Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Carl Jung

1875 – 1961 CE

Insightful shamanistic scientist

Psychic adventurer, fearless explorer of the unconscious, uncompromising guide to realms beyond conventional mind; Carl Jung ransacked visions, penetrated to the heart of obscure symbols, brought world culture further along the path of evolutionary consciousness. Bringer of eastern wisdom into Western culture, Jung influenced psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, literature, and religious studies and wrote introductions to books like the I Ching, Secret of the Golden Flower, and D. T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. He founded analytical psychology based on what he considered the central process of human development and a central theme in the Tao Te Ching: integrating opposites.

Eras

Sources

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Red Book, Liber Novus

Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Unlisted Sources

Civilization in Transition

Interview (1939)​

Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon, 1942

Psychology and Poetry (1930)

Secret of the Golden Flower Introduction

The Symbolic Life (1939)

Quotes by Carl Jung (152 quotes)

“Every statement about the transcendental ought to be avoided because it is invariably a laughable presumption on the part of the human mind, unconscious of its limitations.”

Chapters: 1. The Unnamed

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“as long as one is in any way held by the domination of cupiditas, the veil is not lifted, and the heights of consciousness, empty of content and free of illusion, are not reached, nor can any trick nor any deceit bring it about.”

Chapters: 50. Claws and Swords

Themes: Desire Pleasure

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“'I live' becomes the objective 'it lives me'… In the Pauline Christ-symbol ('No longer do I live, but Christ liveth in me.') the deepest religious experience of the West and East meet.”

Chapters: 14. Finding and Following the Formless Form

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“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

Themes: Confusion

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“Introverts are educators and promoters of culture who show and value the interior life which is painfully wanting in our civilization.”

Chapters: 24. Unnecessary Baggage

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“it is the tremendous experiment of becoming conscious, which nature has imposed on mankind, uniting the most diverse cultures in a common task.”

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

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“No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep. …”

Chapters: 75. Greed

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“No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass.”

Chapters: 53. Shameless Thieves

Themes: Pluralism

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“only when we have found the sense in apparent nonsense can we separate the valueless from the valuable.”

Chapters: 49. No Set Mind

Themes: Deception

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“opposites always balance on the scales – a sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.”

from Secret of the Golden Flower 太乙金華宗旨; Tàiyǐ Jīnhuá Zōngzhǐ

Chapters: 2. The Wordless Teachings

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“Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!”

Chapters: 71. Sick of Sickness

Themes: Belief Fanaticism

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“Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, with a fanatical denial of the existence of autonomous partial-systems… This leads to collective delusions, instigations to war and revolution, in a word, to destructive mass psychoses… this narrowness of consciousness is always the shortest way to the insane asylum.”

Chapters: 31. Victory Funeral

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“The art of letting things happen, action in non-action, letting go of oneself… became a key to me: we must be able to let thing happen in the psyche… this becomes a real art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering.”

Chapters: 37. Nameless Simplicity

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“The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown.”

Chapters: 73. Heaven’s Net

Themes: Obstacles

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“the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate,.. the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part.”

Chapters: 51. Mysterious Goodness

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“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction both are transformed.”

Chapters: 45. Complete Perfection

Themes: Friendship

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“the psychological relationship between the sexes… the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.”

Chapters: 42. Children of the Way

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“The step to higher consciousness leads away from all shelter and safety.”

Chapters: 27. No Trace

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“We are so greatly tempted to turn everything into purpose and method that I deliberately express myself in very abstract terms in order to avoid causing a prejudice in one direction or another.”

Chapters: 70. Inscrutable

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“We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.”

Chapters: 30. No War

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“What did these people do in order to achieve the progress that freed them? As far as I could see they did nothing (wu wei), but let things happen… The art of letting things happen, action in non-action, letting go of oneself as taught by Meister Eckhart, became a key to me with which I was able to open the door to the ‘Way.’”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

Chapters: 57. Wu Wei

Themes: Wu Wei

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“when spirit began to degenerate into intellect, there set a reaction against it, … the dark, earth-born, feminine principle with its emotionality and instinctiveness reaching far back into the depths of time and into the roots of psychological continuity.”

Chapters: 6. The Source

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“whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations - as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness - nature pops up with her inescapable demands.”

Chapters: 58. Goals Without Means

Themes: Opinion

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“Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.”

Chapters: 61. Lying Low

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“Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals... instincts in their original strength can render social adaption almost impossible.”

from Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

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“The spirit that penetrates all things is the World Soul... filling all things, binding and knitting together all things that might make one frame of the world.”

Chapters: 39. Oneness

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“Projection of our own shadow makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.”

Themes: Projection

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“Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.”

Themes: Freedom

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“The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

Themes: Crazy Wisdom

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“You say the Christian God is unequivocal, he is love. But what is more ambiguous than love?”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

Themes: God Paradox

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“My path is not your path therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“The God of words is cold and dead and shines from afar like the moon, mysteriously and inaccessibly”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“Supreme meaning is the Path, the Way, and the Bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

Themes: Meaningfulness

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“If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“Dreams are the guiding words, the speech of the soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

Themes: Dream

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“If you are a boy, your God is a woman. If you are a woman, your God is a boy. If you are a man, your God is a maiden. The God is where you are not. A maiden is the pregnant future. A boy is the engendering future. A woman is having given birth. A man is having engendered.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“You find yourself in your desire… wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil’s own seed. But do not forget to wait.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

Themes: Patience Desire

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“I daily weigh up my whole life and continue in the fiery brilliance of a sacred world far higher than the suicidal ashes of rationality.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“Most will throw themselves with greed back at men, things, and thoughts, whose slaves they will become from then on.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“Do you believe in this false measure, that laughter is lower than worship?”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“If your virtues hinder you from salvation, discard them, since they have become evil to you. The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“Words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

Themes: Truth

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“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.”

from Red Book, Liber Novus

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“Everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method.”

Themes: Integrity

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“Science is an invaluable tool but only clouds our insight when it claims to being the one and only way of understanding.”

Themes: Science

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“We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”

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“One must be able to let things happen which is quite different from doing nothing... a way is only the way when one finds it and follows it oneself.”

Themes: Letting Go

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“I was completely ignorant of Chinese philosophy and it was only much later that my professional experiences showed me that in my methods I was unconsciously led along that secret way which for centuries has been the preoccupation of the best minds of the east.”

Themes: Taoism

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“Consciousness is forever interfering… It would be a simple enough thing to do, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

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“The union of opposites is not a rational affair, nor is it a matter of will, but a psychic process of development which expresses itself in symbols.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

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“Spontaneous fantasies become more and more profound concentrating in abstract structures, 'principles,' true gnostic archai that create intuitive formulations that tend to be dramatized or personified.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

Themes: Imagination

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“Insanity is possession by an unconscious content when consciousness has denied its existence… this narrowness of consciousness, this hubris is always the shortest way to the insane asylum.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

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“The serious problems of life are never fully solved. The meaning and design of a problem does not lie in its solution but in our incessant working on it. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrifaction.”

from Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Themes: Problems

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“For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights.”

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“What is so staggering about Ulysses is the fact that behind a thousand veils nothing lies hidden; that it turns neither toward the mind nor toward the world, but, as cold as the moon looking on from cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being, and decay to pursue its course.”

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“Intuition is a kind of instinctive apprehension through which any one content is presented as a complete whole, the highest form of cognition... Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me, my aim became to leave things to chance...”

Themes: Wu Wei

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“Paracelsus had no conception of ‘psychology’ but did have deep insights into psychic events which the most up-to-date psychology is only now struggling to investigate again.”

from Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon, 1942

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“The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.”

from Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon, 1942

Themes: Obstacles

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“How useful the I Ching is in making you project your hitherto unrealized thoughts into its abstruse symbolism... The less one thinks about the theory, the more soundly one sleeps.”

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“Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundamentals of the universe, to be the first to speak of the suffering of the world which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of the confusion, passion, evil—all those things which the [other philosophers] hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Confusion

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“For all its critical analysis, philosophy has not yet managed to root out its psychopaths. What do we have psychiatric diagnosis for? That grizzler Kierkegaard also belongs in this galere.”

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“My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious... my personal myth... I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like... The difference between most people and myself is that for me the 'dividing walls' are transparent. That is my peculiarity... To some extent I perceive the processes going on in the background”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It's true life is invisible, hidden... What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The life of man is a dubious experiment... so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all... We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“All other memories of travels, people, and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings... Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared... bouts with the unconscious are indelibly engraved upon my memory; everything else has lost importance”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Memory Travel Forget

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“when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Medicine

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“Lao Tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return to his own being, into the unknowable meaning. The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“as in all metaphysical questions, both are true; Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Old Age

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“The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things... that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil an do not even know what is before us, let along what to pit against it... Touching evil brings with it the grave peril of succumbing to it... Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Evil

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“as in the past, so in the future, the wrong we have done, thought, or intended will wreak its vengeance on our souls.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“We must, therefore, never succumb to anything at all—not even to good. A so-called good to which we succumb loses its ethical character.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. We must beware of thinking of good and evil as absolute opposites.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Problems

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“This expanse of water was an inconceivable pleasure to me, an incomparable splendor... without water, I thought, nobody could live at all.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Water

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“Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable, never quite lovable... a god of death, helpful, it is true, in that he scared away the terrors of the night, but himself uncanny, a crucified and bloody corpse. Secretly, his love and kindness which I always heard praised, appeared doubtful to me”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“he did not know the immediate, living God who stands—omnipotent and free—above His Bible and His Church... In his trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Golden Chains God

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“I hated all competition, and if someone played a game too competitively I turned my back on the game. Thereafter I remained second in the class, and found this considerably more enjoyable.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Chapters: 8. Like Water

Themes: Competition

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“today as then—because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not want to know—I am a solitary”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years while I—like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out—am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions. I was but the sum of my emotions, and the Other in me was the timeless, imperishable stone.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Longevity

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“Nothing could persuade me that 'in the image of God' applied only to man. In fact, it seemed to me that the high mountains the rivers, lakes, trees flowers, and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than men with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The 'natural mind' is the mind which says absolutely straight and ruthless things. That is the sort of mind which springs from natural sources, and not from opinions taken from books; it wells up from the earth like a natural spring, and brings with it the peculiar wisdom of nature.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Ordinary Mind

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“This was called the 'Christian religion,' but none of it had anything to do with God as I had experienced Him... that is not religion at all. It is an absence of God; the church is a place I should not go to. It is not life which is there, but death.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Christianity

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“Only in Meister Eckhart did I feel the breath of life—not that I understood him.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“Of the 19th century philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a may who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet... At last I had found confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power and—more important—the role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering... My godfather and authority was the great Goethe himself... But I could not forgive him... I was deeply sorry that Goethe too had fallen for those cunning devices by which evil is rendered innocuous.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“there were no philosophers in my father's library—they were suspect because they thought”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Philosophy

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“The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who cannot save his skin with a satisfactory answer... It exerts a mighty suction which greedily draws everything living into itself; we can only escape from it—for awhile—by pressing forward.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: History

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“My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light my only light.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Wisdom

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“the great find resulting from my researches was Schopenhauer... [his] rugged pessimism is almost cheerful in its bravery. We wish to believe in life, but with both eyes open: ans Schopenhauer opens both eyes without pity and without fear.”

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“My experiences with human beings, too had taught me anything rather than a belief in man's original goodness and decency... On the other hand, man and the proper animals were bits of God that had become independent.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Basic Goodness

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“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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Faust—as I now realized with something of a shock—meant more to me than my beloved Gospel according to St. John. There was something in Faust that worked directly on my feelings... I was convinced that he was the answer which Goethe had given to his times.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“Nietzsche had been on my program for some time, but I hesitated to begin reading him because I felt insufficiently prepared... I was held back by a secret fear that I might perhaps be like him... In spite of these trepidations, I finally resolved to read him and I was carried away by enthusiasm... He was moved by the childish hope of finding people who would be able to share his ecstasies... But he found only educated Philistines. That was the reason for the bombastic language—all a vain attempt to catch the ear of a world which had sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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Thus Spake Zarathustra—this like Goethe's Faust, was a tremendous experience for me... his No. 2 and my No. 2 now corresponded—though this was rather like comparing a molehill with Mount Blanc. And Zarathustra—there could be no doubt abut that—was morbid... Just as Faust had opened a door for me, Zararthustra slammed one shut, and it remained shut for a long time to come.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The naïve person does not appreciate what an insult it is to talk to one's fellows about anything that is unknown to them. They pardon such ruthless behavior only in a writer, journalist, or poet. I came to see that a new idea, or even just an unusual aspect of an old one, can be communicated only by facts.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Skillful Means

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“It was an entry into the monastery of the world, a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probably, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal... only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The finest and most significant conversations of my life were anonymous.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Anonymity

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“Not the least of what I have learned has come from my errors and defeats.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Mistakes

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“Words butter no parsnips; nevertheless, this futile procedure is repeated ad infinitum... the reality of life is covered up by so-called clear concepts. Experience is striped of its substance, and instead mere names are substituted, which are henceforth put in the place of reality.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“It is a widespread error to imagine that I do not see the value of sexuality... Sexuality is of the greatest importance as the expression of the chthonic spirit. That spirit is the 'other face of God,' the dark side of the God-image.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Sex

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“Freud's greatest achievement probably consisted in taking neurotic patients seriously and entering into their peculiar individual psychology... For us, then young psychiatrists, it was a source of illumination, while for our older colleagues it was an object of mockery. Like an Old Testament prophet, he undertook to overthrow false gods, to rip the veils away from a mass of dishonesties and hypocrisies, mercilessly exposing the rottenness of contemporary psyche... By evaluating dreams, he gave back to mankind a tool that had seemed irretrievably lost... I became an open partisan of Freud's and fought for him.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree... Sexuality evidently meant more to Freud that to other people. For him it was something to be religiously observed... He was blind toward the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the unconscious... I see him as a tragic figure; for he was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his daimon... his work had obviously brought him so little that was pleasurable and satisfactory that he took a sour view of the world.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The play and counterplay between two personalities... plays out in every individual. In my life, No. 2 has been of prime importance... but he is perceived only by the very few. Most people's conscious understanding is not sufficient to realize that he is also what they are.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“I always knew that I was two people—One was the son of my parents who went to school and was less intelligent attentive hard-working, decent, and clean than many other boys The other was grown up—old in fact—skeptical, misrustful, remote from the world of men, men but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams, and whatever 'God' worked directly in him.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“Fate had punished her enough! It seemed to me more meaningful that she should return to life in order to atone in life for her crime... She had to bear this burden.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Punishment

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“'Yes,' I thought, 'this is it, my world, the real world, the secret where there are no teachers, no schools, no unanswerable questions, where one can be without having to ask anything'... In real life, I have promised myself this splendor again and again, but I have never kept my promise.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“She was a murderess, but on top of that she had also murdered herself. For one who commits such a crime destroys her own soul... Sometimes it seems as if even animals and plants 'know' it.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to keep my emotions in check. But since it was my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“Wherever there is a reaching down into innermost experience into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fright, and many run away.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“a dogma, that is to say, an undisputable confession of faith, is set up only when the aim is to suppress doubts once and for all. But that no longer has anything to do with scientific judgment; only with personal power drive.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Doubt

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“The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or—to put it in mythic terms—the divinity incarnate in man.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“No one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown... A man must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious... Only then is life whole. For me, the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Emptiness

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“I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter, I had to move on. I had no patience with people—aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me... When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Continuity

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“I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness... There is nothing I'm quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Openness

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“In the Red Book I tried an esthetic elaboration of my fantasies, but never finished it. I became aware that I had not yet found the right language, that I still had to translate it into something else. Therefore I gave up this estheticizing tendency in good time, in favor of a rigorous process of understanding.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“I read seven volumes of Swedenborg... what was burning interest to me was null and void for others and even a cause for dread.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his great gifts... the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element... ruthless, naive egoism, vanity, all kinds of vices—and all this in order to bring to the human "I" at least some life-strength, since otherwise it would perish of sheer inanition.”

from Psychology and Poetry (1930)

Themes: Creativity

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“The lack of comprehension goes so far, that even learned sinologues have not understood the practical application of the I Ching, and have therefore looked on the book as a collection of abstruse magical charms.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

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“just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so to, does the psyche possess a common substratum... the collective unconscious... latent dispositions toward identical reactions.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

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“he could not escape feeling the collision of the opposites, and therefore he sought out the way of life in which he would be what the Hindu terms nirdvandva, free of opposites.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

Themes: Hinduism

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“a successful business man attaining all his desires regardless of death and the devil, and then withdrawing from activity at the crowning point of his success... changes him into a querulous old woman, fastens him to his bed, and thus finally destroys him.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

Themes: Business

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“night begins at midday”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

Themes: Equanimity

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“the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble... They can never be solved, only outgrown... while to remain caught in a conflict is something pathological.”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

Themes: Conflict

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“I deliberately express myself in very abstract terms in order to avoid causing a prejudice in one direction or another. The new thing must not be pigeon-holed under any heading, for then it is applied in a way that permits mechanical duplication”

from Introduction to Secret of the Golden Flower

Themes: Inscrutable

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“Of the 19th century philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison.”

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“Seldom—or perhaps never—does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothy and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.”

Themes: Suffering

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“since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world... This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler's is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, and unreasonable. … So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth.”

from Interview (1939)​

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“We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god.”

from The Symbolic Life (1939)

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“time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains qualities which can manifest themselves in relative simultaneousness in different places and in a parallelism which cannot be explained, like in cases of simultaneous appearance of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic conditions.”

from Secret of the Golden Flower Introduction

Themes: Time Continuity

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“The greatest influence on the life of the child is the unlived life of the parents.”

Themes: Family

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“the individual is so unconscious that he altogether fails to see his own potentialities for decision making. Instead, he is constantly and anxiously looking around for external rules and regulations which can guide him in his perplexity.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Free Will

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“I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Free Will

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“Wilhelm was a truly religious spirit, with an unclouded and farsighted view of things. He had the gift of being able to listen without bias to the revelations of a foreign mentality, and to accomplish that miracle of empathy which enabled him to make the intellectual treasures of China accessible to Europe.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-conscious may extend... All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal”

from Civilization in Transition

Themes: Dream

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“Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feat because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts—which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“The second part of Faust was more than a literary exercise. It is a link in the Aurea Catena [the Golden or Homeric Chian] which has existed from the beginnings of philosophical alchemy... Unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous, it is a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialog between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be 'normal'... My aim was to show that delusions and hallucination, were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“I began to blame philosophers for rattling away when experience was lacking and holding their tongues when they ought to have been answering with facts. In this respect, they all seemed like watered-down theologians.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Philosophy

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“I felt that I had passed through the valley of diamonds, but I could convince no one—not even myself, when I looked at them more closely—that the specimens I had brought back were not mere pieces of gravel.”

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Sacred World

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“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.”

Themes: True Self

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“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

Themes: Projection

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“Where your fear is, there is your task.”

Themes: Fear

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“Thinking is difficult. That's why most people judge.”

Themes: Reason

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“Even a happy life cannot cannot be without a measure of darkness. And the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

Themes: Happiness

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“Go to the country. Raise children, raise pigs, and raise carrots.”

Themes: Strategy

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Quotes about Carl Jung (4 quotes)

“Jung made the first tentative use of the term 'synchronicity', after he observed the simultaneous happenings of psychic phenomena and apparently unconnected outer events which could not be explained by the law of cause and effect”

Anagarika​ (Lama) Govinda 1898 – 1985 CE
(Ernst Hoffmann)
Pioneer of Tibetan Buddhism to the West

from Inner Structure of the I Ching

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“My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious... my personal myth... I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like... The difference between most people and myself is that for me the 'dividing walls' are transparent. That is my peculiarity... To some extent I perceive the processes going on in the background”

Carl Jung 1875 – 1961 CE
Insightful shamanistic scientist
from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e. the world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants.”

Colin Wilson 1931 – 2013 CE
from Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision (1985)

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“… in this house that Carl Jung built, piling up stones with his own hands, at the very entrance, he found the need to chisel out these words… Sometimes I close my eyes and repeat them over and over, and they make me strangely calm. ‘Cold or Not, God Is Present.’”

Haruki Murakami 1949 CE – via Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel

Themes: Travel

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