Carl Jung on “Fate.”

Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 126

But a conscious attitude that renounces its ego-bound intentions—not in imagination only, but in truth—and submits to the supra-personal decrees of fate, can claim to be serving a king. This more exalted attitude raises the status of the anima from that of a temptress to a psychopomp. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 380.

Nature is awful, and I often ask myself, should one not interfere? But one cannot really, it is impossible, because fate must be fulfilled. It is apparently more important to nature that one should have consciousness, understanding, than to avoid suffering. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1416.

You see, in the actual functioning of the psyche, it does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896.

The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason. So much unreason / was in man that he needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the Logos: in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the One, the Powerful One, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280.

The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.

The announcement of an important truth, even with the best of intentions, can lead to an extraordinary mess. That was the fate of Prometheus. It is therefore important to husband dangerous material very carefully so that first graders do not get hold of dynamite. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 59.

For the son, the animus is hidden in the dominating power of the mother and sometimes she leaves him with a sentimental attachment that lasts throughout life and seriously impairs the fate of the adult. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Page 29.

Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung; "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious"; CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Page 62.

Emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin. The pitifulness of this vacuous nonentity goes to his heart (I speak here as a man), and one is tempted to say that this constitutes the whole "mystery" of woman. Such a female is fate itself. A man may say what he likes about it; be for it or against it, or both at once; in the end he falls, absurdly happy, into this pit, or, if he does not, he has missed and bungled his only chance of making a man of himself. In the first case one cannot disprove his foolish good luck to him, and in the second one cannot make his misfortune seem plausible. "The Mothers, the Mothers, how eerily it sounds!" ~Carl Jung; "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939); CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.183

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . . ~Carl Jung; On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW 15; 127.

Before the bar of nature and fate, unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse; on the contrary there are very severe penalties for it. ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 608.

When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.

The doctor should not strive to heal at all costs. One has to be exceedingly careful not to impose one's own will and conviction on the patient. ... Sometimes it is really a question whether you are allowed to rescue a man from the fate he must undergo for the sake of his further development. ~Carl Jung; Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice; 1935.

. . . the self is our life's goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality . . . ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 398 and Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, par. 404.

One clings to possessions that have once meant wealth; and the more ineffective, incomprehensible, and lifeless they become the more obstinately people cling to them. (Naturally it is only sterile ideas that they cling to; living ideas have content and riches enough, so there is no need to cling to them.) Thus in the course of time the meaningful turns into the meaningless. This is unfortunately the fate of metaphysical ideas.~Carl Jung; Aion;Page 34; Paragraph 65.

From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted.
That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was "there," where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there. These talks with the "Other" were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 48.

"All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 222.

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Christ: A Symbol of the Self, Pages 70-71, Para 126.

The earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 28, note 194.

We cannot receive the Holy Spirit unless we have accepted our own individual life as Christ accepted his. Thus we become the "sons of god" fated to experience the conflict of the divine opposites, represented by the crucifixion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, par. 1551.

Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny. ~Carl Jung, Letter to Valentine Brooke, 16Nov1959.

It is a shame everything has to go to the devil, but human beings are such fools that they obviously deserve no better fate. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.

There are cases where it is better not to interfere; we must fulfil our duty as doctors, but the fact remains that some people are not meant to be cured, they are not fitted for life and if you step in and interfere fate always takes its revenge on you. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 27.

This is a dream of fate which gives the dreamer information as to the course his life will take and in this case the actual end was suicide. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 182.

This was the case with our dreamer; fate is not devilish but elfish and chose this moment to bring a new influence into his life. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 177.

Speaking from the standpoint of many thousands of dreams I cannot say that they show guidance. It is as if the dream were quite uninterested in the fate of the ego, it is pure Nature, it expresses the given thing, it mirrors the state of our consciousness with complete detachment ; it never says "to do it in such and such a way would be well", but states that it is so. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 198.
There are certain dreams which seem really to concern themselves with the fate of the ego, but these belong to the category of big dreams. Dreams as a whole are without purpose, like nature herself, it is wiser to regard them as such. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 198.

It sometimes happens that such people identify with a content in a dream that belongs to a fate which it is far beyond their capacity to live, and this may cause a bad split, or even a psychosis. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 204.

But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 6.

Although since 1918 I knew that a terrible fire would spread over Europe beginning in the North East, I have no vision beyond 1940 concerning the fate of Europe. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 285-286.

In the centre there is a lotus with the Buddha sitting in it, and the decisive experience is the final knowledge that the meditator himself is the Buddha, whereby the fateful knots woven in the opening story are apparently resolved. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 572.

Then the spirit comes in the form of the devil, as the cruel fate of Germany shows. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 340-341.

The quiet meditativeness that radiates from the fate you have described is rather like a verse from a hymn-book which one unexpectedly comes across again after 50 years. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 296-297.

It is lovely to hear the word "friend" from you. Fate seems to have apportioned to us the role of two piers which support the bridge between East and West. ~Carl Jung to Richard Wilhelm, Letters Vol. 1, Page 66.

Marriage is indeed a brutal reality, yet the experimentum crucis of life. I hope you learn to endure and not to struggle against the suppressing necessities of fate. Only thus you remain in the centre. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 172-173.

Whether a person's fate comes to him from without or from within, the experiences and events of the way remain the same. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 93.

The character ming really signifies a royal command then, destiny, fate, the fate allotted to a man, so too, the duration of life, the measure of vitality at one's disposal, and thus it comes about that ming (life) is closely related to Eros. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 11.

Somewhat deaf somewhat blind, it [Stupidity] brings about necessary fate and keeps from us the virtuousness coupled with rationality. ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 277.

A certain line of thought, for instance, is developed through a series of dreams; and I discover that I am the duplicate of my unconscious anticipation of myself; at the same moment I am filled with a sense of purpose as if a secret arrangement of my fate existed. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 214.

It is as if the dream were quite uninterested in the fate of the ego, it is pure Nature, it expresses the given thing, it mirrors the state of our consciousness with complete detachment; it never says "to do it in such and such a way would be well”, but states that it is so. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198.

The form in which Christ presented the content of his unconscious to the world became accepted and was declared valid for all. Thereafter all individual fantasies became otiose and worthless, and were persecuted as heretical, as the fate of the Gnostic movement and of all later heresies testifies. The prophet Jeremiah is speaking just in this vein when he warns ~Carl Jung, CW 6, §BI.

We had to swallow the poison of science. Otherwise we would have met the same fate as you have: we'd be completely lamed, if we encountered it unsuspecting and unprepared. This poison is so insurmountably strong that everyone, even the strongest, and even the eternal Gods, perish because of it. ~Carl Jung to Izdubar, Liber Novus, Page 279.

If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the Logos: in the end it poisons us all. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 280.

For relaxation, Jung played solitaire in the evenings, occasionally "helping fate a little by switching the cards around" in "unabashed cheating." ~Aniela Jaffe, Last Years, Pages 114-115.

We imitate Christ and hope he will deliver us from our own fate. Like little Iambs we follow the shepherd, naturally to good pastures. No talk at all of uniting our Above and Below! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 76-77.

The announcement of an important truth, even with the best of intentions, can lead to an extraordinary mess. That was the fate of Prometheus. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 60.

A book of mine is always a matter of fate. A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and drawn by his daimon. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 357.