ix. Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value. As a result, all memory of outer events has faded, and perhaps these ‘outer’ experiences were never so very essential anyhow, or were so only in that they coincided with phases of my inner development. An enormous part of these ‘outer’ manifestations of my life has vanished from my memory—for the very reason, so it has seemed to me, that I participated in them with all my energies. Yet these are the very things that make up a sensible biography: persons one has met, travels, adventures, entanglements, blows of destiny, and so on. But with few exceptions all these things have become for me phantasms which I barely recollect and which my mind has no desire to reconstruct, for they no longer stir my imagination.

 

Ix. To the day of his death the conflict between affirmation and rejection was never entirely settled. There always remained a residue of skepticism, a shying away from his future readers.

 

ix. Jung has been particularly reticent in speaking of his encounters with people, both public figures and close friends and relatives.

 

Xiii. Jung was constantly defining his concepts in new and different ways, for an ultimate definition, he felt, was not possible. He thought it wise to let the inexplicable elements that always cling to psychic realities remain as riddles or mysteries.

 

Prologue

3. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life.

            Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories.” Whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.

 

4. How then can a man form any definite opinion about himself?

            We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives… We do not know how life is going to turn out. Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only be vaguely hinted at. #brighteyes #conoroberst #lifted #lyrics

            The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all.

 

4. Yet I have never lose a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

 

5. Similarly, other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection. #timeline #freewill

 

5. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings.

I. FIRST YEARS

7. This expanse of water was an inconceivable pleasure to me, an incomparable splendor. At that time the idea became fixed in my mind that I must live near a lake; without water, I thought, nobody could live at all.

 

8. Dim intimations of trouble in my parents’ marriage hovered around me. #relationships

 

8. This type of girl later became a component on my anima. The feeling of strangeness which she conveyed, and yet of having known her always, was a characteristic of that figure which later came to symbolize for me the whole essence of womanhood.

 

9. These things point to an unconscious suicidal urge or, it may be, to a fatal resistance to life in this world.

 

10. little children were compared to chicks which Lord Jesus evidently “took” reluctantly, like bitter medicine. This was difficult to understand. But I understood it at once that Satan liked chicks and had to be prevented from eating them. So, although Lord Jesus did not like the taste, he ate them anyway, so that Satan would not get them.

 

13. Secretly, his love and kindness, which I always heard praised, appeared doubtful to me, chiefly because the people who talked most about “dear Lord Jesus” wore black frock coats and shiny black boots which reminded me of burials.

 

14. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.

 

17. This unchildlike behavior was connected on the one hand with an intense sensitivity and vulnerability, on the other hand—and this especially—with the loneliness of my early youth. (My sister was born nine years after me.) I played alone, and in my own way. Unfortunately I cannot remember what I played; I recall only that I did not want to be disturbed.  I was deeply absorbed in my games and could not endure being watched or judged while I played them.

 

18. At night Mother was strange and mysterious.

 

18. I had anxiety dreams of things that were now small, now large. For instance, I saw a tiny ball at a great distance; gradually it approached, growing steadily into a monstrous and suffocating object.

 

19. I hated going to church.

 

20. Often, when I was alone, I sat down on this stone, and then began an imaginary game that went something like this: “I am sitting on top of this stone and it is underneath.” But the stone also could say “I” and think: “I am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me.” The question then arose: “Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?” This question always perplexed me, and I would stand up, wondering who was what now. The answer remained totally unclear, and my uncertainty was accompanied by a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness. But there was no doubt whatsoever that this stone stood in some secret relationship to me. I could sit on it for hours, fascinated by the puzzle it set me. #inanimateobjects

 

21. It felt safe, and the tormenting sense of being at odds with myself was gone. In all difficult situations whenever I had done something wrong or my feelings had been hurt, or when my father’s instability or my mother’s invalidism oppressed me, I thought of my carefully bedded-down and wrapped-up manikin and his smooth, prettily colored stone.

 

22. The meaning of these actions, or how I might explain them, never worried me. I contented myself with the feeling of newly won security, and was satisfied to possess something that no one knew and no one could get at.

 

22. Why that was so I did not ask myself. It simply was so.

 

22. And when religious teachings were pumped into me and I was told, “This is beautiful and this is good,” I would think to myself: “Yes, but there is something else, something very secret that people don’t know about.”

 

23. When I was a child I performed the ritual just as I have seen it done by the natives of Africa; they act first and do not know what they are doing. Only long afterward do they reflect on what they have done.

II. SCHOOL YEARS

24. For my father in particular I felt compassion—less, curiously enough, for my mother. She always seemed to me the stronger of the two.

 

25. This sudden appearance of my sister left me with a vague sense of distrust which sharpened my curiosity and observation.

 

26. For in my forlorn state I remembered that I was also the “Other,” the person who possessed that inviolable secret, the black stone and the little man in frock coat and top hat.

 

27. God was not complicated by my distrust… He was, to be sure, something like a very powerful old man. But to my great satisfaction there was a commandment to the effect that “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything.”

 

29. But my fear of failure and my sense of smallness in the face of the vast world around me created in me not only a dislike but a kind of silent despair which completely ruined school for me.

 

29. I could draw only what stirred my imagination.

 

29. To be sure, the world seemed to me beautiful and desirable, but it was also filled with vague and incomprehensible perils.

 

31. I frittered away my time with loafing, collecting, reading, and playing. But I did not feel any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself.

 

32. I knew that he had been put up to it, so to speak, and that the whole affair was a diabolical plot on my part. I knew, too, that this was never going to happen to me again. I had a feeling of rage against myself, and at the same time was ashamed of myself. For I knew that I had wronged myself and made a fool of myself in my own eyes. Nobody else was to blame; I was the cursed renegade! From then on I could no longer endure my parents’ worrying about me or speaking of me in a pitying tone.

            The neurosis became another of my secrets, but it was a shameful secret, a defeat. Nevertheless it induced in me a studied punctiliousness and an unusual diligence… Regularly I would get up at five o’clock in order to study, and sometimes I worked from three in the morning till seven, before going to school.

 

32. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

 

32. Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist. #freewill

 

33. Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons.

 

34. I cannot describe what was happening in me or what it was that affected me so strongly: a longing, a nostalgia, or a recognition that kept saying, “Yes, that’s how it was! Yes, that’s how it was!” #dejavu

 

35. I could not understand this identity I felt with the eighteenth century. Often in those days I would write the date 1786 instead of 1886, and each time this happened I was overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia.

 

35. At the time these considerations were, I should say, mostly in the form of vague glimmerings and dreams.

 

37. “I  haven’t done this or wanted this, it has come on me like a bad dream. Where do such things come from? This has happened to me without my doing. Why? After all, I didn’t create myself, I came into the world the way God made me—that is, the way I was shaped by my parents.”

 

38. (Adam and Eve) and yet they committed the first sin by doing what God did not want them to do. How was that possible? They could not have done it if God had not placed them in the possibility of doing it… God in His omniscience had arranged everything so that the first parents would have to sin. Therefore it was God’s intention that they should sin.

            This thought liberated me instantly from my worst torment, since I now knew that God Himself had placed me in this situation.

 

38. My broken sleep and my spiritual distress had worn me out to such a point that fending off the thought was tying me into unbearable knots. This could not go on. At the same time, I could not yield before I understood what God’s will was and what He intended. For I was now certain that He was the author of this desperate problem. #freewill

 

39. Hence there was no question in my mind but that God Himself was arranging a decisive test for me, and that everything depended on my understanding Him correctly. I knew, beyond a doubt, that I would ultimately be compelled to break down, to give way, but I did not want it to happen without my understanding it, since the salvation of my eternal soul was at stake.

 

39. I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thoughts come.

 

40. That was what my father had not understood, I thought; he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. And that was why he had never experienced the miracle of grave which heals all and makes all comprehensible.

 

40. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way.

 

40. It was obedience which brought me grace, and after that experience I knew what God’s grace was. One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling his will. Otherwise all is folly and meaningless.

 

40. But then came the dim understanding that God could be something terrible. I had experienced a dark and terrible secret. It overshadowed my whole life, and I became deeply pensive. #bluebeard

 

41. Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of.

 

41. My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret. I induced in me an almost unendurable loneliness… Thus the pattern of my relationship to the world was already prefigured: today as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not even want to know.

 

42. I was but the sum of my emotions, and the Other in me was the timeless, imperishable stone.

 

44. I knew so little about myself, and the little was so contradictory that I could not with a good conscience reject any accusations.

 

44. Naturally I compensated my inner insecurity by an outward show of security, or—to put it better—the defect compensated itself without the intervention of my will… Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons.

 

47. These were the crucial experiences of my life. It was then that it dawned on me: I must take the responsibility, it is up to me how my fate turns out.

 

48. From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled… That gave me the strength to go my own way.

 

51. In the course of my life it has often happened to me that I suddenly knew something which I really could not know at all. The knowledge came to me as though it were my own idea.

 

57. As far as I knew the Bible, this definition seemed to fit. God has a personality and is the ego of the universe, just as I myself am the ego of my psychic and physical being.

 

57. I felt the strongest resistances to imagining God by analogy with my own ego.

 

58. Certainly the world is immeasurably beautiful, but it is quite as horrible.  

 

63. Reading was not only interesting but provided a welcome and beneficial distraction from the preoccupations of personality No. 2, which in increasing measure were leading me to depressions.

 

65. My grief and rage threatened to get out of control. And then something happened that I had already observed in myself several times before: there was a sudden inner silence, as though a soundproof door had been closed on a noisy room. It was as if a mood of cool curiosity came over me, and I asked myself “What is really going on here? All right, you are excited. OF course the teacher is an idiot who doesn’t understand your nature—that is, doesn’t understand it any more than you do. Therefore he is as mistrustful as you are. You distrust yourself and others, and that is why you side with those who are naïve, simple, and easily seen through. One gets excited when one doesn’t understand things.”

 

66. Although at that time I doubtless saw no difference as yet between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, and still claimed the world of No. 2 as my own personal world, there was always, deep in the background, the feeling that something other than myself was involved. It was as though a breath of the great world of stars and endless space had touched me, or as if spirit had invisibly entered the room—the spirit of one who had long been dead and yet was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future. Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of a numen.

 

66. It was no mere locality on the map, but “God’s world,” so ordered by Him and filled with secret meaning.

 

67. People were like animals, and seemed as unconscious as they. They looked down upon the ground or up into the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what purpose; like animals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God’s world, in an eternity where everything is already born and everything has already died. #timeline

            Because they are so closely akin to us and share our unknowingness, I loved all warm-blooded animals who have souls like ourselves and with whom, so I thought, we have an instinctive understanding. We experience joy and sorrow, love and hate, hunger and thirst, fear and trust in common—all the essential features of existence with the exception of speech, sharpened consciousness, and science. And although I admired science in the conventional way, I also saw it giving rise to alienation and aberration from God’s world, as leading to a degeneration which animals were not capable of. Animals were dear and faithful, unchanging and trustworthy. People I now distrusted more than ever. #athiesm

 

67.  Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life.

 

69. I thought, “They all want to force something to come out by tricks of logic, something they have not been granted and do not really know about. They want to prove a belief to themselves, whereas actually it is a matter of experience.” #philosophy

 

70. I discovered that poverty was no handicap and was far from being the principal reason for suffering; that the sons of the rich really did not enjoy any advantages over the poor and ill-clad boys. There were far deeper reasons for happiness and unhappiness than one’s allotment of pocket money. #wealth

 

71. By cautious inquiries I discovered that they looked askance at me because I often made remarks, or dropped hints, about things which I could not possibly know.

 

82. As long as I knew so little about real things, there was no point, I thought, in thinking about them.

III. STUDENT YEARS

85. I felt I was in some way odd. Why could I not make up my mind and commit myself to something definite?

 

90. Children react much less to what grownups say than to the imponderables in the surrounding atmosphere.

 

97. I would not have missed this time of poverty. One learns to value the simple things.

 

99. I, too, was not certain of the absolute reliability of the reports, but why, after all, should there not be ghosts? How did we know that something was “impossible”? And, above all, what did the anxiety signify? For myself I found such possibilities extremely interesting and attractive. They added another dimension to my life; the world gained depth and background. Could, for example, dreams have anything to do with ghosts?

 

100. I had the feeling that I had pushed to the brink of the world; what was of burning interest to me was null and void for others, and even a cause for dread.

 

103. I realized that one gets nowhere unless one talks to people about the things they know.

 

109. But I knew—and nothing and nobody could have deflected me from my purpose—that my decision stood, and that it was fate. It was as though two rivers had united and in one grant torrent were mearing me inexorably toward distant goals.

 

111. I felt resistances against this, for I could not and would no let myself be classified.

 

113. In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others.

IV. PSYCHIATRIC ACTIVITIES

117. In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of.

 

117. In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality.

 

123. It comes out in the end. Sometimes it seems as if even animals and plants “know” it.

 

125. Henceforth I devoted all my attention to the meaningful connections in a psychosis.

 

126. much of what we had hitherto regarded as senseless was not as crazy as it seemed.

 

127. A personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the psychosis. The fault is ours if we do not understand them.

 

131. When a doctor tells me that he adheres strictly to this or that method, I have my doubts about his therapeutic effect.

 

134. As a doctor I constantly have to ask myself what kind of message the patient is bringing me. What does he mean to me?

 

137. The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.

 

138. This situation was a genuine synchronistic phenomenon such as is quite often observed in connection with an archetypal situation—in this case, death.

 

140. I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.

 

144. The spirit does not dwell in concepts, but in deeds and in facts.

 

145. Encounters with people of so many different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities. The finest and most significant conversations of my life were anonymous.

V. SIGMUND FREUD

152. Much later, when I reflected upon Freud’s character, they revealed their significance. There was on characteristic of his that preoccupied me above all: his bitterness.

 

152. and there is, after all, no harsher bitterness than that of a person who is his own worst enemy.

 

153. Freud shows how the object succumbs to the drive, and Adler how man uses the drive in order to force his will upon the object.

 

154. Numinous experience elevates and humiliates simultaneously.

 

154. Nirdvandva (freedom from opposites) is the Orient’s remedy for this. I have not forgotten that. The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

 

158. I was concerned with investigating truth, not with questions of personal prestige.

 

158. it sometimes happens to the best analyst that he is unable to unlock the riddle of a dream.

 

161. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best is can. These forms of life, too, have no wish to deceive our eyes, but we may deceive ourselves because our eyes are shortsighted. Or we hear amiss because our ears are rather deaf—but it is not our ears that wish to deceive us.

 

165. My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

 

166. One form of life cannot simply be abandoned unless it is exchanged for another.

 

168. Having reached this insight, I was able to write again, even though I knew that my ideas would go uncomprehended.

VI. CONFRONTATION WITH THE UNCONSCIOUS

170. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had not yet found my own footing.

 

172. But I knew no technique whereby I might get to the bottom of my inner processes, and so there remained nothing for me to do but wait, go on with my life, and pay close attention to my fantasies.

 

173. Thereupon I said to myself, “Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me.”

 

174. Yet if I wanted to re-establish contact with that period, I had no choice but to return to it and take up once more that child’s life with his childish games. This moment was a turning point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless resistances and with a sense of resignation. For it was a painfully humiliating experience to realize that there was nothing to be done except play childish games.

 

177. As a result of my experiment I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find the particular images which lie behind emotions.

 

178. For as long as we do not understand their meaning, such fantasies are a diabolical mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.

 

180. This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego’s will, and to these one must bow.

 

181. The rain showed that the tension between consciousness and the unconscious was being resolved.

 

182. In such dream wanderings one frequently encounters an old man who is accompanied by a young girl, and examples of such couples are to be found in many mythic tales.

 

182. In myths the snake is a frequent counterpart of the hero.

 

185. Obviously what I was doing wasn’t science. What then could it be but art?

 

186. There is a tremendous difference between intending to tell something and actually telling it. In order to be as honest as possible with myself, I wrote everything down very carefully, following the old Greek maxim: “Give away all that thou hast, then shalt thou receive.”

 

189. No matter how deeply absorbed or how blown about I was, I always knew that everything I was experiencing was ultimately directed at this real life of mine. I meant to meet its obligations and fulfill its meanings.

 

190. It began with a restlessness, but I did not know what it meant or what “they” wanted of me. There was an ominous atmosphere all around me. I had the strange feeling that the air was filled with ghostly entities. Then it was as if my house began to be haunted.

 

190. The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits.

 

191. But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!

 

192. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth.

 

193. The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

 

194. At such times I was remote from everything, and what had only a moment before excited me seemed to belong to a distant past.

 

196. While I was working on them [mandalas], the question arose repeatedly: What is this process leading to? Where is its goal? From my own experience, I knew by now that I could not presume to choose a goal which would seem trustworthy to me. It had been proved to me that I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego. After all, I had been brought up short when I had attempted to maintain it.

 

196. I had to let myself be carried away by the current, without a notion of where it would lead me.

 

199. The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life—in them everything essential was decided.

 

VII. THE WORK

215. Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.

 

220. Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? #notesfromtheunderground

 

222. The work is the expression of my inner development; for commitment to the contents of the unconscious forms the man and produces his transformations. My works can be regarded as stations along my life’s way.

VIII. THE TOWER

226. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!

 

229. for nature is not only harmonious; she is also dreadfully contradictory and chaotic.

 

231. It would seem most likely to have been a synchronistic phenomenon. Such phenomena demonstrate that premonitions or visions very often have some correspondence in external reality.

 

233. When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche.

 

235. Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.

 

236. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise.

 

236. Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festination ex parte diaboli est—all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.

 

237. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.

 

237. There [the tower] I live in my second personality and see life in the round, as something forever coming into being and passing on.

 

X. VISIONS

• This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. (291)
• My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. (291)
• For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. (292)
• I no longer attempted to put across my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts. Thus one problem after the other revealed itself to me and took shape. (297)
• Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead. (297)
• I have also realized that one must accept the thoughts that go on within oneself of their own accord as part of one’s reality… The presence of thoughts is more important than our subjective judgment of them. But neither must these judgments be suppressed, for they also are existent thoughts which are part of our wholeness. (298)

XI. ON LIFE AFTER DEATH

• Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon of psychic life. (299)
• Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible. Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations. (300)
• To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives existence a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should. (301)
• Not only my own dreams, but also occasionally the dreams of others, helped to shape, revise, or confirm my views on a life after death. (305)
• There does seem to be unlimited knowledge present in nature, it is true, but it can be comprehended by consciousness only when the time is ripe for it. The process, presumably, is like what happens in the individual psyche: a man may go about for many years with an inkling of something, but grasps it clearly only at a particular moment. (307)
• One, as the first numeral, is unity. (310)
• The infinite series of natural numbers corresponds to the infinite number of individual creatures. (310)
• Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man’s metaphysical task–which he cannot accomplish without “mythologizing.” (311)
• I try to see the line which leads through my life into the world, and out of the world again. (320) #threads
• I hardly think that after death we shall be spirited to some lovely flowering meadow. (320)
• But if a karma still remains to be disposed of, then the soul relapses again into desires and returns to life once more, perhaps even doing so out of the realization that something remains to be completed. (322)
• Unconscious wholeness therefore seems to me the true spiritus rector of all biological and physical events. (324)
• Only if know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which which we regard as personal possessions: our talent and our beauty. (325)
• 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. (325)
• The feeling of the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. (325)
• Uniqueness and limitation are synonymous. (325)
• As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

XII. LATE THOUGHTS

• Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. (329)
• As a rule, however, the individual is so unconscious that he altogether fails to see his own potentialities for decision. Instead he is constantly and anxiously looking around for external rules and regulations which can guide him in his perplexity. Aside from general human inadequacy, a good deal of the blame for this rests with education, which promulgates the old generalizations and says nothing about the secrets of private experience. (330)
• The clash, which is at first of a purely personal nature, is soon followed by the insight that the subjective conflict is only a single instance of the universal conflict of opposites. Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche. (335)
• It is a fact that symbols, by their very nature, can so unite the opposites that these no longer diverge or clash, but mutually supplement one another and give meaningful shape to life. (338)
• The Water Bearer seems to represent the self. With a sovereign gesture he pours the content os his jug into the pouth of Piscis austrinus, which symbolizes a son, a still unconscious content. (339)
• Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable–perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. (340)
• We cannot explain an inspiration. Our chief feeling about it is that it is not the result of our own ratiocinations, but that it came to us from elsewhere. (340)
• But anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic. (344)
• For certain new things come to light when one transfers the knowledge of one field to another and applies it in practice. (349)
• I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love. (353)
• In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain what it is. (353)

RETROSPECT

• As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. (356)
• If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for 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. (356) #relationships
• It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. (356)
• Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead. (356) #[[0. The Fool]]
• How can anyone live without inconsistency? (357)
• I had to learn painfully that people continued to exist even when they had nothing more to say to me. (357)
• I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In this way I made many enemies. A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon. (357)
• Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others, and at the same time much less. When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation. (357)
• I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum… There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions–not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. (358)