Quote of the day

Nowhere are closer to the sublime secret of all origination than in the recognition of our own selves., whom we always think we know already. Yet we know the immensities of space better than we know our own depths, where--even though we do not understand it--we can listen directly to the throb of creation itself. CW 8 - par 737

Quote of the day

Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived. CW 15 - par 4

Quote of the day

If there is anything that we wish to change in our children, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. CW 17 - par 287

Quote of the day

The totality of psyche can never be grasped by intellect alone. Whether we will or no, philosophy keeps breaking through, because the psyche seeks an expression that will embrace its total nature. CW 7 - par 201

Quote of the day

I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with hight ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being--that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal. CW 10 - par 588

Quote of the day

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is. CW 7 - par 242

Quote of the day

An ancient adept has said: "If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way." This Chinese saying, unfortunately only too true, stands in sharp contrast to our belief in the "right" method irrespective of the man who applies it. In reality, everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method. CW 13 - par 4

Quote of the day

There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the "thron in the flesh" is needed, the suffering of defects whcitout which there is no progress and nop ascent. CW 12 - par 208

Quote of the day

Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psyche, and collective psyche moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness. The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect...The archetypal image decide the fate of man. CW 18 - par 183

Quote of the day

Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. CW 11 - par 870

Quote of the day

It is just the most unexpected, the most terrifyingly chaotic things which reveal a deeper meaning...Gradually breakwaters are built against the surging of chaos, and the meaningful divides itself from the meaningless. When sense and nonsense are no longer identical, the force of chaos is weakened by their subtraction; sense is then endued with the force of meaning, and nonsense with the force of meaninglessness. In this way a new cosmos arises. CW 9 - par 64

Quote of the day

Just as the unconscious world of mythological images speaks indirectly, through the experiences of external things, to the man who surrenders himself wholly to the outer world, so the real world and its demands find their way indirectly to the man who has surrendered himself wholly to the soul; for no man can escape both realities. If he is intent only on the outer reality, he must live his myth; if he is turned only towards the inner reality, he must dream his outer, so-called real life. CW 6 - par 280

Quote of the day

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man., particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breadth of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movie, and thinks he knows what it is really like--and is then amazed that cowsheds "smell," because the dictionary did not say so. CW 10 - par 882

Quote of the day

No amount of skepticism and criticism has yet enabled me to regard dreams as negligible occurrences. Often enough they appear senseless, but it is obviously we who lack the sense and ingenuity to read the enigmatic message from the nocturnal realm of the psyche. Seeing that at least half of our psychic existence is passed in that realm, and that consciousness acts upon our nightly life just as much as the unconscious overshadows our daily life, it would seem all the more incumbent on medical psychology to sharpen its senses by a systematic study of dreams. Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings? They are truly part of our life, and sometimes more truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day. CW 16 - par 325

Quote of the day

We should not try to 'get rid' of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. We should even learn to be thankful to it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are. A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it--it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him. From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. CW 10 - par 361

Quote of the day

Perhaps art has no "meaning," at least not as we understand meaning. Perhaps it is like nature, which simply is and "means" nothing beyond that. Is "meaning" necessarily more than mere interpretation--an interpretation secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning? Art, it has been said, is beauty, and "a thing of beauty is a joy forever." It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art. CW 15 - par 121

Quote of the day

That the greatest effects come from the smallest causes has become patently clear not only in physics but in the field of psychological research as well. How often in the critical moments of life everything hangs on what appears to be a mere nothing! CW 9 - par 408

Quote of the day

The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing. CW 10 - par 1004

Quote of the day

Rational truths are not the last word, there are also irrational ones. In human affairs, what appears impossible by way of the intellect has often become true by way of the irrational. Indeed, all the greatest changes that have ever affected mankind have come not by way of intellectual calculation, but by ways which contemporary minds either ignored or rejected as absurd, and which were recognized only long afterwards because of their intrinsic necessity. More often than not they are never recognized at all, for the all-important laws of mental development are still a book with seven seals. CW 6 - par 135

Quote of the day

The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual. CW 7 - par 305

Quote of the day

For the modern man, a conscious encounter with the autonomous archetypal psyche is equivalent to the discovery of God. After such an experience he is no longer alone in his psyche and his whole world view is altered. He is freed to a large extent from the projections of the Self onto secular aims and objects. He is released from the tendency to identify with any particular partisan faction which might lead him to live out the conflict of opposites in the outer world. Such a person is consciously committed to the process of individuation. Edward F. Edinger. Ego and Archetype. p. 104

Quote of the day

To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself, and which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage. But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one's back. To see and admit the shadow is part of the problem, to say something has happened to me, something has leaked out.; but the great ethical problem begins when one makes up one's mind to express the shadow consciously. That requires great care and reflection if it is not to have a disturbing effect. M.-L. von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, p. 5

Quote of the day

The dream is a little door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic might which was psyche log before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness f that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. C.G. Jung, CW 10 - par 304f

Quote of the day

Incisive changes in history are generally attributed exclusively to external causes. It seems to me, however, that external circumstances often serve merely as occasions for a new attitude to life and the world, long prepared in the unconscious, to become manifest. CW 8 - par 594

Quote of the day

Nobody can meddle with fire or poison without being affected in some vulnerable spot; for the true physician does not stand outside his work but is always in the thick of it. CW 12 - par 5

Quote of the day

Nobody can say where man ends. That is the beauty of it. The unconscious of man can reach God knows where. There we are going to make discoveries. Conversations with Carl Jung, Evans - p. 62

Quote of the day

Psychic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image. Only psychic existence is immediately verifiable. To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually nonexistent. CW 11 - par 769

Quote of the day

The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and the consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. CW 11 - par 756

Public Program

Monday, September 26, 2011 - Monday, October 31, 2011

A Collected Works Reading Program: Alchemical Studies, Volume 13 , Part III, pars. 144-238

Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon
Presented by J. Gordon Nelson, Ph.D.

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Quote of the day

People who merely believe and don't think always forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worst enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping-stone to better knowledge. CW 11 - par 170

Quote of the day

Only life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but fol all concerned. CW 8 - par 645

Quote of the day

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him his instrument. The artists is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his owns ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. CW 15 - par 157

Quote of the day

The small world of the child, the family milieu, is the model for the big world. The more intensely the family sets its stamp on the child, the more he will be emotionally inclined, as an adult, to see in the great world his former small world. Of course this must not be taken as a conscious intellectual process. On the contrary, the patient feels and sees the difference between now and then, and tries as well as he can to adapt himself. Perhaps he will even believe himself perfectly adapted, since he may be able to grasp the situation intellectually, but that does not prevent his emotions from lagging far behind his intellectual insight. CW 4 - par 312

Quote of the day

Neurosis is intimately bound up with the problem of our time and really represents an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person. CW 7 - par 18

Quote of the day

Everything to do with religion, everything it is and asserts, touches the human soul so closely that psychology least of all can afford to overlook it. CW 11 - par 172

Quote of the day

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. CW 9 - par 429

Quote of the day

To have soul is the whole adventure of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence. CW 9 - par 56

Quote of the day

The nature of psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding. It contains as many riddles as the universe with its galactic systems, before whose majestic configurations only a mind lacking in imagination can fail to admit its own insufficiency. CW 8 - par 815

Quote of the day

The individual distinguishes himself himself by his deeds, the many by their renunciation of power. CW 7 - Par 238

Quote of the day

Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language. (Indeed, language itself is only an image.) The most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do it to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being. The archetype--let us never forget--is a psychic organ present in all of us. CW 9 - par 271

Quote of the day

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. In this latter case, unfortunately, there is no scientific test that would prove the discrepancy between perception and reality. Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naively projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection. CW 8 - par 507

Quote of the day

The more highly developed men of our time do not want to be guided by a creed or a dogma; they want to understand. So it's not surprising if they throw aside everything they do not understand.; and religious symbols, being the least intelligible of all, are generally the first to go overboard. The sacrifice of the intellect demanded by positive belief is a violation against which the conscience of the more highly developed individual rebels. CW 4 - par 434

Quote of the day

No one develops his personality because somebody tells him that it would be useful or advisable to do so. Nature has never yet been taken in by well-meaning advice. The only thing that moves nature is causal necessity, and that goes for human nature too. Without necessity nothing budges, the human personality least of all. It is tremendously conservative, not to say torpid. Only acute necessity is able to rouse it. The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command, no insight, only brute necessity; it needs the motivating force of inner or outer fatalities. Any other development would be no better than individualism. That is why the cry of "individualism" is a cheap insult when slung at the natural development of personality. CW 17 - par 293

Quote of the day

Gleaming islands, indeed whole continents, can still add themselves to our modern consciousness. CW 8 - par 387

Quote of the day

Nature is often obscure or impenetrable, but she is not, like man, deceitful. We must therefore take it that the dream is just what it pretends to be, neither more or less. If it shows something in a negative light, there is no reason for assuming that it is meant positively. CW 7 - par 162

Quote of the day

It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious... Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can non longer distinguish the God-image empirically. CW 11 - par 757

Quote of the day

If a man is capable of leading a responsible life himself, then he is also conscious of his duties to the community. CW 18 - par 56

Quote of the day

I said just now that we have no schools for forty-year olds. That is not quite true. Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regards them like that today? How many of us older ones have been brought up in such schools and really prepared for the second half of life, for old age, death and eternity. CW 8 - par 786

Quote of the day

Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take a step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. CW 8 - par 784

Quote of the day

The region of darkness into which one fall is not empty; it is the "lavishing mother" of Lao-Tzu, the "images" and the "seed". When the surface has been cleared, things can grow out of the depths. People always suppose that they have lost their way when they come up against these depths of experience. But if they do not know how to go on, the only answer is, the only advice that makes sense is "Wait fro what the unconscious has to say about the situation." A way is only the way when one finds it and follows it oneself. There is no general prescription for "how to do it". First Ed. of "The Integration Personality," p. 31f