CG Jung

Symbols of Transformation

Comparison between the Mithraic and the Christian sacrifice should show just where the superiority of the Christian symbol lies: it lies in the frank admission that not only has man's animal instinctuality (symbolized by the bull) to be sacrificed, but the entire natural man, who is more than can be expressed by his theriomorphic symbol. Whereas the latter represents animal instinctuality and utter subjection to the law of the species, the natural man means something more than that, something specifically human, namely the ability to deviate from the law, or what in theological language is known as the capacity for “sin”. It is only because this variability in his nature has continually kept other ways open that spiritual development has been possible for Homo sapiens at all. The disadvantage, however, is that the absolute and apparently reliable guidance furnished by the instincts is displaced by an abnormal learning capacity which we also find in the anthropoid apes. Instead of instinctive certainty there is uncertainty and consequently the need for a discerning, evaluating, selecting, discriminating consciousness. If the latter succeeds in compensating the instinctive certainty, it will increasingly substitute reliable rules and modes of behaviour for instinctive action and intuition. There then arises the opposite danger of consciousness being separated from its instinctual foundations and of setting up the conscious will in the place of natural impulse.

CG Jung

Symbols of Transformation

How do they know, forsooth, that the unconscious is “lower” and not “higher” than the conscious? The only certain thing about this terminology is that consciousness deems itself higher — higher than the gods themselves.

CG Jung

Symbols of Transformation

Symbols are not allegories and not signs: they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness. We have still to discover that such contents are real, that they are agents with which it is not only possible but absolutely necessary for us to come to terms.

CG Jung

Symbols of Transformation

Through the shifting of interest from the inner to the outer world our knowledge of nature was increased a thousandfold in comparison with earlier ages, but knowledge and experience of the inner world were correspondingly reduced. The religious interest, which ought normally to be the greatest and most decisive factor, turned away from the inner world, and the great figures of dogma dwindled to strange and incomprehensible vestiges, a prey to every sort of criticism. Even modern psychology has the greatest difficulty in vindicating the human soul's right to existence, and in making it credible that the soul is a mode of being with properties that can be investigated, and therefore a suitable object for scientific study; that it is not something attached to an outside, but has an autonomous inside, too, and a life of its own; that it is not just an ego-consciousness, but an existent which in all essentials can only be inferred indirectly.

James Hollis

A Life of Meaning

. . . I cited Jung's homey metaphor that we all walk in shoes too small for us. Why is that? Because the intimidating powers of life are so huge and we are so small. So we are, in some way, easily shadow-driven in the sense of living small lives. Our recurrent denial of the summons to a larger life is probably ou biggest shadow issue of all.

James Hollis

A Life of Meaning

We are separate from our instincts and live by rules and prescriptions and schedules.

Richard Rohr

On the Threshold of Transformation

Most men today, especially overly educated men, exist largely in their heads. We are trying to make sense of it all. As a result, we are often unwilling to actually experience life because we want the purpose and meaning up front, prior to the experience. We suffer from too much desire to control and too little faith to “let go and let God.”

Richard Rohr

Breathing Under Water

We each have our inner program for happiness, our plans by which we can be secure, esteemed, and in control, and are blissfully unaware that these cannot work for us for the long haul without our becoming more and more control freaks ourselves. Something has to break our primary addiction, which is to our own power and our false programs for happiness. Here is the incestuous cycle of the ego: “I want to have power” > “I will take control” > “I will always be right” > “See, I am indeed powerful!” This is the vicious circle of the will to power. It does not create happy people, nor happy people around them.

Richard Rohr

On the Threshold of Transformation

The so-called “fall” of Adam and Eve is not something unfortunate that happened; it is a blueprint for what will and probably must happen to each of us. What it all boils down to is this: one day a man must wake up and realize, “I'm a complete dumb ass, and I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Mature spirituality might well begin only at that point.

CG Jung

Symbols of Transformation

. . . Hiawatha has in himself the possibility, indeed the necessity, of confronting his daemon. On the way to this goal he conquers the parents and breaks his infantile ties. But the deepest tie is to the mother. Once he has conquered this by gaining access to her symbolical equivalent, he can be born again. In this tie to the maternal source lies the strength that gives the hero his extraordinary powers, his true genius, which he frees from the embrace of the unconscious by his daring and sovereign independence.

CG Jung

Symbols of Transformation

In the darkness of the unconscious a treasure lies hidden, the same “treasure hard to attain” which in our text, and in many other places too, is described as the shining pearl, or, to quote Paracelsus, as the “mystery”, by which is meant a fascino-sum par excellence. It is these inherent possibilities of “spiritual” or “symbolic” life and of progress which form the ultimate, though unconscious, goal of regression. By serving as a means of expression, as bridges and pointers, symbols help to prevent the libido from getting stuck in the material corporeality of the mother. Never has the dilemma been more acutely formulated than in the Nicodemus dialogue: on the one hand the impossibility of entering again into the mother's womb; on the other, the need for rebirth from “water and spirit.” The hero is a hero just because he sees resistance to the forbidden goal in all life's difficulties and yet fights that resistance with the whole-hearted yearning that strives towards the treasure hard to attain, and perhaps unattainable — a yearning that paralyses and kills the ordinary man.

James Hollis

Under Saturn's Shadow

All men suffer from neurosis. The word itself suggests a mechanical failure and, indeed, derives from the Enlightenment's effort to create models of the cosmos and models of men. But in fact neurosis simply signifies the deep split between socialization and soul, between collective culture and individual psyche. When outer roles do not fit the shape of one's soul, a terrible one-sidedness occurs. It is the suffering of this imbalance that impels men to war on themselves and on each other.

James Hollis

The Broken Mirror

Recently I was asked whether the unconscious itself has a consciousness. (Who, or what, for example, is talking to us through our dreams?) It is an impossible question to answer, though it is abundantly clear that there is an intentionality to the unconscious. Seemingly, it seeks first our growth and development, whether we so wish them or not.

CG Jung

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams, and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.

CG Jung

Answer to Job

. . . even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.

Bill Holm

Advice

Someone dancing inside us
has learned only a few steps:
the “Do-Your-Work” in 4/4 time,
the “What-Do-You-Expect” Waltz.
He hasn't noticed yet the woman
standing away from the lamp.
the one with black eyes
who knows the rumba.
and strange steps in jumpy rhythms
from the mountains of Bulgaria.
If they dance together,
something unexpected will happen;
if they don't, the next world
will be a lot like this one.

William Stafford

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Ian McGilchrist

The Matter with Things

There's a world of difference between “going beyond” the evidence, in the sense that your facts are wrong, and seeing the philosophical implications of those facts - how they hang together to create something greater, which inevitably goes beyond them. That's what intelligent science is supposed to do — to progress beyond the mere accumulation of facts to an understanding of the question: “who, then, are we?”

Goethe

Conversations with Goethe (JP Eckermann)

I can certainly put together the individual parts of a machine made of separate pieces, and, upon such a subject, speak of composition; but not when I have in my mind the individual parts of an organic whole, which produce themselves with life, and are pervaded by a common soul . . . How can one say, Mozart has composed Don Juan! Composition! As if it were a piece of cake or biscuit, which had been stirred together out of eggs, flour, and sugar! It is a spiritual creation, in which the details, as well as the whole, are pervaded by one spirit, and by the breath of one life; so that the producer did not make experiments, and patch together, and follow his own caprice, but was altogether in the power of the dæmonic spirit of his genius, and acted according to his orders.

Raine Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet

A work of art is good when it has been born from necessity. It will be judged on the basis of this origin: there is no other standard. For this reason, dear Sir, I could only offer the advice for you to go deep within yourself and to probe the depths from which your life emanates. At its source you will find the answer to the question whether you absolutely must create. Accept this answer, listen to its sound, but do not guess at its meaning.

James Hillman

The Soul's Code

Each person enters the world called. The idea comes from Plato, his Myth of Er at the end of his most well-known work, the Republic. I can put the idea in a nutshell. The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process or arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.

Alfred North Whitehead

The Function of Reason

Obscurantism is the refusal to speculate freely on the limitations of traditional methods. It is more than that: it is the negation of the importance of such speculation, the insistence on incidental dangers. A few generations ago the clergy, or to speak more accurately, large sections of the clergy were the standing examples of obscurantism. Today their place has been taken by scientists . . . The obscurantists of any generation are in the main constituted by the greater part of the practitioners of the dominant methodology. Today scientific methods are dominant, and scientists are the obscurantists.

CG Jung

Symbols of Transformation

The unconscious, on the other hand, is universal: it not only binds individuals together into a nation or race, but unites them with the men of the past and with their psychology.

Marie-Louise von Franz

The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

The greatest difficulty we drag along with us from our childhood is the sack of illusions which we carry on our backs into adult life. The subtle problem consists in giving up certain illusions without becoming cynical.

Marie-Louise von Franz

The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

That is the problem of the divine child when it appears in this in-between state. One just does not know what to do. Theoretically the situation is clear: one should be able to cut away the childishness and leave the true personality. One should somehow be able to disentangle the two, and if an analysis goes right that is what slowly happens. One succeeds in disentangling and destroying what is really childish and in saving the creativity and the future life. But, practically, this is something which is immensely subtle and difficult to accomplish.

Marie-Louise von Franz

The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

The child motif when it turns up represents a bit of spontaneity, and the great problem — in each case an ethical individual one — is to decide whether it is now an infantile shadow which has to be cut off and repressed, or something creative moving toward a future possibility of life. The child is always behind and ahead of us. Behind us, it is the infantile shadow which must be sacrificed — that which always pulls us backward into being infantile and dependent, lazy, playful, escaping problems and responsibility and life. On the other hand, if the child appears ahead of us, it means renewal, the possibility of eternal youth, of spontaneity and of new possibilities — the life flow towards the creative future. The great problem is to always make up one's mind in each instance whether it is an infantile impulse which only pulls backward, or an impulse which seems infantile to one's own consciousness but which really should be accepted and lived because it leads forward.

James Hollis

Living an examined life

Rather than ask, why am I here, might we better ask the question: What wants to enter the world through me? Is it not better to reflect on what our incarnation might mean, not from our ego or cultural positions, but from the standpoint of nature, or of divinity?