Tag: Jung

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often are a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.

— Carl Jung

Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live. If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning.

— Carl Jung

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

— Carl Jung

Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. The conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly of his conscious contents, and for the other and far greater part, of his unconscious, which is of indefinite extent with no assignable limits. In this totality the conscious mind is contained like a smaller circle within a larger one. Hence it is quite possible for the ego to be made into an object, that is to say, for a more compendious personality to emerge in the course of development and take the ego into its service.

— Carl Jung

Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.

— Meister Eckhart

Wrapping both Jung and Zen up in a neat package.

Later on, life forces us to make one-sided differentiations. But that is why we get lost to ourselves and have to learn, again, to find ourselves. When you are whole, you have discovered yourself once again, and you know what you have been all the time.

— Carl Jung

There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside?

— Carl Jung

If we do not accept the existence of archetypes, reading ancient myths and fairy tales can be very helpful because these stories came spontaneously from people who had not studied psychology. The stories came straight out of their unconscious and, therefore, show us how the unconscious works unimpeded by conscious intervention.

— Carl Jung Depth Psychology

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Apparently attributed to Jesus, from the Gnostic Gospels, but could just have easily have come from Carl Jung.

Is this what you think it means to be human? How little adept we are at living! We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. And how much childish, shortsighted egotism lies in an intention! We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. How can we presume to want to know in advance from where the light will come to us?

— Carl Jung, The Black Books

There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come is created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is really yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

– Carl Jung, The Red Book