Showing posts with label Aion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aion. Show all posts

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Carl Jung: Thus in the course of time the meaningful turns into the meaningless.





I regard these parallels as important because it is possible, through them, to relate so-called metaphysical concepts, which have lost their root connection with natural experience, to living, universal psychic processes, so that they can recover their true and original meaning.

In this way the connection is reestablished between the ego and projected contents now formulated as "meta- physical" ideas. Unfortunately, as already said, the fact that metaphysical ideas exist and are believed in does nothing to prove the actual existence of their content or of the object they refer to, although the coincidence of idea and reality in the form of a special psychic state, a state of grace, should not be deemed impossible, even if the subject cannot bring it about by an act of will.

Once metaphysical ideas have lost their capacity to recall and evoke the original experience they have not

only become useless but prove to be actual impediments on the road to wider development.

One clings to possessions that have once meant wealth; and the more ineffective, incomprehensible, and life- less 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.

Monday, May 7, 2018

Carl Jung: The serpent in Genesis is an illustration...




For the Naassenes Paradise was a quaternity parallel with the Moses quaternio and of similar meaning.

Its fourfold nature consisted in the four rivers, Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Phrat.

The serpent in Genesis is an illustration of the personified tree numen; hence it is traditionally represented in or coiled round the tree.

It is the tree’s voice, which persuades Eve—in Luther’s version—that "it would be good to eat of the tree, and

pleasant to behold that it is a lusty tree."

In the fairytale of "The Spirit in the Bottle," Mercurius can likewise be interpreted as a tree numen.

In the Ripley "Scrowle" Mercurius appears as a snake in the shape of a Melusina descending from the top of the Philosophical Tree ("tree of knowledge").

The tree stands for the development and phases of the transformation process, and its fruits or flowers signify the consummation of the work.


In the fairytale Mercurius is hidden in the roots of a great oak-tree, i.e., in the earth. For it is in the interior of the earth that the Mercurial serpent dwells. Carl Jung, Aion, Para 372

Thursday, February 15, 2018

In her sixth or seventh year, she dreamt that God had promised her a golden fish.




In conclusion, I would like to give a concrete example of the way the symbol of the fish springs out of the unconscious autochthonously.

The case in question is that of a young woman who had uncommonly lively and plastic dreams.

She was very much under the influence of her father, who had a materialistic outlook and was not happily married.

She shut herself off from these unfavourable surroundings by developing, at a very early age, an intense inner life of her own.

As a small child, she replaced her parents by two trees in the garden.

In her sixth or seventh year, she dreamt that God had promised her a golden fish.

From this time forth she frequently dreamt of fishes.

Later, a little while before starting psychological treatment on account of her manifold problems, she dreamt that she was "standing on the bank of the Limmat and looking down into the water.

A man threw a gold coin into the river, the water became transparent and I could see the bottom.

There was a coral reef and a lot of fishes.

One of them had a shining silver belly and a golden back.' During treatment she had the following dream: "I came to the bank of a broad, flowing river.

I couldn't see much at first, only water, earth, and rock.

I threw the pages with my notes on them into the water, with the feeling that I was giving something back to the river.

Immediately afterwards I had a fishing-rod in my hand.

I sat down on a rock and started fishing.

Still I saw nothing but water, earth, and rock.

Suddenly a big fish bit.

He had a silver belly and a golden back.

As I drew him to land, the whole landscape became alive: the rock emerged like the primeval foundation of the earth, grass and flowers sprang up, and the bushes expanded into a great forest.

A gust of wind blew and set everything in motion.

Then, suddenly, I heard behind me the voice of Mr. X [an older man whom she knew only from photographs and from hearsay, but who seems to have been some kind of authority for her].

He said, quietly but distinctly: 'The patient ones in the innermost realm are given the fish, the food of the deep.'

At this moment a circle ran round me, part of it touching the water.

Then I heard the voice again: 'The brave ones in the second realm may be given victory, for there the battle is fought.

Immediately another circle ran round me, this time touching the other bank.

At the same time I saw into the distance and a colourful landscape was revealed.

The sun rose over the horizon.

I heard the voice, speaking as if out of the distance: 'The third and the fourth realms come, similarly enlarged, out of the other two.

But the fourth realm'—and here the voice paused for a moment, as if deliberating—'the fourth realm joins on to the first.

It is the highest and the lowest at once, for the highest and the lowest come together.

They are at bottom one.' "

Here the dreamer awoke with a roaring in her ears. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Pages 151-152

Carl Jung across the web:

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Great Sites to visit:

1. Jenna Lilla's Path of the Soul http://jennalilla.org/

2. Steve Jung-Hearted Parker's Jung Currents http://jungcurrents.com/

3. Frith Luton's Jungian Dream Analysis and Psychotherapy: http://frithluton.com/articles/

4. Lance S. Owens The Gnosis Archives http://gnosis.org/welcome.html


Friday, January 26, 2018

Carl Jung: In men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos.




Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint.

This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit.

The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros.

But I do not wish or intend to give these two intuitive concepts too specific a definition.

I use Eros and Logos merely as conceptual aids to describe the fact that woman's consciousness is characterized more by the connective quality of Eros than by the discrimination and cognition associated with Logos.

In men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos.

In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression of their true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident.

It gives rise to misunderstandings and annoying interpretations in the family circle and among friends.

This is because it consists of opinions instead of reflections, and by opinions I mean a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth.

Such assumptions, as everyone knows, can be extremely irritating.

As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right.

Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.

With them the question becomes one of personal vanity and touchiness (as if they were females); with women it is a question of power, whether of truth or justice or some other "ism"—for the dressmaker and hairdresser have already taken care of their vanity.

The "Father" (i.e., the sum of conventional opinions) always plays a great role in female argumentation.

No matter how friendly and obliging a woman's Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus.

Often the man has the feeling—and he is not altogether wrong—that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of persuasion.

He is unaware that this highly dramatic situation would instantly come to a banal and unexciting end if he were to quit the field and let a second woman carry on the battle (his wife, for instance, if she herself is not the fiery war horse).

This sound idea seldom or never occurs to him, because no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima.

Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, cliches from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic.

It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains essentially the same.

This singular fact is due to the following circumstance: when animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction.

The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).

The language of love is of astonishing uniformity, using the well-worn formulas with the utmost devotion and fidelity so that once again the two partners find themselves in a banal collective situation.

Yet they live in the illusion that they are related to one another in a most individual way.

In both its positive and its negative aspects the anima/animus relationship is always full of "animosity," i.e., it is emotional, and hence collective.

Affects lower the level of the relationship and bring it closer to the common instinctual basis, which no
longer has anything individual about it.

Very often the relationship runs its course heedless of its human performers, who afterwards do not know what happened to them. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 15-16

Carl Jung across the web:

Blog: http: http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/

Google+: https://plus.google.com/102529939687199578205/posts

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Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Carl Jung: In considering the double aspect of Christ, mention might be made of the legend of Pistis Sophia..




In considering the double aspect of Christ, mention might be made of the legend of Pistis Sophia (3rd cent.),
which also originated in Egypt.

Mary says to Jesus:

When thou wert a child, before the spirit had descended upon thee, when thou wert in the vineyard with Joseph, the spirit came down from the height, and came unto me in the house, like unto thee, and I knew him not, but thought that he was thou. And he said nto me, "Where is Jesus, my brother, that I may go to meet him?"And when he had said this unto me, I was in doubt, and thought it was a phantom tempting me. I seized him and bound him to the foot of the bed which was in my house, until I had gone to find you in the field, thee and Joseph; and I found you in the vineyard, where Joseph was putting up the vine-poles. And it came to pass, when thou didst hear me saying this thing unto Joseph, that thou didst understand, and thou wert joyful, and didst say, "Where is he, that I may see him?" And it came to pass, when Joseph heard thee say these words, that he was disturbed. We went up together, entered into the house and found the spirit bound to the bed, and we gazed upon thee and him, and found that thou wert like unto him. And he that was bound to the bed was unloosed, he embraced thee and kissed thee, and thou also didst kiss him, and you became one. [Pistis Sophia, Mead trans., pp. n8f., slightly modified.]

It appears from the context of this fragment that Jesus is the "truth sprouting from the earth," whereas the
spirit that resembled him is "justice looking down from heaven."

The text says: "Truth is the power which issued from thee when thou wast in the lower regions of chaos.

For this cause thy power hath said through David, 'Truth hath sprouted out of the earth,' because thou wert
in the lower regions of chaos."

Jesus, accordingly, is conceived as a double personality, part of which rises up from the chaos or hyle, while the other part descends as pneuma from heaven. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Paras 131-132


Carl Jung across the web:

Blog: http: http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/

Google+: https://plus.google.com/102529939687199578205/posts

Facebook: Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/56536297291/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=4861719&sort=recent&trk=my_groups-tile-flipgrp

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Carl-Jung-326016020781946/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/purrington104/

Red Book: https://www.facebook.com/groups/792124710867966/

Scoop.It: http://www.scoop.it/u/maxwell-purrington

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MaxwellPurringt

WordPress: https://carljungdepthpsychology.wordpress.com/

Great Sites to visit:

1. Jenna Lilla's Path of the Soul http://jennalilla.org/

2. Steve Jung-Hearted Parker's Jung Currents http://jungcurrents.com/


3. Frith Luton's Jungian Dream Analysis and Psychotherapy: http://frithluton.com/articles/


Sunday, December 10, 2017

Aniela Jaffe on Jung's Book Aion




Jung's book Aion (1951) can, depending on one's standpoint, be regarded either as an astrological treatise or as the proof of a synchronistic phenomenon of cosmic proportions.

It is, in part, an account of the meaningful coincidence of the Platonic month of Pisces-which started two thousand years ago with the birth of Christ and, as we have said, is now passing into the Platonic month of Aquarius-with the spiritual development of Christianity during this period.

The fish is an old symbol for Christ.

The parallelism between the cosmic event-the progression of the spring-point through the double sign of the Fishes-and the spiritual and historical events is exceedingly impressive.

The turn of the first millennium, just about the time when the spring-point reached the beginning of the second Fish, witnessed the rise of the heretical movements that compensated and also undermined Christianity-the Cathars, Waldenses, Albigenses, the Holy Ghost Movement of Joachim of Flora, and other sects.

Although the year 1000 did not mark the expected end of the world, it secretly initiated the "kingdom of the second Fish" -traditionally interpreted as the age of Antichrist-whose culmination, no one will deny, we are experiencing in the present century. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 33

Friday, November 10, 2017

Carl Jung's Aion as an Astrological Treatise or proof of a Synchronistic event.




Jung's book Aion (1951) can, depending on one's standpoint, be regarded either as an astrological treatise or as the proof of a synchronistic phenomenon of cosmic proportions.

It is, in part, an account of the meaningful coincidence of the Platonic month of Pisces-which started two thousand years ago with the birth of Christ and, as we have said, is now passing into the Platonic month of Aquarius-with the spiritual development of Christianity during this period.
The fish is an old symbol for Christ.

The parallelism between the cosmic event-the progression of the spring-point through the double sign of the Fishes-and the spiritual and historical events is exceedingly impressive.

The turn of the first millennium, just about the time when the spring-point reached the beginning of the second Fish, witnessed the rise of the heretical movements that compensated and also undermined Christianity-the Cathars, Waldenses, Albigenses, the Holy Ghost Movement of Joachim of Flora, and other sects.

Although the year 1000 did not mark the expected end of the world, it secretly initiated the "kingdom of the second Fish" -traditionally interpreted as the age of Antichrist-whose culmination, no one will deny, we are experiencing in the present century. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 33

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Carl Jung: CW 9ii "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self" - Quotations




With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason-in the realm of dogma he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where you make the mistake, for then you can do something about it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 424

The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 123.

Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention man would have been lost. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114

Psychology is an empirical science and deals with realities. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para . 98

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii. Para 17

Man knows only a small part of his psyche, just as he has only a very limited knowledge of the physiology of his body. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 253


Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 429

Yahweh and Allah are unreflected God-images, whereas in the Clementine Homilies there is a psychological and reflective spirit at work. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 54n.

We need to find our way back to the original, living spirit which, because of its ambivalence, is also a mediator and uniter of opposites, an idea that preoccupied the alchemists for many centuries. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 141

For alchemy is the mother of the essential substance as well as the concreteness of modern scientific thinking, and not scholasticism, which was responsible in the main only for the discipline and training of the intellect. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 266.

The anima and animus have tremendous influence because we leave the shadow to them. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 53.

The splitting of the Original Man into husband and wife expresses an act of nascent consciousness; it gives birth to the pair of opposites, thereby making consciousness possible. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 320

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 43.

We can act differently, if we want to. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114.

Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, par. 15.

The anima also has affinities with animals, which symbolize her characteristics. Thus she can appear as a snake or a tiger or a bird. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 358.
Animals generally signify the instinctive forces of the unconscious, which are brought into unity within the mandala. This integration of the instincts is a prerequisite for individuation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 660.

If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 423.

If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Par 423.

The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 191-192.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; Para 429.

All I have written is correct. . . . I only realize its full reality now ~Carl Jung; Jung His Life and Work; Page 279.

This primary substance [the chaos] is round (massa globosa, rotundum), like the world and the world-soul; it is in fact the world-soul and the world-substance in one. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 II: §376

[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as ‘chaos’ or ‘nigredo’). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 II, §304.

Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one . . . [is] singularly incapable of moral judgment. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii, par. 15.

This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 21

Emotion is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 15

The ego is the subject of all successful attempts at adaptation so far as these are achieved by the will. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; para 11

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 14

"Redemption" does not mean that a burden is taken from one's shoulders which one was never meant to bear. Only the "complete" person knows how unbearable man is to himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 125

Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 ii, Para 17

If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 423.

The final factors at work in us are nothing other than those talents which "a certain nobleman" entrusted to his "servants," that they might trade with them (Luke 19:12 ff.). It does not require much imagination to see what this involvement in the ways of the world means in the moral sense. Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious s/he is, the more the devil drives her/him. . . . Only ruthless self-knowledge o the widest scale, which sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives of human action, offers some guarantee that the end result will not turn out too badly ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 255.

It is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, consciousness, patience, etc., are of the greatest value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective self-criticism are valuable on the intellectual side. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 46.

Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the soul and not to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 50.

We can certainly hand it to Augustine that all natures are good, yet just not good enough to prevent their badness from being equally obvious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 95

Fishing is an intuitive attempt to “catch” unconscious contents (fishes). ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 137.

The causal factors determining his psychic existence reside largely in unconscious processes outside consciousness, and in the same way there are final factors at work in him which likewise originate in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 253

Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97

Sooner or later nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together as both of them, independently of one another and from opposite directions, push forward into transcendental territory, the one with the concept of the atom, the other with that of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 412

In order to give our judgment.. on the character of wholeness, we must supplement our time-conditioned thinking by the principle of correspondence [between outer and inner events], or as I have called it, synchronicity." C.G. Jung, Aion, para 409

No amount of insight into the relativity and fallibility of our moral judgment can deliver us from these defects, and those who deem themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of mankind, because they are twisted with the pain and fear of their own sickness. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 97

This subjective knowledge of the self [is what is meant by]: "No one can know himself unless he knows what, and not who, he is, on what he depends, or whose he is (or to whom or what he belongs) and for what end he was made." This distinction . . . is crucial. . . . Not the subjective ego-consciousness of the psyche is meant, but the psyche itself as the unknown, unprejudiced object that still has to be investigated. . . . "What" refers to the neutral self, the objective fact of totality, since the ego is on the one hand causally "dependent on" or "belongs to" it, and on the other hand is directed toward it as to a goal ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 252.


Only with Christ did the devil enter the world as the real counterpart of God, and in early Jewish-Christian circles Satan was regarded as Christ's elder brother. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 113

The shadow, the syzygy, and the Self are psychic factors of which an adequate picture can be formed only on the basis of a fairly thorough experience of them. Just as these concepts arose out of an experience of reality, so they can be elucidated only by further experience ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 63.

We know only a small part of our psyches. The causal factors determining [one's] psychic existence reside largely in the unconscious processes outside consciousness , and in the same way there are final factors at work in [one] that likewise originate in the unconscious. . . . Causes and ends thus transcend consciousness to a degree that ought not to be underestimated, and this implies that their nature and action are unalterable and irreversible [to the degree that] they have not become objects of consciousness. They can only be corrected through conscious insight and moral determination, which is why self-knowledge, being so necessary, is feared so much ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 253.

Although its bases are in themselves relatively unknown and unconscious, the ego is a conscious factor par excellence. It is even acquired, empirically speaking, during the individual's lifetime. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 5.

It [The Ego] seems to arise in the first place from the collision between the somatic factor and the environment, and, once established as a subject, it goes on developing from further collisions with the outer world and the inner. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 5.

Through the Christ crucified between the two thieves, man gradually attained knowledge of his shadow and its duality. This duality had already been anticipated by the double meaning of the serpent. Just as the serpent stands for the power that heals as well as corrupts, so one of the thieves is destined upwards, the other downwards, and so likewise the shadow is on one side regrettable and reprehensible weakness, on the other side healthy instinctively and the prerequisite for higher consciousness. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 255; Para 402.

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

Who are we to imagine that "it couldn't happen here"? We have only to multiply the population of Switzerland by twenty to become a nation of eighty millions, and our public intelligence and morality would then be automatically divided by twenty in consequence of the devastating moral and psychic effects of living together in huge masses. Such a state of things provides the basis for collective crime, and it is then really a miracle if the crime is not committed .... It has filled us with horror to realize all that man is capable of, and of which, therefore, we too are capable. Since then a terrible doubt about humanity, and about ourselves, gnaws at our hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 412

Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic — and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience. Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the passion for show and new clothes. What is more, these images — are they Christian or Buddhist or what you will — are lovely, mysterious, and richly intuitive. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 7-8.

The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 282

As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 29

Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions. Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity. Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam. . . . And on top of this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature's business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 35

When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 90

Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya—and not only into life's reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 24

The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down. Instead, dogma is "believed"; it is hypostatized, as the Protestants hypostatize the Bible, illegitimately making it the supreme authority, regardless of its contradictions and controversial interpretations. (As we know, anything can be authorized out of the Bible.) Dogma no longer formulates anything, no longer expresses anything; it has become a tenet to be accepted in and for itself, with no basis in any experience that would demonstrate its truth. Indeed, faith has itself become that experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 276

Myths are miracle tales and treat of all those things which, very often, are also objects of belief. In the everyday world of consciousness such things hardly exist; that is to say, until 1933 only lunatics would have been found in possession of living fragments of mythology. After this date the world of heroes and monsters spread like a devastating fire over whole nations, proving that the strange world of myth had suffered no loss of vitality during the centuries of reason and enlightenment. If metaphysical ideas no longer have such a fascinating effect as before, this is certainly not due to any lack of primitivity in the European psyche, but simply and solely to the fact that the erstwhile symbols no longer express what is now welling up from the unconscious as the end-result of the development of Christian consciousness through the centuries. This end result is a true antimimon pneuma, a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, woolly-mindedness, criminal amorality, and doctrinaire fanaticism, a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods, spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug, fit only to be fed wholesale to the mass man of today. That is what the post-Christian spirit looks like. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 66

Sunday, September 24, 2017

He [Christ] He is the "spiritual inner man."



It was known, and stated, very early that the man Jesus, the son of Mary, was the principium individuationis. Thus Basilides is reported by Hippolytus as saying:

''Now Jesus became the first sacrifice in the discrimination of the natures, and the Passion came to pass for no other reason than the discrimination of composite things.

For in this manner, he says, the sonship that had been left behind in a formless state [anopsia] . . , needed separating into its components, in the same way that Jesus was separated."

According to the rather complicated teachings of Basilides, the "non-existent" God begot a threefold sonship.

The first "son," whose nature was the finest and most subtle, remained up above with the Father.

The second son, having a grosser (iraxv^pio-Tepa) nature, descended a bit lower, but received "some such wins: as that with which Plato . . . equips the soul in his Phaedrus."

The third son, as his nature needed purifying, fell deep est into "formlessness."

This third "sonship" is obviously the grossest and heaviest because of its impurity.

In these three emanations or manifestations of the non-existent God it is not hard to see the trichotomy of spirit, soul, and body.

Spirit is the finest and highest; soul, as the ligamentum spiritus et corporis, is grosser than spirit, but has "the wings of an eagle," so that it may lift its heaviness up to the higher regions.

Both are of a "subtle" nature and dwell, like the ether and the eagle, in or near the region of light, whereas the body, being heavy, dark, and impure, is deprived of the light but nevertheless contains the divine seed of the third sonship, though still unconscious and formless.

This seed is as it were awakened by Jesus, purified and made capable of ascension by virtue of the fact that the opposites were separated in Jesus through the Passion (i.e., through his division into four).

Jesus is thus the prototype for the awakening of the third sonship slumbering in the darkness of humanity.

He is the "spiritual inner man."

He is also a complete trichotomy in himself, for Jesus the son of Mary represents the incarnate man, but his immediate predecessor is the second Christ, the son of the highest archon of the hebdomad, and his first prefiguration is Christ the son of the highest archon of the ogdoad, the demiurge Yahweh.

This trichotomy of Anthropos figures corresponds exactly to the three sonships of the non-existing God and to the division of human nature into three parts.

We have therefore three trichotomies:


First sonship Christ of the Ogdoad Spirit

Second sonship Christ of the Hebdomad Soul

Third sonship Jesus the Son of Mary Body ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 118




Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Lecture X, 11 December 1929




LECTURE X 11 December 1929

I have here a question by Mrs. Sawyer which I rather expected and which shows that we are not yet finished with this exceedingly intricate problem about astrology and the connection between time
and energy.

As I told you, I never would have ventured into such an abstruse subject if it had not been indispensable for the understanding of the dreamer's material.

This is his universe, and if one dismissed the problem, it would be saying to him that one was not sufficiently concerned with his psychology.

For him, as for most men, the Logos side of his material is the most interesting.

It might be less important in a woman's .case.

Mrs. Sawyer's question is in regard to the relationship between ordinary astrology and the precession of the equinoxes.

I will state the problem again.

You see, ordinary astrology suggests that our life is dependent. Upon the so-called vibrations of the planets that. are in a certain relative position at the moment of our birth and, they say, actually influence that moment and all our life.

So if a planet crosses the same place it was in at that moment, perhaps twenty years later, it produces a special effect.

Astrologers still hold to the actual place of the planets, but here we are confronted with the fact that today there is no correspondence between the positions ascribed to them and their actual position in the skies.

Since 100 B.C. the spring-point has been artificially fixed at zero degrees Aries, but astronomically that is no longer true.

In reality, on account of the precession of the equinoxes, the spring-point has passed from Aries to Pisces and it is shortly to enter Aquarius.

So our calculations are simply arbitrary, having to do only with time and not with the actual position.

Now, the last time I told you something that was apparently quite contradictory.

Having stated that the position of the stars had no influence upon us, I then drew certain conclusions about the effects of the sun on the earth as it passed from one zodiacal sign to another.

I told you, for instance, that in A.D. 900, when by actual astronomical calculation the spring-point was at the point of greatest extension of the Fishes, Christianity was coincidentally at the height of its power.

Then by 1500, the spring-point was in the commissure, the ribbon connecting the two fishes, and at this point began a mental and spiritual revolution and the decline of the Church.

The second fish represents the Antichrist and the decay of Christianity.

The Gothic movement was vertical, and then began the horizontal age of materialism, a time of great intellectual extension, voyages of discovery, etc., but winding up with the World War, the moral defeat of the spirit of Europe.

I said, too, that we might expect a peculiar change in the mentality of the world in the next fifty to one hundred years, in the time when the spring-point proceeds into Aquarius.

So I seemed to be linking up the astronomical positions with human affairs and with peculiar changes in mentality.

The problem is an exceedingly difficult one, and it took me years before I understood, so I don't expect you to solve it at once.

An astrologer told me that the ephemerides, that is, the position of the planets, are exact as to time but not as to the actual position of the stars.

Now I will read Mrs. Sawyer's question: "I understand that astrology has been projected into the stars, and that it does not matter whether the stars are actually at the spring point, the time element being the important thing. But when you say that the spring-point is now actually in the Fishes and prophesy about 1940, you are following the actual movement of the stars, are you not?
Was the whole projection in the first place really made with an intuition of the backward movement so that the projection works both ways-that is, that it works from a static standpoint and also at the same time from the moving standpoint?"

Well, the important point is that the horoscope is true only in the time sense, not astronomically. It is independent of the stars.

We see that menstruation has a moon period, yet it does not coincide with the phases of the moon; otherwise all women would menstruate at the same time, and they don't.

It simply means that there is a moon-law in every woman and likewise the laws of the stars are in every human being but not in the relation of cause and effect.

The fact that the spring-point changes does not mean that it is the cause of the changes that ensue on earth.

Life has changed and will change, as the spring-point is changing, but the apparent connection is a coincidence; that is, the two things occur together in time but not in a causal sequence.

In an ordinary horoscope, one is not concerned with the spring point.

In the life of the individual the spring-point doesn't matter, but in the life of the tree of mankind, it matters very much.

An ordinary year is to us what the Platonic year of 26,000 of our years is to the race.

The precession of the equinoxes is making its way backward in a circle from Aries to Pisces, to Aquarius, Capricorn, etc.

When the cycle is complete, it covers 26,000 years. That is the Platonic unit in the life of the tree.

The fixation of the spring-point is an arbitrary measure for our arbitrary use, the same condition having prevailed in 2000 B.C., when the astronomical conditions actually did coincide with the statements of the horoscope.

The precession of the equinoxes might be said to be the clock-hand that marks the great spaces of time, the hand that measures time for the tree of mankind.

On our clock, the hand moves forward, but with the clock of the race it moves in the other direction.

Each zodiacal sign then becomes a [Platonic] month, and we call a certain period of 2,150 years the [Platonic] month of the Fishes, for instance, which is of course again a projection.

So for us, our whole historical life, the length of human consciousness, is only three months.

But man has gone through those 26,000 years many times.

Divide 1,000,000 years (the probable age of man) by 26,000 and you will know how many Platonic years they have been

Paleolithic man might go back many hundreds of thousands of years to the Pithecanthropus erectus, and from that to the apes and, still further, to the saurians.

So when we speak of the coming up of the saurian in our dreams, we mean that the impressions of an infinitely remote time are making themselves felt.

In the course of the innumerable revolutions of the Platonic years we have received imprints of conditions of which we are not conscious, but they are in our unconscious.

Only three months in power is so little, it makes a poor showing.

One is embarrassed intellectually, for one does not know; human consciousness is much too young.

There are certain symbolic evidences in our dreams and fantasies, but that is far from scientific.

All that remains to us, for instance, of the "months" of Taurus and Aries are bull gods and ram gods.

Perhaps by a further elaboration of the unconscious we may sometime get further back; we may get the feeling of what Gemini and Cancer meant to mankind.

At all events, we have the Zodiac, which is the naive projection of unconscious imprints through numberless Platonic years.

Mankind has projected intuitive memory into the stars as he moved through the cycle in remote ages I don't know whether in those days he felt the exceedingly historical character, but relatively primitive man has made those projections.

Then time progressed, and slowly the spring-point wandered out of Aries; and then they felt the need of getting it fixed, and since then it is simply the law in ourselves that accounts for the validity of astrology.

It has the same validity as the connection between the monthly period of woman and the moon.

So we can think of the underlying laws of our unconscious as star laws.

But the artificial spring-point has nothing to do with the life of the tree of mankind.

At the time when the Zodiac was invented, man was in the springtime of consciousness, so the falling of the spring-point in Aries, a spring-sign, was appropriate; it is as if the horoscope of humanity had begun with the dawn of consciousness.

The essential point to remember is that the precession of the equinoxes does not prove the identity of astronomical facts with periods of human psychology.

It is just that our consciousness began in the spring-time of mankind, and that happens to fit the zodiacal sign of that time.

But here is a little mistake.

Hipparchus should have fixed the spring-time in Taurus instead of Aries.

At that time the Zodiac had only eleven or ten signs. In Roman times there were eleven, Libra, the twelfth, was made by cutting off part of Scorpio.

That had to do with the fact that the spring-point moved from Taurus into Aries.

This is very complicated, but you must get the peculiar fact that the flow of energy, the libido in ourselves, is the flow of energy in living nature and in the universe, although the two worlds are not causally connected in their energic phenomena.

The energy in both is identical in essence, but in each plane it is following different causal sequences.

And the flow of energy in ourselves and in the universe has to do with time.

How can we best catch time, in itself such an abstraction?

Well, in the flow of energy we have something upon which to hang time.

Our modern idea of time is highly abstract, we have definite notions about the divisions of time into hours, minutes, seconds, etc.-very fine distinctions about time values, in other words.

To the primitive, however, time is a very nebulous thing.

One feels this as soon as one is out of the reach of civilization, and of course the whole East has no notion of time in our sense.

So we can't expect primitive man to produce symbols with the specific time character as we know it.

He is much concerned, however, with the flow of energy, as is shown in his conception of mana.

We have plenty of material that shows us that energy symbolism.

But the question of time symbols is abstruse and more difficult, and I want to confine myself now to those that appear in language.

We are constantly using metaphors, for instance, in which time appears as a river, a wind, or a storm-"the stream of the hours that pass" or "Tempestas horarum"-devouring quality of time.

In mythology it may be the dragon that eats everything that one loves father and mother, all that one has.

Therefore the hero who overcomes the dragon brings into existence again all the ancestors, the crops, even whole nations that have been eaten by time.

He redeems all these precious things from the past.

So the quality of eternity has been attributed to the religious hero.

Before Christ, it was immortality that the hero possessed, not eternity.

In the Babylonian myth of Gilgamesh, the hero was two-thirds divine but one-third human, and in order to be wholly divine and gain immortality he must cross the great sea to the Westland.

Now in these symbols-dragon, wind, river, etc.-we have energy symbols.

It is the flow of life, the river of life, wind, spiritual energy.

So we see how the concept of time gets mixed up with energy concepts.

As a river is a fertilizer so time has also been understood as productive.

Bergson has this idea in his duree creatrice, which is really the Neoplatonic idea of Chronos4 as a god of energy, light, fire, phallic power, and time.

The material for time symbols as they appear in language is very scattered.

The concept of time is so abstract and merges so with that of energy that it is difficult to detach, in order to show that time is really meant.

It soon becomes energy.

Mana at first seems only to have to do with energy, but later on it takes on time qualities.

Now let us take Chronos, the god who ate his own children, the word having the meaning of time.

Chronos is from the Greek root chre, which later becomes the Indo-Germanic rootgher (where there is a reversal of the r and the e), and they have the peculiar connotation of a verb, activity.

The word chre has the meaning of passing over like wind. In German it is hinstreichen uber.

Cher gives the idea of taking in, holding.

From the root-word chre comes chronos, and from the root-word gher comes geron, a Greek word meaning old, in German, Greis, old man; so time takes on the guise of an old man.

With the primitives, the notion of time is expressed by an old man, or by a visible sign of old age.

In seeing an old man, it becomes visible that there is time.

My Africans thought I was a hundred years old because I had white hair.

One hundred means untold ages.

Chronos is the oldest of the gods.

Then there is an Iranian word zrvan, usually found in connection with another word, akarana, meaning a god, and Zrvan Akarana means unlimited duration that contains all that happens.

An old French scholar once made a shrewd guess about this phrase, but unfortunately it proved to be not the right one.

He guessed that since it meant an immensely long time, it contained the idea of Ormuzd (light) and Ahriman (darkness). In other words, the pair of opposites.

But this cannot be, because one version has it that Zrvan, the devil, made time and another that Akarana, the god of duration, made it, so opinions are divided about the origin of that awful thing, the flow of energy.

One can never make out who is responsible.

Nowhere is there such a marvellous dualism. One could make a diagram of it like this:

Do you see that it makes a cross?

I have a book with a picture that I would have liked to show you.

It is a crucified god hanging on the cross, and on the right is the sun and on the left the moon.

The blood from all his wounds is flowing down as grace to the world-divine energy.

The clash of the sun and the moon, unified by the suffering man on the cross, brings the energy.

The thing that flows is time.

Then in the old Persian religion there is another very interesting symbol, a real mana concept. It is Haoma,1 which means grace.

It really means fiery splendour, but it is what the Christians called grace, the gift of the Holy Ghost, like the fiery tongues that fell upon the disciples-fiery tongues of heavenly grace, mana.

It is quite possible that there is somewhere a connection between the Persian and the Christian idea.

You see, besides the time, there is also the energy concept.

I would like to discuss also another Greek word dealing with time, Aion, meaning the time of life. Aion has interesting connections.

The equivalent in Latin is Aevum, meaning eternity, also the duration of life, or an epoch in history.

There is a wonderful verse in Horace, about the river that is flowing and flowing, fleeing past into all eternity, (aevum). Again we find here the peculiar union of energy and time.

The old High German word ewa meaning "always" is close to the Anglo-Saxon and modern English word ever.

Then concerning Aion there is the interesting fact that the Persian Zrvan Akarana became in later times the god Aion and played a great role in the Mithraic cult.

This is rather difficult to understand.

He also is called Deus Leontocephalus, or the lion-headed god, and statues of him have been often found in underground caves.

The cult of Mithras was chthonic in character, so half the churches were at least half underground, and originally they were in caves. (It is said that the cellar where Christ was born had been a grotto-temple of Attis.)

In the statues, the god Aion is represented s a man witn a hon's head, about whose body is coiled a serpent, the head of the serpent projecting over the head of the man.

Another Mithraic symbol is the amphora with the lion and the serpent battling for its possession, and often a flame is coming out of the amphora.

The lion is July, the fiery heat of summer, and the serpent represents the darkness and the coolness of earth, so it is the Yang and the Yin again.

Aion is the god of the union of the opposites, the time when things come together.

Now, I think I have said enough for the present about the peculiar connection between time and energy and psychology, we have had rather a profound discussion.

Let us return to the dreamer.

One of the members of the seminar asked me if our discussions here had not affected the dreamer himself. I think they have, I must say that during the summer he made a decided step forward.

His feelings became very positive, and up to that time they did not visibly stir.

Four weeks ago for the first time he wrote a spontaneous poem about the birth of the new sun, which is a spring festival celebrated in the north of Africa.

On the 28th of July he had a dream which he brought to me to analyse on the 21st of November, three weeks ago.

Dream [18]

He dreamed of a Buddhist monk, a little old man who led him to a fissure in a Cyclopean wall, and inside he saw the wall-people, who were like a secret society doing mysterious things.

Once inside, in a sort of temple, the old man changed into a beautiful little boy, and the dreamer fell down and worshipped him as if he were a divine being.

He wore three capes one over the other and a sort of cap.

He was something like a Milnchner Kindl.

This puzzled the dreamer, but I explained to him that the Cabiri are usually represented like that, the one on the arms of the city of Munich is a little monk.

He is like the Cabiri of Aesculapius, the inspiring familiar spirit of the doctors, who is often represented as holding a scroll and reading wisdom to Aesculapius, and he is always cloaked from head to foot with a hood over his face.

His name is Telesphoros, meaning the one that brings completion, perfection, or initiation.

That is what I told him, and somehow that worked in his mind, for during the last seminar, he produced a picture of a boy in the cross position.

In one of his outstretched hands he holds a sun, in the other the sistrum, or the crescent.

Mind you, he knows nothing of what is going on here, and yet he was doing exactly what we were doing.

The dream is interesting but the symbols would not· have come from what I told him, they probably would not have come without our seminar.

I think he was stirred from within. I must draw your attention to the design on the robe.

It is like a fleur-de-lys but it is also a Buddhist symbol for the thunderbolt, or collective energy, which the dreamer did not know.

When I asked him for an explanation of the picture, he said that as he painted it, he constantly had the words in his mind, "I am the Resurrection and the Life."

Now we will take up the dream that directly followed the one concerned with the union of the pairs of opposites, the sword and scythe symbols.

Dream [21]

He sees a vast grey plain approaching him, and the closer it comes, the more the monotonous grey dissolves into multi-coloured stripes, some wide and some narrow, and they move in a peculiar way
through each other, uniting and separating.

And then he sees that many people are occupied with those stripes, as if to shape or canalize them or to change the direction or to blend them.

The work is hampered through pressure that comes from other stripes.

So on account of that interference, the activity of the people is hindered and the result~ are often quite different from the original intention, and he says to himself “cause and effect.”

Then he tries to help them and in working on them he becomes aware that they are nothing but the surface of a vast mass, like a huge river flowing in a given direction, and the movement is due to the mass flowing along like a lava stream, the stripes coming up and disappearing again.

At the same time, he becomes aware that it is all transparent and luminous, that not only the mass itself but the atmosphere and the people and he himself are all permeated with something that he compares to fluid light, and he knows that this has a tremendous influence on everything that it permeates.

He says to himself, "The Fate of Man, the Fate of People, the Fate of Worlds," yet still he remains preoccupied in shaping his stripe.

Associations: Of the grey plain, he says that grey contains all the colours because it is a mixture of all.

Concerning his remark "Cause and effect," when he sees the people remodeling the stripes, he says, "That is indeed quite illogical. People couldn't hope to make any effect on that huge mass. They would have no effect on the total thing."

Then he says that he is quite unable to get at the meaning of the dream.

He thought it must have to do with impressions he got from a book by Kunkel, called The Great Year, meaning the Platonic year. I have read that book and it is not particularly important, but there is a pretty good description of the outlook on the Fish age and the age of Aquarius.

There are some ideas in it that are interesting.

The dreamer happened to read it. Now, how can we prove that it was an astrological dream?

Dr. Baynes: By his saying, the Fate of Man, the Fate of People, etc.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that show

s the three stages, the individual man, mankind, and the world.

It is exactly what we were talking about the identity of the flow of energy and time, which contains the great Platonic years and his individual fate too.

Now, what do the stripes suggest?

Mrs. Sigg: Shaping his individual life.

Dr. Jung: Yes.

Mrs. Fierz: It is the same idea as the thread of the Parcae.

Dr. Jung: Yes, it stands for the extension of time, the thread spun by the goddesses of fate. Now what are the colours?

Dr. Baynes: The colours are the individual elements of the spectrum.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and that peculiar fluid that permeates?

Miss Wolff' It is clarity, light, the spiritual principle of consciousness permeating everything.

Dr. Jung: Yes, everybody and everything is permeated by it.

That flow of compact substance like lava is the idea of physical matter, and it is permeated by light, the spiritual principle, which is not only inside but above.

There are the two things, substance or the material body, and the mysterious unsubstantial principle of consciousness. They interpenetrate one another.

We think we know something about matter, but what is consciousness?

We have no idea.

We have no standpoint outside of consciousness from which we could judge its quality.

Now each individual is represented by a stripe, and Mrs. Fierz has compared the stripes in the dream to the threads spun by one fate, decorated with roses by another, and cut by the scissors of the third, which would be death.

This is a similar kind of extension symbol.

It might be interesting to go deeper into it.

We can say that human life is a long stripe like a long river.

Looking down at it from a mountain, one can see perhaps a hundred miles, the whole distance of the river from its source to the sea.

One can see it all in one or two seconds, yet a ship on the river needs a long time to cover that distance, and it takes the actual water a long time to flow so far.

It is time or human life seen from very far away, the beginning and the end at the same time. It is seeing time in space.

Now, supposing that from a very high Swiss mountain you see two horses and wagons coming up, and you know it will take two days for them to meet.

From above we can look into the future of those two fellows.

So in such a dream we see human life as a stripe, as the river of time, and a person having such a dream is on a high standpoint, seeing the past, present, and future all at once.

From such a point, human life would look like an extension of man, and then man himself would no longer be a definite figure, he would be extended in time.

To his present body would be added all the other bodies he has ever had.

The body I had yesterday and before that, when I was cheese high or like an embryo, down to my death, form a stripe, a long series of bodies.

This makes man into a snake, and time is a snake. In the fourth dimension, man is a worm, and our length is not measured my metres but by the number of our years.

One might say that that was a perfectly crazy notion, but I will give you an illustration full of religious dignity.

Christ is represented as a great serpent who carries twelve signs on his back, meaning the twelve signs of the zodiac and also the twelve apostles.

He says, "I am the vine, ye are the branches."

He is the zodiacal serpent and they are the manifestation of the months, so the idea of man as a serpent is not so unique.

The serpent was the original form of the physician's god.

There was an enormous serpent in the temple of Aesculapius, and in the third century, the huge beast was brought to Rome to combat the spirit of pestilence.

For centuries, there was a serpent in the sanctuary.

It was snake worship. A staff with a snake wrapped around it was the doctor's symbol, the caduceus. It was also the symbol of Hermes the Sorcerer.

There was originally an idea that Aesculapius himself was a serpent, so it conveyed the idea of healing, as Christ was the healing one.

Saviour and serpent are used interchangeably.

Moses lifted up the serpent and Christ said that so he must be lifted up to draw all men unto him.

The Gnostics say that Christ was a serpent sent by the really spiritual God who had pity on mankind when he saw what poor half-conscious things they were.

He sent Christ as a serpent into the garden of Eden to teach people to eat of the fruit of the tree, to know good from evil, and to become conscious.

It is a peculiar idea-that we ought to became wise like a serpent. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 424-435

Saturday, July 1, 2017

Carl Jung on the Shadow




THE SHADOW

Whereas the contents of the personal unconscious are acquired during the individual’s lifetime, the contents of the collective unconscious are invariably archetypes that were present from the beginning. Their relation to the Instincts has been discussed elsewhere.

1 The archetypes most clearly characterized from the empirical point of view are those which have the most frequent and the most disturbing Influence on the ego. These are the shadow, the anima, and the animus.

2 The most accessible of these, and the easiest to experience, is the shadow, for its nature can in large measure be inferred from the contents of the personal unconscious. The only exceptions to this rule are those rather rare cases where the positive qualities of the personality are repressed, and the ego In consequence plays an essentially negative or unfavorable role.

4 The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of It involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and It therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psycho therapeutic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period.

5 Closer examination of the dark characteristics that is, the Inferiorities constituting the shadow reveals that they have an
emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality. Emotion, incidentally, Is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral judgment.

6 Although, with insight and good will, the shadow can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up with projections,, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary. While some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without too much difficulty as one’s own personal qualities, in this case both insight and good will are unavailing because the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person. No matter how obvious it may be to the neutral observer that it is a matter of projections, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself. He must be convinced that he throws a very long shadow before he is willing to withdraw his emotionally- toned projections from their object.

7 Let us suppose that a certain individual shows no inclination whatever to recognize his projections. The projection-making factor then has a free hand and can realize its object if it has one or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power. As we know, it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an auto-erotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable.

The resultant sentiment d’incompletude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust In between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions. A forty-five-year-old patient who had suffered from a compulsion neurosis since he was twenty and had become completely cut off from the world once said to me: “But I can never admit to myself that I’ve wasted the best twenty-five years of my life!”

8 It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course or consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

9 One might assume that projections like these, which are so very difficult if not impossible to dissolve, would belong to the realm of the shadow that is, to the negative side of the personality. This assumption becomes untenable after a certain point, because the symbols that then appear no longer refer to the same but to the opposite sex, in a man’s case to a woman and vice versa. The source of projections is no longer the shadow which is always of the same sex as the subject but a contra-sexual figure. Here we meet the animus of a woman and the anima of a man, two corresponding archetypes whose autonomy and unconsciousness explain the stubbornness of their projections.

Though the shadow is a motif as well known to mythology as anima and animus, it represents first and foremost the personal unconscious, and its content can therefore be made conscious without too much difficulty. In this it differs from anima and animus, for whereas the shadow can be seen through and recognized fairly easily, the anima and animus are much further away from consciousness and in normal circumstances are seldom if ever realized. With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. ~Carl Jung, Aion, The Shadow, Pages 7-8.

Friday, June 2, 2017

Carl Jung: It was known, and stated, very early that the man Jesus, the son of Mary, was the principium individuationis.



It was known, and stated, very early that the man Jesus, the son of Mary, was the principium individuationis.

Thus Basilides is reported by Hippolytus as saying:

''Now Jesus became the first sacrifice in the discrimination of the natures, and the Passion came to pass for no other reason than the discrimination of composite things.

For in this manner, he says, the sonship that had been left behind in a formless state [anopsia] . . , needed separating into its components, in the same way that Jesus was separated."

According to the rather complicated teachings of Basilides, the "non-existent" God begot a threefold sonship.

The first "son," whose nature was the finest and most subtle, remained up above with the Father.

The second son, having a grosser (iraxv^pio-Tepa) nature, descended a bit lower, but received "some such wins: as that with which Plato . . . equips the soul in his Phaedrus."

The third son, as his nature needed purifying, fell deep est into "formlessness."

This third "sonship" is obviously the grossest and heaviest because of its impurity.

In these three emanations or manifestations of the non-existent God it is not hard to see the trichotomy of spirit, soul, and body.

Spirit is the finest and highest; soul, as the ligamentum spiritus et corporis, is grosser than spirit, but has "the wings of an eagle," so that it may lift its heaviness up to the higher regions.

Both are of a "subtle" nature and dwell, like the ether and the eagle, in or near the region of light, whereas the body, being heavy, dark, and impure, is deprived of the light but nevertheless contains the divine seed of the third sonship, though still unconscious and formless.

This seed is as it were awakened by Jesus, purified and made capable of ascension by virtue of the fact that the opposites were separated in Jesus through the Passion (i.e., through his division into four).

Jesus is thus the prototype for the awakening of the third sonship slumbering in the darkness of humanity.

He is the "spiritual inner man."

He is also a complete trichotomy in himself, for Jesus the son of Mary represents the incarnate man, but his immediate predecessor is the second Christ, the son of the highest archon of the hebdomad, and his first prefiguration is Christ the son of the highest archon of the ogdoad, the demiurge Yahweh.

This trichotomy of Anthropos figures corresponds exactly to the three sonships of the non-existing God and to the division of human nature into three parts.

We have therefore three trichotomies:


First sonship Christ of the Ogdoad Spirit

Second sonship Christ of the Hebdomad Soul

Third sonship Jesus the Son of Mary Body ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 118



Monday, May 29, 2017

Carl Jung and a "Big Fish" Dream



In conclusion, I would like to give a concrete example of the way the symbol of the fish springs out of the unconscious autochthonously.

The case in question is that of a young woman who had uncommonly lively and plastic dreams. She was very much under the influence of her father, who had a materialistic outlook and was not happily married.

She shut herself off from these unfavourable surroundings by developing, at a very early age, an intense inner life of her own. As a small child, she replaced her parents by two trees in the garden. In her sixth or seventh year, she dreamt that God had promised her a golden fish. From this time forth she frequently dreamt of fishes.

Later, a little while before starting psychological treatment on account of her manifold problems, she dreamt that she was "standing on the bank of the Limmat and looking down into the water. A man threw a gold coin into the river, the water became transparent and I could see the bottom. There was a coral reef and a lot of fishes. One of them had a shining silver belly and a golden back.

During treatment she had the following dream: "/ came to the bank of a broad, flowing river. I couldn't see much at first, only water, earth, and rock. I threw the pages with my notes on them into the water, with the feeling that I was giving something back to the river. Immediately afterwards I had a fishing-rod in my hand.

I sat down on a rock and started fishing. Still I saw nothing but water, earth, and rock. Suddenly a big fish bit. He had a silver belly and a golden back. As I drew him to land, the whole landscape became alive: the rock emerged like the primeval foundation of the earth, grass and flowers sprang up, and the bushes expanded into a great forest. A gust of wind blew and set everything in motion.

Then, suddenly, I heard behind me the voice of Mr. X [an older man whom she knew only from photographs and from hearsay, but who seems to have been some kind of authority for her]. He said, quietly but distinctly: 'The patient ones in the innermost realm are given the fish, the food of the deep.' At this moment a circle ran round me, part of it touching the water. Then I heard the voice again: 'The brave ones in the second realm may be given victory, for there the battle is fought.

Immediately The transparency of the water means that attention (value, gold) is given to the unconscious. It is an offering to the genius of the fountain. Cf. the vision of the Amitabha Land in my "Psychology of Eastern Meditation."

another circle ran round me, this time touching the other bank. At the same time I saw into the distance and a colourful landscape was revealed. The sun rose over the horizon. I heard the voice, speaking as if out of the distance: 'The third and the fourth realms come, similarly enlarged, out of the other two. But the fourth realm'—and here the voice paused for a moment, as if deliberating—'the fourth realm joins on to the first. 10* It is the highest and the lowest at once, for the highest and the lowest come together. They are at bottom one.' " Here the dreamer awoke with a roaring in her ears. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Pages 151-152



Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Carl Jung: According to the old view the soul is round and the vessel must be round too, like the heavens or the world.




Zosimos calls the rotundum the omega element (fi), which probably signifies the head.

The skull is mentioned as the vessel of transformation in the Sabaean treatise "Platonis liber quartorum," the "Philosophers" styled themselves "children of the golden head," which is probably synonymous with "filii sapientiae."

The vas is often synonymous with the lapis, so that there is no difference between the vessel and its content; in other words, it is the same arcanum.

According to the old view the soul is round and the vessel must be round too, like the heavens or the world. The form of the Original Man is round.

Accordingly Dorn says that the vessel "should be made from a kind of squaring of the circle, so that the spirit and the soul of our material, separated from its body, may raise the body with them to the height of their own heaven." the anonymous author of the scholia to the "Tractatus aureus" also writes about the squaring of the circle and shows a square whose corners are formed by the four elements.

In the centre there is a small circle.

The author says: "Reduce your stone to the four elements, rectify and combine them into one, and you will have the whole magistery.

This One, to which the elements must be reduced, is that little circle in the centre of this squared figure.

It is the mediator, making peace between the enemies or elements."

In a later chapter he depicts the vessel, "the true philosophical Pelican," as shown on the next page. Carl Jung, Aion, Pages 238-239

St. Paul’s concept of ayvoia (ignorantia) may not be too far removed from dyiwia, since both mean the initial, unconscious
condition of man.

When God "looked down" on the times of ignorance, the Greek word used here, WeptSwv (Vulgate: despiciens) has the connotation ’to disdain, despise.’

At all events, Gnostic tradition says that when the highest God saw what miserable, unconscious creatures these human beings were
whom the demiurge had created, who were not even able to walk upright, he immediately got the work of redemp- tion under way.

And in the same passage in the Acts, Paul reminds the Athenians that they were "God’s offspring," and that God, looking back disapprovingly on
"the times of ignorance," had sent the message to mankind, commanding "all men everywhere to repent."

Because that earlier condition seemed to be altogether too wretched, the (transformation of mind) took on the moral character of repentance of sins, with the result that the Vulgate could translate it as "poenitentiam agere." The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness.

As we have seen, it is not only man who is in this condition, but also, according to the Gnostics, the God without consciousness.

This idea is more or less in line with the traditional Christian view that God was transformed during the pas- sage from the Old Testament to the New, and, from being the God of wrath, changed into the God of Love—a thought that is expressed very clearly by Nicolaus Caussin in the seventeenth century. Carl Jung, Aion, Pages 191-192