Monday 12 December 2016

Carl Jung on “West and East” – Anthology Consciousness determines Weltanschauung.


All conscious awareness of motives and intentions is a Weltanschauung in the bud; every increase in experience and knowledge is a step in the development of a Weltanschauung.
And with the picture that the thinking man fashions of the world he also changes himself.
The man whose sun still moves round the earth is essentially different from the man whose earth is a satellite of the sun.
Giordano Bruno's reflections on infinity were not in vain: they represent one of the most important beginnings of modern consciousness.
The man whose cosmos hangs in the empyrean is different from one whose mind is illuminated by Kepler's vision.
The man who is still dubious about the sum of twice two is different from the thinker for whom nothing is less doubtful than the a priori truths of
mathematics.
In short, it is not a matter of indifference what sort of Weltanschauung we possess, since not only do we create a picture of the world, but this picture retroactively changes us. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 696
A science can never be a Weltanschauung but merely the tool with which to make one.
Whether we take this tool in hand or not depends on the sort of Weltanschauung we already have. For no one is without a Weltanschauung of
some sort.
Even in an extreme case, he will at least have the Weltanschauung that education and environment have forced on him.
If this tells him, to quote Goethe, that "the highest joy of man should be the growth of personality," he will unhesitatingly seize upon science and its conclusions,
and with this as a tool will build himself a Weltanschauung—to his own edification.
But if his hereditary convictions tell him that science is not a tool but an end in itself, he will follow the watchword that has become more and more prevalent during the last one hundred and fifty years and has proved to be the decisive one in practice.
Here and there single individuals have desperately resisted it, for to their way of thinking the meaning of life culminates in the perfection of the human personality and not in the differentiation of techniques, which inevitably leads to an extremely one-sided development of a single instinct, for instance the instinct for knowledge.
If science is an end in itself, man's raison d'etre lies in being a mere intellect.
If art is an end in itself, then his sole value lies in the imaginative faculty, and the intellect is consigned to the lumber-room.
If making money is an end in itself, both science and art can quietly shut up shop.
No one can deny that our modern consciousness, in pursuing these mutually exclusive ends, has become hopelessly fragmented.
The consequence is that people are trained to develop one quality only; they become tools themselves. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para
The totality of the psyche can never be grasped by intellect alone.
Whether we will or no, philosophy keeps breaking through, because the psyche seeks an expression that will embrace its total nature. ~Carl Jung, 7, Para 201
The intellect is only one among several fundamental psychic functions and therefore does not suffice to give a complete picture of the world.
For this another function —feeling—is needed too.
Feeling often arrives at convictions that are different from those of the intellect, and we cannot always prove that the convictions of feeling are necessarily
inferior. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 600
We can understand at once the fear that the child and the primitive have of the great unknown.
We have the same childish fear of our inner side, where we likewise touch upon a great unknown world.
All we have is the afTect, the fear, without knowing that this is a world-fear—for the world of affects is invisible.
We have either purely theoretical prejudices against it, or superstitious ideas.
One cannot even talk about the unconscious before many educated people without being accused of mysticism.
The fear is legitimate in so far as our rational Weltanschauung with its scientific and moral certitudes—so hotly believed in because so deeply questionable—is shattered by the facts of the other side. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 324
Freud was a great destroyer, but the turn of the century offered so many opportunities for debunking that even Nietzsche was not enough.
Freud completed the task, very thoroughly indeed.
He aroused a wholesome mistrust in people and thereby sharpened their sense of real values.
All that gush about man's innate goodness, which had addled so many brains after the dogma of original sin was no longer understood, was blown to the winds by Freud, and the little that remains will, let us hope, be driven out for good and all by the barbarism of the twentieth century. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 69
In the last one hundred and fifty years we have witnessed a plethora of Weltanschauungen—a proof that the whole idea of a Weltanschauung has been discredited, for the more difficult an illness is to treat, the more the remedies multiply, and the more remedies there are, the more disreputable each one becomes. 5-732
such a legacy of dubious propositions that doubt is not only possible but altogether justified, indeed meritorious.
The gold will not prove its worth save in the fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 69
The fatal error of every Weltanschauung so far has been that it claims to be an objectively valid truth, and ultimately a kind of scientific evidence of this truth.
This would lead to the insufferable conclusion that, for instance, the same God must help the Germans, the French, the EngHsh, the Turks, and the heathen—in short, everybody against everybody else. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 734
If the picture we create of the world did not have a retroactive effect on us, we could be content with any sort of beautiful or diverting sham.
But self-deception recoils on us, making us unreal, foolish, and ineffectual.
Because we are tilting at a false picture of the world, we are overcome by the superior power of reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 699
If we have a disagreeable view of a situation or thing, our pleasure in it is spoiled, and then it does in fact usually disagree with us.
And, conversely, how many things become bearable and even acceptable if we can give up certain prejudices and change our point of view. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 218
To have a Weltanschauung means to create a picture of the world and of oneself, to know what the world is and who I am.
Taken literally, this would be too much.
No one can know what the world is, just as little as can he know himself.
But, cum grano salts, it means the best possible knowledge—a knowledge that esteems wisdom and abhor sunfounded assumptions, arbitrary assertions, and didactic opinions.
Such knowledge seeks the well-founded hypothesis, without forgetting that all knowledge is limited and subject to error. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 698
The world changes its face —tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis—for we can grasp the world only as a psychic image in ourselves, and it is not always easy to decide, when the image changes, whether the world or ourselves have changed, or both.
The picture of the world can change at any time, just as our conception of ourselves changes.
Every new discovery, every new thought, can put a new face on the world.
We must be prepared for this, else we suddenly find ourselves in an antiquated world, itself a relic of lower levels of consciousness.
We shall all be as good as dead one day, but in the interests of life we should postpone this moment as long as possible, and this we can only do by never allowing our picture of the world to become rigid. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 700
If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world.
Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round.
Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete.
Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves.
For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 737
The world exists not merely in itself but also as it appears to me.
Indeed, at bottom, we have absolutely no criterion that could help us to form a judgment of a world which was unassimilable by the subject.
If we were to ignore the subjective factor, it would be a complete denial of the great doubt as to the possibility of absolute cognition.
And this would mean a relapse into the stale and hollow positivism that marred the turn of the century—an attitude of intellectual arrogance accompanied by crudeness of feeling, a violation of life as stupid as it is presumptuous.
By overvaluing our capacity for objective cognition we repress the importance of the subjective factor, which simply means a denial of the subject.
But what is the subject.
The subject is man himself—we are the subject.
Only a sick mind could forget that cognition must have a subject, and that there is no knowledge whatever and no world at all unless "I know" has been said, though with this statement one has aheady expressed the subjective Umitation of all knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 621
If we were conscious of the spirit of the age, we should know why we are so inclined to account for everything on physical grounds; we should know that it is because, up till now, too much was accounted for in terms of spirit.
This realization would at once make us critical of our bias.
We would say: most likely we are now making exactly the same mistake on the other side.
We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a "metaphysical" mind or spirit, and so we overestimate
material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life.
But matter is just as inscrutable as mind.
As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of equilibrium. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 657
I know nothing of a "super-reality."
Reality contains everything I can know, for everything that acts upon me is real and actual.
If it does not act upon me, then I notice nothing and can, therefore, know nothing about it.
Hence I can make statements only about real things, but not about things that are unreal, or surreal, or subreal.
Unless, of course, it should occur to someone to limit the concept of reality in such a way that the attribute "real" applied only to a particular segment of the world's reality.
This restriction to the so-called material or concrete reality of objects perceived by the senses is a product of a particular way of thinking—the thinking that underlies "sound common sense" and our ordinary use of language.
It operates on the celebrated principle "Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu," regardless of the fact that there are very many things in the mind which did not derive from the data of the senses.
According to this view, everything is "real" which comes, or seems to come, directly or indirectly from the world revealed by the senses.
This limited picture of the world is a reflection of the one-sidedness of Western man. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 742
Has mankind ever really got away from myths?
Everyone who has his eyes and wits about him can see that the world is dead, cold, and unending.
Never yet has he beheld a God, or been compelled to require the existence of such a God from the evidence of his senses.
On the contrary, it needed the strongest inner compulsion, which can only be explained by the irrational force of instinct, for man to invent those religious beliefs whose absurdity was long since pointed out by Tertullian.
In the same way one can withhold the material content of primitive myths from a child but not take from him the need for mythology, and still less
his ability to manufacture it for himself.
One could almost say that if all the world's traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation. ~Carl Jung , CW 4, Para 30
Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way.
He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.
The historical element in man represents a vital need to which a wise psychic economy must respond.
Somehow the past must come alive and participate in the present.
Total assimilation to the object will always arouse the protest of the suppressed minority of those elements that belong to the past and have existed from the very beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 570
the data of the senses.
According to this view, everything is "real" which comes, or seems to come, directly or indirectly from the world revealed by the senses.
This limited picture of the world is a reflection of the one-sidedness of Western man. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 742
Has mankind ever really got away from myths?
Everyone who has his eyes and wits about him can see that the world is dead, cold, and unending.
Never yet has he beheld a God, or been compelled to require the existence of such a God from the evidence of his senses.
On the contrary, it needed the strongest inner compulsion, which can only be explained by the irrational force of instinct, for man to invent those religious beliefs whose absurdity was long since pointed out by Tertullian.
In the same way one can withhold the material content of primitive myths from a child but not take from him the need for mythology, and still less his ability to manufacture it for himself.
One could almost say that if all the world's traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 30
Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way.
He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.
The historical element in man represents a vital need to which a wise psychic economy must respond.
Somehow the past must come alive and participate in the present.
Total assimilation to the object will always arouse the protest of the suppressed minority of those elements that belong to the past and have existed from the very beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 570
How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe, circled by a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth.
Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should
do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence.
Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.
Science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds.
That age lies as far behind as childhood, when one's own father was unquestionably the handsomest and strongest man on earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 162
Is a thing beautiful because I attribute beauty to it?
Or is it the objective beauty of the thing that compels me to acknowledge it?
As we know, great minds have wrestled with the problem whether it is the glorious sun that illuminates the world, or the sun-like human eye.
Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets.
He must de-psychize nature in order to dominate her; and in order to see his world objectively he must take back all his archaic projections. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 135
Primitive man, being closer to his instincts, like the animal, is characterized by fear of novelty and adherence to tradition.
To our way of thinking he is painfully backward, whereas we exalt progress.
But our progressiveness, though it may result in a great many delightful wish-fulfillments, piles up an equally gigantic Promethean debt, which has to be paid off from time to time in the form of hideous catastrophes.
For ages man has dreamed of flying, and all we have got for it is saturation bombing!
We smile today at the Christian hope of a life beyond the grave, and yet we often fall into chiliasms a hundred times more ridiculous than the notion of a happy Hereafter. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 276
A man is only half understood when we know how everything in him came into being.
If that were all, he could just as well have been dead years ago.
As a living being he is not understood, for life does not have only a yesterday, nor is it explained by reducing today to yesterday.
Life has also a tomorrow, and today is understood only when we can add to our knowledge of what was yesterday the beginnings of tomorrow.
This is true of all life's psychological expressions, even of pathological symptoms. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 67
Psychology teaches us that, in a certain sense, there is nothing in the psyche that is old; nothing that can really, finally die away.
Even Paul was left with a thorn in the flesh.
Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and regresses to the past falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past.
The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past and the other from the future.
In principle both are doing the same thing: they are reinforcing their narrow range of consciousness instead of shattering it in the tension of opposites and
building up a state of wider and higher consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 767
The conscious mind must have reason, firstly to discover some order in the chaos of disorderly individual events occurring in the world, and secondly to create order, at least in human affairs.
We are moved by the laudable and useful ambition to extirpate the chaos of the irrational both within and without to the best of our ability.
Apparently the process has gone pretty far.
As a mental patient once told me: "Doctor, last night I disinfected the whole heavens with bichloride of mercury, but I found no God."
Something of the sort has happened to us as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104A
And what kind of an answer did the next generation give to the individualism of Nietzsche's superman?
It answered with a collectivism, a mass organization, a herding together of the mob, tam ethice quarn physice, that made everything that went before look like a bad joke.
Suffocation of the personality and an impotent Christianity that may well have received its death-wound—such is the unadorned balance-sheet of our time. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 559
When something happens to a man and he supposes it to be personal only to himself, whereas in reality it is a quite universal experience, then his attitude is obviously wrong, that is, too personal, and it tends to exclude him from human society.
By the same token we need to have not only a personal, contemporary consciousness, but also a suprapersonal consciousness with a sense of historical continuity.
~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 99
We are now reaping the fruit of nineteenth-century education.
Throughout that period the Church preached to young people the merit of blind faith, while the universities inculcated an intellectual rationalism, with the result that today we plead in vain whether for faith or reason.
Tired of this warfare of opinions, the modern man wishes to find out for himself how things are.
And though this desire opens the door to the most dangerous possibilities, we cannot help seeing it as a courageous enterprise and giving it some measure of sympathy.
It is no reckless adventure, but an effort inspired by deep spiritual distress to bring meaning once more into life on the basis of fresh and unprejudiced
experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 529
Life is crazy and meaningful at once.
And when we do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest scale.
There is then little sense and little nonsense either.
When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened.
Interpretations are only for those who don't understand; it is only the things we don't understand that have any meaning.
Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 65
The least of things with a meaning is always worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 96
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 66
The East teaches us another, broader, more profound, and higher understanding—understanding through life.
We know this only by hearsay, as a shadowy sentiment expressing a vague religiosity, and we are fond of putting "Oriental wisdom" in quotation marks and banishing it to the dim region of faith and superstition.
But that is wholly to misunderstand the realism of the East.
Texts of this kind do not consist of the sentimental, overwrought mystical intuitions of pathological cranks and recluses, but are based on the practical insights of highly evolved Chinese minds, which we have not the slightest justification for undervaluing. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 2
Everything requires for its existence its own opposite, or else it fades into nothingness.
The ego needs the self and vice versa.
The changing relations between these two entities constitute a field of experience which Eastern introspection has exploited to a degree almost unattainable to
Western man.
The philosophy of the East, although so vastly different from ours, could be an inestimable treasure for us too; but, in order to possess it, we must first earn it.
~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 961
Western man is held in thrall by the "ten thousand things"; he sees only particulars, he is ego-bound and thing-bound, and unaware of the deep root of all being.
Eastern man, on the other hand, experiences the world of particulars, and even his own ego, like a dream; he is rooted essentially in the "Ground," which attracts him so powerfully that his relations with the world are relativized to a degree that is often incomprehensible to us. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 8
While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 969
Whatever happens in a given moment has inevitably the quality of that moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 970
The West is always seeking uplift, but the East seeks a sinking or deepening.
Outer reality, with its bodiliness and weight, appears to make a much stronger and sharper impression on the European than it does on the Indian.
The European seeks to raise himself above this world, while the Indian likes to turn back into the maternal depths of Nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 936
In general, meditation and contemplation have a bad reputation in the West.
They are regarded as a particularly reprehensible form of idleness or as pathological narcissism.
No one has time for self-knowledge or believes that it could serve any sensible purpose.
Also, one knows in advance that it is not worth the trouble to know oneself, for any fool can know what he is.
We believe exclusively in doing and do not ask about the doer, who is judged only by achievements that have collective value.
The general public seems to have taken cognizance of the existence of the unconscious psyche more than the so-called experts, but still nobody has drawn any conclusions from the fact that Western man confronts himself as a stranger and that self-knowledge is one of the most difficult and exacting of the arts. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 709
The Christian during contemplation would never say "/ am Christ," but will confess with Paul: "Not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).
Our sutra however, says: "Thou wilt know that thou art the Buddha."
At bottom the two confessions are identical, in that the Buddhist only attains this knowledge when he is andtman, 'without self.'
But there is an immeasurable difference in the formulation.
The Christian attains his end in Christ, the Buddhist knows he is the Buddha.
The Christian gets out of the transitory and ego-bound world of consciousness, but the Buddhist still reposes on the eternal ground of his inner nature, whose oneness with Deity, or with universal Being, is confirmed in other Indian testimonies. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 949
The Christian West considers man to be wholly dependent upon the grace of God, or at least upon the Church as the exclusive and divinely sanctioned earthly instrument of man's redemption.
The East, however, insists that man is the sole cause of his higher development, for it believes in "self-liberation." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 770
If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing.
The Eastern attitude (more particularly the Indian) is the other way about: everything, highest and lowest, is in the (transcendental) Subject.
Accordingly the significance of the Atman, the Self, is heightened beyond all bounds.
But with Western man the value of the self sinks to zero. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 9
There is no conflict between religion and science in the East, as no science is there based upon a passion for facts, and no religion upon faith; there is religious cognition and cognitive religion. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 768
Great as is the value of Zen Buddhism for understanding the religious transformation process, its use among Western people is very problematical.
The mental education necessary for Zen is lacking in the West.
Who among us would place such implicit trust in a superior Master and his incomprehensible ways?
This respect for the greater human personality is found only in the East.
Could any of us boast that he believes in the possibility of a boundlessly paradoxical transformation experience, to the extent, moreover, of sacrificing many years of his life to the wearisome pursuit of such a goal?
And finally, who would dare to take upon himself the authority for such an unorthodox transformation experience—except a man who was little to be trusted,
one who, maybe for pathological reasons, has too much to say for himself?
Just such a person would have no cause to complain of any lack of following among us.
But let a "Master" set us a hard task, which requires more than mere parrot-talk, and the European begins to have doubts, for the steep path of self-development is to him as mournful and gloomy as the path to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 902
Western consciousness is by no means the only kind of consciousness there is; it is historically conditioned and geographically limited, and representative of only one part of mankind.
The widening of our consciousness ought not to proceed at the expense of other kinds of consciousness; it should come about through the development of those
elements of our psyche which are analogous to those of the alien psyche, just as the East cannot do without our technology, science, and industry.
The European invasion of the East was an act of violence on a grand scale, and it has left us with the duty —noblesse oblige—of understanding
the mind of the East.
This is perhaps more necessary than we realize at present. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 84
Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects into it everything he fears and despises in himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 8
I have no wish to depreciate the tremendous differentiation of the Western intellect; compared with it the Eastern intellect must be described as childish. (Naturally this has nothing to do with intelligence.)
If we should succeed in elevating another, and possibly even a third psychic function to the dignified position accorded to the intellect, then the West might expect to surpass the East by a very great margin. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 8
The usual mistake of Western man when faced with this problem of grasping the ideas of the East is like that of the student in Faust.
Misled by the devil, he contemptuously turns his back on science and, carried away by Eastern occultism, takes over yoga practices word for word and becomes
a pitiable imitator. (Theosophy is our best example of this.)
Thus he abandons the one sure foundation of the Western mind and loses himself in a mist of words and ideas that could never have originated in European brains and can never be profitably grafted upon them. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 3
There could be no greater mistake than for a Westerner to take up the direct practice of Chinese yoga, for that would merely strengthen his will and consciousness against the unconscious and bring about the very effect to be avoided.
The neurosis would then simply be intensified.
It cannot be emphasized enough that we are not Orientals, and that we have an entirely different point of departure in these matters. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 16
Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 802
Sometimes, when we look back at history, it seems as though the present time had analogies with certain periods in the past, when great empires and civilizations had passed their zenith and were hastening irresistibly towards decay.
But these analogies are deceptive, for there are always renaissances.
What does move more clearly into the foreground is Europe's position midway between the Asiatic East and the Anglo-Saxon—or shall we say American?—West. Europe now stands between two colossi, both uncouth in their form but implacably opposed to one another in their nature.
They are profoundly different not only racially but in their ideals.
In the West there is the maximum political freedom with the minimum personal freedom; in the East it is just the opposite.
We see in the West a tremendous development of Europe's technological and scientific tendencies, and in the Far East an awakening of all those spiritual forces which, in Europe, these tendencies hold in check.
The power of the West is material, that of the East ideal. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 237
Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside.
He has both in almost devilish perfection.
What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him.
He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills.
If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 870
The Indian can forget neither the body nor the mind, while the European is always forgetting either the one or the other.
With this capacity to forget he has, for the time being, conquered the world.
Not so the Indian.
He not only knows his own nature, but he also knows how much he himself is nature.
The European, on the other hand, has a science of nature and knows astonishingly little of his own nature, the nature within him.
For the Indian, it comes as a blessing to know of a method which helps him to control the supreme power of nature within and without.
For the European, it is sheer poison to suppress his nature, which is warped enough as it is, and to make out of it a willing robot. 116:867
The extraverted tendency of the West and the introverted tendency of the East have one important purpose in common: both make desperate efforts to conquer the mere naturalness of life.
It is the assertion of mind over matter, the opus contra naturam, a symptom of the youthfulness of man, still delighting in the use of the most powerful
weapon ever devised by nature: the conscious mind.
The afternoon of humanity, in a distant future, may yet evolve a different ideal. In time, even conquest will cease to be the dream. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 787
The breathless drive for power and aggrandizement in the political, social, and intellectual sphere, gnawing at the soul of the Westerner with apparently insatiable greed, is spreading irresistibly in the East and threatens to have incalculable consequences.
Not only in India but in China, too, much has already perished where once the soul lived and throve.
The externalization of culture may do away with a great many evils whose removal seems most desirable and beneficial, yet this step forward, as experience shows, is all too dearly paid for with a loss of spiritual culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 962
The wisdom and mysticism of the East have very much to say to us, even when they speak their own inimitable language.
They serve to remind us that we in our culture possess something similar, which we have already forgotten, and to direct our attention to the fate of the inner man. 36:963
In the East, the inner man has always had such a firm hold on the outer man that the world had no chance of tearing him away from his inner roots; in the West, the outer man gained the ascendancy to such an extent that he was alienated from his innermost being, ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 785
A growing familiarity with the spirit of the East should be taken merely as a sign that we are beginning to relate to the alien elements within ourselves.
Denial of our historical foundations would be sheer folly and would be the best way to bring about another uprooting of consciousness.
Only by standing firmly on our own soil can we assimilate the spirit of the East. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 72
Instead of learning the spiritual techniques of the East by heart and imitating them in a thoroughly Christian way—imitatio Christi!—with a correspondingly forced attitude, it would be far more to the point to find out whether there exists in the unconscious an introverted tendency similar to that which has become the guiding spiritual principle of the East.
We should then be in a position to build on our own ground with our own methods.
If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that "everything good is outside," whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls.
It seems to me that we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough with out having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 773
If you want to learn the greatest lesson India can teach you, wrap yourself in the cloak of your moral superiority, go to the Black Pagoda of Konarak, sit down in the shadow of the mighty ruin that is still covered with the most amazing collection of obscenities, read Murray's cunning old Handbook^ for India, which tells you how to be properly shocked by this lamentable state of affairs, and how you should go into the temples in the evening, because in the lamplight they look if possible "more (and how beautifully!) wicked"; and then analyse carefully and with the utmost honesty all your reactions, feelings, and thoughts.
It will take you quite a while, but in the end, if you have done good work, you will have learned something about yourself, and about the white man in general, which you have probably never heard from anyone else. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1013
The spirit of the age will not let itself be trifled with.
It is a religion, or, better, a creed which has absolutely no connection with reason, but whose significance lies in the unpleasant fact that it is taken as the absolute measure of all truth and is supposed always to have common sense upon its side. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 652
The tasks of every age differ, and it is only in retrospect that we can discern with certainty what had to be and what should not have been.
In the momentary present the conflict of opinions will always rage, for "war is the father of all."
History alone decides the issue.
Truth is not eternal —it is a programme to be fulfilled.
The more "eternal" a truth, the more lifeless it is and worthless; it says nothing more to us because it is self-evident. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 87
Anything new should always be questioned and tested with caution, for it may very easily turn out to be only a new disease.
That is why true progress is impossible without mature judgment.
But a well-balanced judgment requires a firm standpoint, and this in turn can only rest on a sound knowledge of what has been.
The man who is unconscious of the historical context and lets slip his link with the past is in constant danger of succumbing to the crazes and delusions engendered by all novelties. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 251
Knowledge of the universal origins builds the bridge between the lost and abandoned world of the past and the still largely inconceivable world of the future.
How should we lay hold of the future, how should we assimilate it, unless we are in possession of the human experience which the past has bequeathed to \x^}
Dispossessed of this, we are without root and without perspective, defenceless dupes of whatever novelties the future may bring. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 250
The man of the present must work for the future and leave others to conserve the past.
He is therefore not only a builder but also a destroyer.
He and his world have both become questionable and ambiguous.
The ways that the past shows him and the answers it gives to his questions are insufficient for the needs of the present.
All the old, comfortable ways are blocked, new paths have been opened up, and new dangers have arisen of which the past knew nothing.
It is proverbial that one never learns anything from history, and in regard to present-day problems it usually teaches us nothing.
The new path has to be made through untrodden regions, without presuppositions and often, unfortunately, without piety. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239
It is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, be it cooling water for the thirsty or the sandy wastes of unfruit £ul error.
The one helps, the other warns.
Not the criticism o£ individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of his discoveries, but future generations.
There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be.
So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 201
New ideas, if they are not just a flash in the pan, generally require at least a generation to take root.
Psychological innovations probably take much longer, since in this field more than in any other practically everybody sets himself up as an authority. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 8
One's contemporaries are always dense and never understand that what appears to them unseemly ebullience comes less from personal temperament than from the still unknown wellsprings of a new age.
How people looked askance at Nietzsche's volcanic emotion, and how long he will be spoken of in times to come!
Even Paracelsus has now been gratefully disinterred after four hundred years in an attempt to resuscitate him in modern dress. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 4
To think otherwise than as our contemporaries think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual.
He is stupidly swimming against the social current. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 653
Our modern attitude looks back arrogantly upon the mists of superstition and of medieval or primitive credulity, entirely forgetting that we carry the whole living past in the lower storeys of the skyscraper of rational consciousness.
Without the lower storeys our mind is suspended in mid air. No wonder it gets nervous.
The true history of the psychic organism of every individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 56
Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth.
The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same.
Everything has become relative and therefore doubtful.
And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, with democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty.
And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177
The "present" is a thin surface stratum that is laid down in the great centres of civilization.
If it is very thin, as in Tsarist Russia, it has no meaning, as events have shown.
But once it has attained a certain strength, we can speak of civilization and progress, and then problems arise that are characteristic of an epoch. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239
What is a problem of the present day?
If we speak of a general problem nowadays, it is because it exists in the heads of many people.
These individuals are somehow chosen by fate and destined by their own natures to suffer under a collectively unsatisfactory condition and to make it
a problem.
Therefore it is always single individuals who are moved by the collective problem and who are called upon to respond and contribute to its solution by tackling
it in their own lives and not running away from it. ~Carl Jung, Basel Seminar, Para 86
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 266
The time is as great as one thinks it, and man grows to the stature of the time. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 945
Life is a flux, a flowing into the future, and not a stoppage or a backwash.
It is therefore not surprising that so many of the mythological saviours are child gods. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 278
It was of profound psychological significance when Christianity first proclaimed that the orientation to the future was the redeeming principle for mankind.
In the past nothing can be altered, and in the present little, but the future is ours and capable of raising life's intensity to the highest pitch. A little span of youth belongs to us, all the rest belongs to our children. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 668

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