Quotes about Jung

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.

In the book of Job written several centuries before the New Testament, Yaweh subject his “faithful servant,” Job,  to a harrowing series of tests, after excepting a wager from Satan that Job’s faith can be broken.  “Job is no more the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God,” wrote Jung.  Like a scientist performing some cruel experiment on bacilli in a test tube, Yaweh kills Job’s family, removes his land, riddles him with disease, and inflicts every imaginable form of ruin upon him.  Job, however, remains steadfast.  At the same time, he is determined to understand the reason for his plight.  According to Jung, Job is the first man to comprehend the split inside Yaweh – that the God-image is an antimony, comprising both the dark god of cruelty and the benevolent deity of love and justice;  “in light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.”  Confronted by archetypal injustice, Job insists on equalizing compassion, and eventually receives it, as his status in the world is restored.

Despite his overpowering might, the creator fears the judgment of his creature.  “Yaweh projects onto Job a skeptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye,” Jung noted.  From the perspective of the God-image, Job had attained a higher state of knowledge than Yaweh through his trvails, and this required a compensatory sacrifice, enacted, a few hundred years later, through the incarnation of Christ.

Jung realized that God intended to fully incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this time was quickly approaching.  From his psychoanalytic and personal work and theoretical musings, he proposed that the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was unfolding into a “quaternity,” adding a fourth element that had been suppressed from the Western psyche.  “The enigma of squaring the circle” was one representation of this quaternity, “an age-old and presumably pre-historic symbol, always associated with the idea of a world-creating deity.”  This aspect of divinity, now returning and requiring assimilation into consciousness, was the Devil, who had been dissociated from the Western psyche at the beginning of the Judeo-Christian aeon.  Along with the Devil, the fourth element also represented natural wisdom, personified by the Gnosticc deity Sophia, long exiled and excised from the canonical texts.

Since the creator is an antimony, a totality of inner opposites, his creatures reflect this schism.  To descend into humanity, God must choose “the creaturely man filled with darkness – the natural man who is tainted with original sin,” Jung wrote.  “The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world, and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room.”  The uniting of opposites, the reconciliation of dark and light contained in the God-image, can only take place within the consciously realized “guilty man,” not the sanctimonious, ascetic, or self-righteous one – anyone who denies their shadow will only project it in some new form.

“Yaweh is not split, but is an antimony – a totality of inner opposites – and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism,”  Jung realized.  Not only a benevolent helper, the god-image also represents the forces that oppose us, throwing obstacles in our path, surprising and humiliating us, inciting suffering to create intensified self-consciousness.  God, as a psychic fact, reveals himself in our neuroses, our allergies, our failed love affairs.  “God enters through the wound,” he wrote.

Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit.

The decisive question for man is:

Is he related to something infinite or not? 

That is the telling question of his life. 

Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance...If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. 

In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. 

In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.

In the midst of everyday struggle we hope for enlightenment and some kind of release.  In our prayer and meditation we hope for fulfilling ordinary life.  Jung always taught that these two, anima and animus, are capable of a mystical wedding, the heiros gamos, a divine union.  But it is not an easy marriage to effect.  Spirit tends to to shoot off in it's own ambition, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and perfectionism.  Soul gets stuck in its soupy moods, impossible relationships, and obsessive preoccupations.  For the marriage to take place, each has to learn to appreciate the other and to be affected by the other - spirits lofty aims tempered by the souls lowly limitations, soul's unconsciousness stirred by ideas and imagination.

The test of healthy religion, then, is its ability to assimilate the psychic antithesis of good and evil in the imago Dei and in human nature. Christianity's paradox is that the one who embodies the wholeness of God becomes the victim of humanity's dark side. In redeeming humanity, the unblemished goodness of Christ shows up humanity's dark side. But, according to Jung, since Christ is fully human and fully divine, Christians should acknowledge the polarities of good and evil in the Christ archetype. Instead, Christians have spiritualized Christ and excluded the instinctual, bodily aspects of Christ from the Christ image.

 In analytical psychology, reality is ordered by a paradoxical movement of archetypal polarities. Individuation is the process by which these polarities are integrated. In this process, the ego, the center of awareness, differentiates from the Self -the center of wholeness- and reintegrates with the Self over the course of the life history. Jung maintains that it is in mid-life that we are mature enough to take on the arduous task of integrating the negative and contrasexual opposites of the personality.