscious to become morally responsible, it must first be seen.
You understand so little of what is around you because you do not use what is within you.
… where the existence of an unconscious psyche is admitted, the contents of projection can be received into the inborn instinctive forms which pre-date consciousness. They do not in any sense represent things that they are in themselves, rather the forms in which things can be perceived and conceived.
A man who had not passed through the inferno of his passions had never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
… for I had accustomed myself to living always on two planes simultaneously, one conscious, which attempted to understand and could not, and one unconscious, which wanted to express something and could not formulate it any better than by a dream.
There I live in my second personality and see life in the round, as something forever coming into being and passing on.
Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast.
… most people find it quite beyond them to live on close terms with the unconscious. Again and again I have had to learn how hard this is for people.
Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious.
It is equally a grave mistake to think that it is enough to gain some understanding of the images and that knowledge can here make a halt. Insight into them must be converted into an ethical obligation. Not to do so is to fall prey to the power principle, and this produces dangerous effects which are destructive not only to others but even to the knower. The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
He [a fantasized Philemon] confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.
Sometimes it was as if I were hearing it with my ears, sometimes feeling it with my mouth, as if my tongue were formulating words; now and then I heard myself whispering aloud. Below the threshold of consciousness everything was seething with life.
But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies. When I endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving conviction that I was obeying a higher will, and that feeling continued to uphold me until I had mastered the task.
I knew no reasons for the assumption that the tricks of consciousness can be extended to the natural processes of the unconscious. On the contrary, daily experience taught me what intense resistance the unconscious opposes to the tendencies of the conscious mind.
…there is, after, all no harsher bitterness than that of a person who is his own worst enemy.
The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them.
Now all at once I understood many things that had been inexplicable to me before - in particular that cold shadow of embarrassment and estrangement which passed over people's faces whenever I alluded to anything reminiscent of the inner realm.
I found the various little glasses so inspiring that I was wafted into an entirely new and unexpected state of consciousness. There was no longer an inside or outside, no longer an "I" and the "others," No. 1 and No. 2 were no more; caution and timidity were gone, and the earth and the sky, the universe and everything in it that creeps and flies, revolves, rises, or falls, had all become one. I was shamefully, gloriously, triumphantly drunk.
Not until several years later did I come to understand that my poor father did not dare to think, because he was consumed by inward doubts. He was taking refuge from himself and therefore insisted on blind faith.
But my encounters with the "other" reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison.
Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.
If the reader should feel stimulated to work further on the investigation and assimilation of the unconscious - which always begins by working on oneself - the purpose of this introductory book would be fulfilled.
... the unconscious is not only able to associate and combine, but even to judge. The judgment of the unconscious is an intuitive one, but it is under favorable circumstances completely sure.
The powerful forces of the unconscious most certainly appear not only in clinical material but also in the mythological, religious, artistic, and all the other cultural activities by which man expresses himself. Obviously, if all men have common inherited patterns of emotional and mental behavior (which Jung called the archetypes), it is only to be expected that we shall find their products (symbolic fantasies, thoughts, and actions) in practically every field of human activity.
Attending the theatre (which is an imitation of real life) is a popular way of evading an active part in life's drama. The spectator can identify with the play, yet continue to pander to his fantasies.
The unconscious is pure nature, and, like nature, pours out its gifts in profusion. But left to itself and without the human response from consciousness, it can (again like nature) destroy its own gifts and sooner or later sweep them into annihilation.
… [unconscious] always manifests itself when conscious or rational knowledge has reached its limits and mystery sets in, for man tends to fill the inexplicable and mysterious with the contents of his unconscious. He projects them, as it were, into a dark, empty vessel.
Fascination arises when the unconscious has been moved.
Portraits hanging in a museum are usually the dead remains of the past, and often the images of the unconscious are regarded in the same way until we discover that they are alive and meaningful.
No deliberate attempts to influence the unconscious have yet produced any significant results, and it seems that the mass unconscious preserves its autonomy just as much as the individual unconscious.
All activities and obligations that belong exclusively to the outer world do definite harm to the secret activities of the unconscious. Through these unconscious ties those who belong together come together.
Like all the higher forms of life, man is in tune with the living beings around him to a remarkable degree. He perceives their sufferings and problems, their positive and negative attributes and values, instinctively quite independently of his conscious thoughts about other people.
If you listen to your unconscious and obey it, you must expect constant interference with your conscious plans, Your will is crossed by other intentions that you must submit to, or at any rate must seriously consider. This is partly why the obligation attached to the process of individuation is often felt to be a burden rather than an immediate blessing.
It is very difficult indeed to keep these inner opposites united within oneself without toppling over into one or the other extreme.
In order to understand the symbolic indications of the unconscious, one must be careful not to get outside oneself or "beside oneself," but to stay emotionally within oneself. Indeed, it is vitally important that the ego should continue to function in normal ways. Only if I remain an ordinary human being, conscious of my incompleteness, can I become receptive to the significant contents and processes of the unconscious.
In fact, whenever a human being genuinely turns to the inner world and tries to know himself — not by ruminating about his subjective thoughts and feelings, but by following the expressions of his own objective nature such as dreams and genuine fantasies — then sooner or later the Self emerges. The ego will then find an inner power that contains all the possibilities of renewal.
The only adventure that is still worthwhile for modern man lies in the inner realm of the unconscious psyche.
In ways that are still completely beyond our comprehension, our unconscious is similarly attuned to our surroundings, to our group, to society in general, and, beyond these, to the space-time continuum and the whole of nature.
If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift, so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich, unending inner adventure, full of creative possibilities. In a woman's psychology, this same youthful personification of the Self can appear as a supernaturally gifted girl.
Most people are too indolent to think deeply about even those moral aspects of their behavior of which they are conscious; they are certainly too lazy to consider how the unconscious affects them.
It takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and to tackle the problems it raises.
In the unconscious, one is unfortunately in the same situation as in a moonlit landscape: all the contents are blurred and merge into one another, and one never knows exactly what or where anything is, or where one thing begins and ends.
If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a "projection." … Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships.
It is not surprising that there should appear, in the unconscious of someone who is seeking help from a doctor specializing in psychic disorders, images that duplicate the major patterns of initiation as we know them from history.
…the unconscious mind of modern man preserves the symbol-making capacity that once found expression in the beliefs and rituals of the primitive. And that capacity still plays a role of vital psychic importance. In more ways than we realize, we are dependent on the messages that are carried by such symbols, and both our attitudes and behavior are profoundly influenced by them.
Our actual knowledge of the unconscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon and that, like Nature herself, it is at least neutral. It contains all aspects of human nature - light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly.
Whatever the unconscious may be, it is a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful. We cannot expect someone who has never looked through a microscope to be an authority on microbes; in the same way, no one who has not made a serious study of natural symbols can be considered a competent judge in this matter. But the general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice.
Even tendencies that might in some circumstances be able to exert a beneficial influence are transformed into demons when they are repressed. This is why many well-meaning people are understandably afraid of the unconscious, and incidentally of psychology.
What we call civilized consciousness has steadily separated itself from the basic instincts. But these instincts have not disappeared. They have merely lost their contact with our consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect fashion. This may be by means of physical symptoms in the case of a neurosis, or by means of incidents of various kinds, like unaccountable moods, unexpected forgetfulness, or mistakes in speech.
For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or "dissociated," psychological disturbance follows. In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.
Our conscious impressions, in fact, quickly assume an element of unconscious meaning that is psychically significant for us, though we are not consciously aware of the existence of this subliminal meaning or of the way in which it both extends and confuses the conventional meaning.
…it is a fact that, in addition to memories from a long-distant conscious past, completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious - thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before.
… the unconscious is no mere depository of the past, but is also full of germs of future psychic situations and ideas…
… where pride is insistent enough, memory prefers to give way.
Many people mistakenly overestimate the role of will power and think that nothing can happen to their minds that they do not decide and intend. But one must learn to discriminate carefully between intentional and unintentional contents of the mind. The former are derived from the ego personality; the latter, however, arise from a source that is not identical with the ego, but is its "other side." It is this "other side" that would have made the secretary forget the invitations.
… just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious, can arise from it.
No matter how low anyone's opinion of the unconscious may be, he must concede that it is worth investigating; the unconscious is at least on a level with the louse, which, after all, enjoys the honest interest of the entomologist. If somebody with little experience and knowledge of dreams thinks that dreams are just chaotic occurrences without meaning, he is at liberty to do so. But if one assumes that they are normal events (which, as a matter of fact, they are), one is bound to consider that they are either causal - ie, that there is a rational cause for their existence - or in a certain way purposive, or both.
He hears and does not hear; he sees, yet is blind; he knows and is ignorant. Such examples are so common that the specialist soon realizes that unconscious contents of the mind behave as if they were conscious and that you can never be sure, in such cases, whether thought, speech, or action is conscious or not.
They consider any expression of the unconscious as something neurotic or psychotic, which has nothing to do with a normal mental state. But neurotic phenomena are by no means the products exclusively of disease. They are in fact no more than pathological exaggerations of normal occurrences; it is only because they are exaggerations that they are more obvious than their normal counterparts.
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