Reference
Jung. C. G. (1973) Jaffé. A. Ed. Winston R., Winston C. Trans. Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Vintage books, a division of Random House, Inc. NY

Jung Timeline

p3 “My Life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward and the too desires to evolve manifestation, personality out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.
What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis ("from the perspective of the eternal" …the phrase is used to describe an alternative or objective point of view.), can only be expressed by way of myth. 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.”

p8 “My illness, in 1878, must have been connected with a temporary separation of my parents. My mother spent several months in a hospital in Basel, and presumably her illness had something to do with the difficulty in the marriage. An aunt of mine, who was a spinster and some twenty years older than my mother, took care of me. … From then on, I always felt mistrustful when the word “love” was spoken. The feeling I associated with “woman” was for a long time that of innate unreliability. “Father,” on the other hand, meant reliability and powerlessness.”

p9 “My mother told me, too, of the time when I was crossing the bridge over the Rhine Falls to Neuhausen. The maid caught me just in time - I already had one leg under the railing and was about to slip through. These things point to an unconscious suicidal urge or, it may be, to a fatal resistance to life in this world.”

The Dream of the phallus on the throne
p11 ”…I was then between three and four years old. …“ …“Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!”

p13-14 His relationship with God, how he perceived Jesus Christ.

p15 1879 : move to Klein-Hüningen, near Basel.

p16 ”…no more than six years old…“ museum incident with the aunt and the naked statues.

p17 “Soon after I was six my father began giving me Latin lessons, and I also went to school. I did not mind school; …“
Associates the Jesuits with the man-eater dream… Bottom of the page; he was lonely.

p18 “My first concrete memory of games dates from my seventh or eighth year. I was passionately fond of playing with bricks, …”

p19 “seven to nine” …enjoyed playing with fire.

p21 The pencil case and manikin

Q. Did Jung really understand what was going on with him at such a young age.
A. He alludes to a number of things that when he talks about them it is as though he does however he often finishes off a section with a comment like:
p22 “The little wooden figure with the stone was a first attempt, still unconscious and childish, to give shape to the secret [the phallus dream and Jesuit]. I was always absorbed by it and had the feeling I ought to fathom it; and yet I did not know what it was I was trying to express.” Cf. p45

p28 hates maths

p30 1887 - hits his head and stays home from school.
p32 “That was when I learned what a neurosis is.”

p32 Age 11 has the I am myself moment.

p33 Bottom of the page, “Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons.” Discovers his no. 1 and 2.

p35 footnote on his descendant from Goethe.

p39 Finally completes his thought of God dropping a turd on the cathedral. This is important as he explains over the next couple of pages, it was a defining moment for him. This thought along with his thought processes about God surrounding this moment;

p41-42 ”…I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed. …
My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret. It induced in me an almost unendurable loneliness. My one great achievement during those years was that I resisted the temptation to talk about it with anyone. 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.” xRef p356

p43 Discussions with his father ”…he was in the habit os saying, “you always want to think. One ought not to think, but believe.” I would think, “No, one must experience and know,”…“

p44 15yrs old; fight with other boys.

p44 xRef p33 “Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons. 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, mistrustful, remote from the world of 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 to whatever “God” worked directly in him. I put “God” in quotation marks here. For nature seemed, like myself, to have been set aside by God as non-divine, although created by Him as an expression of Himself. Nothing could persuade me that “in the image of God” applied only to man …”

p45 “What I am unfolding, sentence by sentence, is something I was then not conscious of in any articulate way, though I sensed it with an overpowering premonition and intensity of feeling.” xRef. p22. Of his #2 nature Jung writes: “He is a typical figure, but he is perceived only by the very few. Most people's conscious understanding is not sufficient to realise that he is also what they are.”

p46 ”…for I knew, knew from experience, that this grace was accorded only to one who fulfilled the will of God without reservation. …“

p47 ”…I felt absolutely sure that it was not myself who had invented these thoughts and images. These were the crucial experiences of my life. It was then that it dawned on me: I must take the responsibility, …“

p48 “From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. … These talks with the “Other” were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy.”

p48-49 On his mother and his mothers two personalities.

p50 Bottom of the page Jung discusses the 'natural mind'. Something his mother demonstrated every now and then.

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p51 The dinner table story where he spoke of the other mans life.

p53 His interest in the trinity and awaiting his father to ask. Only for his father then to say, “We now come to the Trinity, but we'll skip that, for I really understand nothing of it myself.”

p54-56 He takes communion to no affect.

p56 On his relationship to the church, “My sense of union with the Church and with the human world, so far as I knew it, was shattered. I had, so it seemed to me, suffered the greatest defeat of my life. The religious outlook which I imagined constituted my sole meaningful relation with the universe had disintegrated; I could no longer participate in the general faith, but found myself involved in something inexpressible, in my secret, which I could share with no one.”

p60 Top of the page; his mothers no. 2 personality tells him to read Faust.

p62 “How had I arrived at my certainty about God? … Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the most certain and immediate of experiences.”

Discussing his thoughts on God and religion in the previous pages…
p63 “The account I have given here summarises trains of thought and developments of ideas which, broken by long intervals, extended over several years. They went on exclusively in my No. 2 personality, and were strictly private. …”

p64-65 Called a cheat at school.

p66 “At that time, of course, I could never have expressed myself in this fashion, nor am I attributing to my state of consciousness something that was not there at the time. I am only trying to express the feelings I had then, …”

p68-69 Philosophy…
“But the great find resulting from my researches was Schopenhauer. He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil …”

p70 “This philosophical development extended from my seventeenth year until well into the period of my medical studies.”

p71 Called a cheat again.

p72 Decision on what he was going to do. ”…I was drawn principally to zoology, palaeontology, and geology; in the humanities to Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and prehistoric archaeology.“
p85-86 Wanted to do archaeology but couldn't afford to travel and study as there were no teachers at Basel. Didn't want to end up a school master, so medicine.

p74 Tried to extinguish no.2

p75 His father says, “Be anything you like except a theologian.”… his father was a philologist and linguist. (Dissertation on the arabic version of the Song of Songs)

p75 no.1 vs no.2

p76-77 14 years old, sent away on doctors orders to Entlebuch for a cure…among adult strangers. He met a chemist. First time drunk - on an outing to a distillery.

p78 A trip up the mountains, “This was the best and most precious gift my father had ever given me.”

p80 Meets a pretty girl

p80 “This period of my life was filled with conflicting thoughts. Schopenhauer and Christianity….” Between No. 1 and No. 2 personality.

pp81 Has a waking fantasy about a castle in which he lives and makes gold ” …a kind of laboratory in which I made gold out of the mysterious substance which the copper roots drew from the air. This was really an arcanum, of whose nature I neither had nor wished to form any conception.“

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Dreams
p85 (1) digs up bones of prehistoric animals on a burial mound - must get to know nature. (2) radiolarian - these two dreams, I must go into science.

p86 Decision to do medicine

Dream
p88 “My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess… Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only life”

p91-93 17-19 years old, vehement discussions with his father. “Theology had alienated my father and me from one another. I felt that I had once again suffered a fatal defeat,…”

p94 “The arch sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it forestalled experience.”

p96 1896 his father dies. He then had a dream. p97 ”…it forced me for the first time to think about life after death.“

p99 Reading a book on spiritualism dating from the 1870's, written by a theologian. ”… Nevertheless, it could be established that at all times and all over the world the same stories had been reported again and again. There must be some reason for this, and it could not possibly have been the predominance of the same religious conceptions everywhere, for that was obviously not the case. Rather it must be connected with the objective behaviour of the human psyche. But with regard to this cardinal question - the objective nature of the psyche - I could find out absolutely nothing, except what the philosophers said.(emphasis mine)

p102 Reads Nietzsche

p104 Facts! Cf p107

p105 Table splits, knife shatters. During the summer holidays 1898

pp106 Hears about a relative who is a medium, his cousin Helene Preiswerk who was about 15 & 1/2 at this time, Jung was about 23.
xRef http://jungcurrents.com/helen-preiswerk/

Regarding Toni Wolf: http://jungcurrents.com/?s=toni+wolf
In my conversations with Franz Jung in July 1983 in Kusnacht, he told me that Toni ‘more or less’ saved his father’s life and sanity. She was his lover and ‘therapist’-he took his dreams(ie written into his ‘black books’) to her,she did active imaginations with them(him) and then he later polished them and wrote and drew them into the Red Book. This was the period 1913-1919.

p108 Chooses psychiatry.

p109 “Well, now let's see what a psychiatrist has to say for himself.” …“A few lines further on, the author called the psychoses “diseases of the personality.” My heart suddenly began to pound… Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, (Cf. MDR p104 and 107 on the topic of 'facts' and 'empiricism') which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.”

p111 Starts at Burghölzli
p112 - keeps info on his colleagues.

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p117 “In 1905 I became lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zürich, and that same year I became senior physician at the psychiatric Clinic. I held this position for four years. Then in 1909 I had to resign … However, I continued my professorship until the year 1913. I lectured on psychopathology, and, naturally, also on the foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as on the psychology of primitives. …”

p115/120 “psychogalvanic experiments” Association experiments.

p118 Hypnosis

p134 To be an analyst Jung says ”“Do you know what that means? It means that you must first learn to know yourself. You yourself are the instrument. If you are not right, how can the patient be made right? … ” …subjective experience again.

p141 Religious experience again.

p140 Spirit of the age.

p144 Experience again.

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p155 The bookcase cracking

p156 Freud fainting

p158 “Then he said, “But I cannot risk my authority~” At that moment he lost it altogether. The sentence burned itself into my memory; … Freud was placing personal authority above truth.”

dream
p159 The dream into the unconscious (see p161 too) through the different floors of the house until he found the “scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture”, and two human skulls.

p162 Comes across the Miss Miller fantasies.

dream
p163 Freud as the old customs official who “couldn't die properly.” (part 1)
dream
p164-165 dream about the knight templar (from the twelfth century - when Alchemy was beginning.) - pointing to the European legend of the grail (part 2)

p167 “When, then, Freud announced his intention of identifying theory and method and making them into some kind of dogma, I could no longer collaborate with him; there remained no choice for me but to withdraw.
When I was working on my book about the libido (CW5 Symbols of Transformation) and approaching the end of the chapter “The Sacrifice,” I knew in advance that its publication would cost me my friendship with Freud.”

xRef p150 “I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.” … In some astonishment I asked him, “A bulwark - against what?” To which he replied, “Against the black tide of mud” - and here he hesitated for a moment, then added - “of occultism.””

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p170 Even at this time of disorientation he continued with patients where he learned about their dreams.

p171 “…for that is how dreams are intended. They are the facts from which we must proceed.”

p171 “… But what myth does man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be, “Do you live in it?” I asked myself. To be honest the answer was no. “Then do we no longer have any myth?” “No, evidently we no longer have any myth” “But then what is your myth - the myth in which you do live?” At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end.”

dream
p171 …a white bird turns into a girl.
dream
p172-173 the line of tombs through the centuries, to the twelfth century to the crusader → pointing toward alchemy.

p174 playing as a child with the building blocks…p175 discovering my own myth

p175-176 He has a vision in October 1913 about the impending tide that will cover Europe …the war. He then had a number of dreams leading up to the war.

p176 “On August 1 the world war broke out. Now my task was clear: I had to try understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general. Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche. I made a beginning by writing down the fantasies which had come to my during my building game. This work took precedence over everything else.”

p176-177 going mad and doing yoga

p179 He has a vision about the corpse “ a youth with blond hair and a wound in the head. He was followed by a gigantic black scarab and then by a red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of the water. …” …“ I realised, of course, that it was a hero and solar myth, …”

dream
p180 Kills Siegfried - must understand (revolver next to bed) The hero was killed.

p181 “In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent. I made several attempts to get to the very bottom. …Elijah and Salome

p182 He meets Philemon “He developed out of the Elijah figure… Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration. His figure first appeared to me in the following dream.”

dream
p182-183 clouds as clods of earth. A winged being with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys.

p183 ”…Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, …I was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.“

p187 Art vs Science

p188 “This is the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age.”

p189-190 Seven sermons to the dead.

p192 “When I look back upon it all today and consider what happened to me during the period of my work on the fantasies, … There were things in the images which concerned not only myself but many others also. It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. The knowledge I was concerned with, or was seeking, still could not be found in the science of those days. I myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise they would have remained subjective assumptions without validity.
Today I can say that I have never lost touch with my initial experiences. All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.”

p194 ”… that the contents of psychic experience are real, and real not only as my own personal experiences, but as collective experiences which other also have.“

p195 Mandalas - his first Mandala 1916.

p197 Receives a copy of The secret of the golden flower from Richard Wilhelm

dream
p198 Liverpool dream

p199 ”… Out of it emerged a first inkling of my personal myth.
..
The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life - in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime's work.(Emphasis mine)

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p200-201 Alchmey

p201 Spirit of our age

p202 The feminine

dream
p202 Alchemy dreams - the library. “The crucial dream anticipating my encounter with alchemy came around 1926: …“
xRef p205 for the moment when he suddenly understood the dream.

p205 ”…and it became clear to me that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no psychology of the unconscious. …”

p206 ”… My life has been permeated and held together by one idea and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the secret of the personality. Everything can be explained from this central point, and all my works relate to this one theme.“

p206 “I had a starting point in my intense preoccupation with the images of my own unconscious. This period lasted from 1913 to 1917; then the stream of fantasies ebbed away. Not until it had subsided and I was no longer held captive inside the magic mountain was I able to take an objective view of that whole experience and begin to reflect upon it. ”

p209 “Only after I had familiarised myself with alchemy did I realise that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. … Through the study of these collective transformation processes and through understanding of alchemical symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology; the process of individuation.”

p209 “Through Paracelsus I was finally led to discuss the nature of alchemy in relation to religion and psychology - or, to put it another way, of alchemy as a form of religious philosophy. This I did in Psychology and Alchemy (1944). Thus I had at last reached the ground which underlay my own experiences of the years 1913 to 1917; for the process through which I had passed at that time corresponded to the process of alchemical transformation discussed in that book.”

pp210 “Not only do I leave the door open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit.” Continue reading for more about religion and alchemy and Jung

p210 Vision - Christ at the foot of the bed.

p212 UFO's

dream
p213 Different wing of the house, fathers laboratory, ichthyological

p216 Answer to Job

dream
pp217 “It started with my paying a visit to my long-deceased father. …
for som reason I could not bring my forehead quite down to the floor - there was perhaps a millimeter to spare. …”

p221 Age of Pisces

p221. “The Christ problem in Aion finally led me to the question of how the phenomenon of the Anthropos - in psychological terms, the self - is expressed in the experience of the individual. …
This investigation was rounded out by the Mysterium Coiunctionis, in which I once again took up the problem of the transference, but primarily followed my original intention of representing the whole range of alchemy as a kind of psychology of alchemy, or as an alchemical basis for depth psychology. in Mysterium Coiunctionis my psychology was at last given its place i reality and established upon its historical foundations. Thus my task was finished, my work done, and now it can stand.”

p222 “The work is the expression of my inner development; for the commitment to the contents of the unconscious forms the man and produces his transformations. …”
regarding his work… “The represent a compensation for our times, and I have been impelled to say what no one wants to hear.”

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p238 - p246: i. North Africa

p242 ”… But it is not given to reflection; the ego has almost no autonomy. The situation is not so different with the European; but we are, after all, somewhat more complicated. At any rate the European possesses a certain measure of will and directed intention. What we lack is intensity of life.“

dream
pp242 “I dreamt that I was in an Arab city, and as …”

Why travel to Africa?
p244 “In traveling to Africa to find a psychic observation post outside the sphere of the European, I unconsciously wanted to find that part of my personality which had become invisible under the influence and the pressure of being European. This part stands in unconscious opposition to myself, and indeed I attempt to suppress it. … The predominantly rationalistic European finds uch that is human alien to him, and he prides himself on this without realising that his rationality is won at the expense of his vitality, and that the primitive part of his personality is consequently condemned to a more or less underground existence.”

p245 “going black under the skin” …
p246 “If we were to relive it naïvely, it would constitute a relapse into barbarism. Therefore we prefer to forget it. But should it appear to us again in the form of a conflict, then we should keep it in our consciousness and test the two possibilities against each other - the life we live and the one we have forgotten.”

p255 Jung takes in the view of Africa and has a moment

p246 - p253: ii. America: the Pueblo Indians
p253 - p274: iii. Kenya and Uganda
p274 - p284: iv. India

p275 “The journey formed an intermesso in the intensive study of alchemical philosophy on which I was engaged at the time.

p275 ”…In India I was principally concerned with the question of the psychological nature of evil. (Emphasis mine) I had been very much impressed by the way this problem is integrated in Indian spiritual life, and I saw it in a new light. In a conversation with a cultivated Chinese I was also impressed, again and again, by the fact these people are able to integrate so-called “evil” without “losing face.” In the West we cannot do this. …”

p279 “For Buddha, the self stands above all gods, a unus mundus which represents the essence of human existence and of the world as a whole. The self embodies both the aspect of intrinsic being and the aspect of its being known, without which no world exists. (xRef MDR p255 where Jung experienced a similar thought in Africa) Buddha saw and grasped the cosmogonic dignity of human consciousness; for that reason he saw clearly that if a man succeeded in extinguishing this light, the world would sink into nothingness. Schopenhauer's great achievement lay in his also recognising this, or rediscovering it independently.”

Σ p280 “Similarly, in Christianity, Christ is an exemplar who dwells in every Christian as his integral personality. But historical trends led to the imitatio Christi, whereby the individual does not pursue his own destined road to wholeness, but attempts to imitate the way taken by Christ. Similarly in the East, historical trends led to a devout imitation of the Buddha. That Buddha should have become a model to be imitated was in itself a weakening of his idea, just as the imitatio Christi was a forerunner of the fateful stasis in the evolution of the Christian idea. As Buddha, by virtue of his insight, was far in advance of the Brahma gods, so Christ cried out to the Jews, “You are gods” (John 10:34); but men were incapable of understanding what he meant. …” (Makes me think a little of Rabi Cook and his ideas; the light of god existing in each of us.)

dream
“I found myself, with a large number of my Zürich friends and acquaintances, on an unknown island, presumably situated not far off the coast of southern England. …” (about the Grail)
p284 - p288: v. Ravenna and Rome

p284 Where he visited the tomb of Galla Placidia and experienced a vision of “four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty, … The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan; the second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea; the third, on the east, soon faded from my memory. It might have shown the Naaman being cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan; … The fourth mosaic, on the west side of the baptistery, was the most impressive of all. … It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves. … “
p285 (I find this next bit interesting to note in consideration of the confrontation with death.) ”…and discussed the original ritual of baptism, especially the curious archaic conception of it as an initiation connected with the real peril of death. Such initiations were often connected with the peril of death and so served to express the archetypal idea of death and rebirth.”

p287 “What happens within oneself when one integrates previously unconscious contents with the consciousness is something which can scarcely be described in words. It can only be experienced. … I have come to the conclusion that before we settle upon any theories in regard to the unconscious, we require many, many more experiences of it.”

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p289

p296 “The objectivity which I experienced in this dream and in the visions is part of a completed individuation. It signifies detachment from valuations and from what we call emotional ties. In general, emotional ties are very important to human beings. But they still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree. Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible.” back to top

p299

p302 “A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it - even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole.”

p302 - 303 Vision, or experience while on the train at the same time his grandson almost drowned. In talking about this he then poses the question: “The unconscious had given me a hint. Why should it not be able to inform me of other things also? …
Frequently foreknowledge is there, but not recognition. …”

p304 “Only, one must remain critical and be aware that such communications may have a subjective meaning as well. They may be in accord with reality, and then again they may not.”

p304 “However, there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time. … Along with numerous cases of spontaneous foreknowledge, non-spatial perceptions, and so on - of which I have given a number of examples from my own life - these experiments prove that the psyche at times functions outside of the spatio-temporal law of causality. This indicates that our conceptions of space and time, and therefore causality also, are incomplete.”

p306 “But while the man who despairs marches toward nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them.” (Emphasis mine. What is this 'archetype'. I xRef p302 where Jung mentions the 'archetype'.)

p306 “The figures from the unconscious are uninformed too, and need man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain to knowledge. …” Do we inform and therefore some how create the unconscious dimension? Cf. p326 “It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.”

dream While on a bicycle trip through upper Italy with a friend in 1911 (circa 36yrs old)
p307 “In the dream I was in an assemblage of distinguished spirits of earlier centuries; …”

p307 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.“

p310 “Mathematics goes to great pains to create expressions for relationships which pass empirical comprehension. In much the same way, it is all0important for a disciplined imagination to build up images of intangibles by logical principles and on the basis of empirical data, that is, on the evidence of dreams. The method employed is what I have called “the method of the necessary statement.” It represents the principles of amplification in the interpretation of dreams, but can most easily be demonstrated by the statements implicit in simple whole numbers.” Emphasis mine. Cf von Franz, Marie-Louise (1974), Number and Time - Reflections leading towards a unification of psychology and physics. In particular, the discussion on natural numbers.
p311 “Therefore I submit that other than mathematical statements (i.e., statements implicit in nature) are likewise capable of pointing to irrepresentable realities beyond themselves - such, for example, as those products of the imagination which enjoy universal acceptance or are distinguished by the frequency of their occurrence, like the whole class of archetypal motifs.”

p311 “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 “mythologising.” Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition. True, the unconscious knows more than consciousness does; but it is knowledge of a special sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and now, not couched in language of the intellect. Only when we let its statements amplify themselves, as has been shown above by the example of numerals, does it come within the range of our understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to us. This process is convincingly repeated in every successful dream analysis.” Cf with p321: “To follow out the thought that involuntarily comes to me: the world, I feel, is far too unitary for there to be a hereafter in which the rule of opposites is completely absent.”

p318 “The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world's answer.”

pp318 Jung discusses his thoughts on Karma, rebirth, reincarnation, etc.

dream p322-323 “The thorny problem of the relationship between eternal man, the self and earthly man in time and space was illuminated by two dreams of mine. …
From the first dream he mentions (October 1958): “We always think that the UFO's are projections of ours. Now it turns out that we are their projections. …”
From the second dream (circa late 1944): “I realised that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.”
Cf these thoughts with those on p20

p324 “But closer study shows that as a rule the images of the unconscious are not produced by consciousness, but have a reality and spontaneity of their own. …
Unconscious wholeness therefore seems to me the true spiritus rector (guiding spirit) of all biological and psychic events. Here is a principle which strives for total realisation - which in man's case signifies the attainment of total consciousness. …self-knowledge is therefore the heart and essence of this process.”

p325 “The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. …
The feel for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the “self”; it is manifested in the experience : “I am only that!” Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination - that is, ultimately limited - we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!
… it is a supreme challenge to ask man to become conscious of his uniqueness and his limitation. Uniqueness and limitation are synonymous. …”

p326 “It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.” Cf p306

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p327

Σ p329 “In practical terms, this means that good and evil are no longer so self-evident. We have to realise that each represents a judgement. In view of the fallibility of all human judgement, we can not believe that we will always judge rightly.”

Σ pp338 God and man
“In the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites “God” and “man” that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites within the God-image itself. That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself.” (Emphasis mine) “That is the goal, or one goal, which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation, and at the same time confers meaning upon it. It is an explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in the course of the decades. It is a goal I can acknowledge and esteem, and which therefore satisfies me.” ”… Through consciousness he (man) takes possession of nature by recognising the existence of the world and thus, as it were, confirming the Creator. The world becomes the phenomenal world, for without conscious reflection it would not be. If the Creator were conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious creatures; …”

p339 “… But the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes - the second cosmogony.” (Emphasis mine)

p340 Meaning “The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and unconscious. 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. …”

p347-348 Speaking of God and archetype; “If, therefore, we speak of “God” as an “archetype,” we are saying nothing about His real nature but are letting it be known that “God” already has a place in that part of our psyche which is pre-existent to consciousness and that He therefore cannot be considered an invention of consciousness. We neither make Him more remote nor eliminate Him, but bring Him closer to the possibility of being experienced. This latter circumstance is by no means unimportant, for a thing which cannot be experienced may easily be suspected of non-existence.”

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p355

p356 “I do not know what started me off perceiving the stream of life. Probably the unconscious itself. Or perhaps my early dreams. They determined my course from the beginning.
Knowledge of precesses in the background early shaped my relationship to the world. Basically, that relationship was the same in my childhood as it is to this day. 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. …”

p358 “The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The ordinary undertakings I planned usually had the worst of it - though not always and not everywhere. By way of compensation, I think, I am conservative to the bone. I fill my pipe from my grandfather's tobacco jar and still keep his alpenstock, topped with a chamois horn, which he brought back from Pontresina after having been one of the first guests at that newly opened Kurort.”

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  • Last modified: 2018/09/19 02:56
  • by janus