Jung the Mystic Quotes

“The self is who we truly are, but the persona or mask (the word comes from the Latin for an actor’s mask) is the face we turn to the world in order to deal with it. A persona is absolutely necessary, but the problem is that we often become identified with it, to the detriment of our self, a dilemma that the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre recognized in his notion of mauvaise foi, or “bad faith,” when one becomes associated exclusively with one’s social role.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“the outcome, if successful, in both alchemy and individuation is a union of opposites—the coniunctionis or transcendent function—leading to alchemical gold, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, or, in Jungian terms, the Self.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Like the initiate of a secret society that has broken free from the undifferentiated collectivity,” Jung wrote, “the individual on his lonely path needs a secret which for various reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret reinforces him in the isolation of his individual aims.”16 Without this secret, Jung argues, we too easily fall into the herd-mind of the mass and lose our individuality.”
― Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung made clear that far from simply rejecting society’s norms and “dropping out,” “individuators” had a responsibility to create new values and achieve new levels of inner discipline. Although “individuation is exclusive adaptation to inner reality and hence an allegedly ‘mystical’ process,” society has a right to “condemn the individuant if he fails to create equivalent values, for he is a disease.”14 Individuating means “stepping over into solitude, into the cloister of the inner self . . . inner adaptation leads to the conquest of inner realities, from which values are won for the reparation of the collective. Individuation remains a pose so long as no positive values are created. Whosoever is not creative enough must re-establish collective conformity . . . otherwise he remains an empty waster and windbag . . . society has a right to expect realizable values . . . ”15 Jung’s terminology sounds abstract, but his meaning is simple. It’s not enough to withdraw from society and seek your own salvation, your own individuation. The individuator must return to society (“collectivity”) to contribute his or her new insights, his or her new values, which must be at least equal to if not greater than the norm.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“What, then, is active imagination? In practice it’s exactly what Jung did in his visions and conversations with inner figures such as Philemon, Ka, and Salome mentioned above: entering a fantasy and talking with one’s “self”—at least a part of oneself “normally” left unconscious—asking questions and receiving knowledge that one—“you”—did not know. In many ways, it’s something we engage in often already, but in a shallow, fleeting way, when we “ask ourselves” what we think or will do about a situation. More abstractly, it’s a method of consciously entering into a dialogue with the unconscious, which triggers the transcendent function, a vital shift in consciousness, brought about through the union of the conscious and unconscious minds. Unexpected insights and self-renewal are some of the results of the transcendent function. It achieves what I call that elusive “Goldilocks” condition, the “just right” of having the conscious and unconscious minds work together, rather than being at odds. In the process it produces a third state more vivid and “real” than either; in it we recognize what consciousness should be like and see our “normal” state as at best a muddling through. We’ve already seen how the transcendent function helped Jung when faced with the dilemma of having to choose between science and the humanities. Then it operated through a dream, producing the mandala-like symbol of the giant radiolarian. In the simplest sense, the transcendent function is our built-in means of growth, psychological and spiritual—it’s “transcendent” only in the sense that it “transcends” the frequent deadlock between the conscious and unconscious minds—and is a development of what Jung earlier recognized as the “prospective tendencies in man.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung recognized that society advances only slowly, through the gradual integration of new insights gleaned through the often unrecorded work of individuals, whose attempts at self-transformation add incrementally to society’s own growth. This is a theme he returned to in his late work The Undiscovered Self, written in 1957, which applies the insights of analytical psychology to the H-bomb threatened world of the Cold War years.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Increasingly, Jung came to see that while his father and his uncles, six of whom were pastors, spoke to him about dogma and belief, he was more concerned with experience, with what he would later call gnosis, discovering the distinction in the ancient Gnostic Christian sects of the second and third centuries AD. He was convinced his father had no real experience of a living God, and after his first Communion proved to be an empty affair (“So that’s that” is how he described it), Jung realized that the Church was the last place he might find the answers to the questions that plagued him.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals—Freud was their psychologist of choice—but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections—his “so-called autobiography”—Jung was part of a canon of “alternative” thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D. T. Suzuki, R. D. Laing, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky, and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few. That his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, in a crowd of other unorthodox characters, was endorsement enough.”
― Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“But Jung did speak out against Hitler some years before he left the society. In 1936 he condemned the Fuehrer as a “raving berserker” and a man “possessed” who had set Germany on its “course toward perdition.”37 And a year earlier, in his lecture series at London’s Tavistock Clinic, Jung broke off his remarks to refer to his prophecy of 1918. “I saw it coming,” he told his fellow psychologists, “I said in 1918 that the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany. No psychologist then understood at all what I meant . . .” Commenting on the power of the archetypes to overrun conscious decision, Jung called them “the great decisive forces.”38 They “get you below the belt and not in your mind, your brain just counts for nothing, your sympathetic system is gripped.”39 Remarks like these led to accusations that Jung gave people a way of avoiding responsibility for their actions: they didn’t decide to become Nazis, the archetypes “made them do it.” Yet they are remarkably similar to what the philosopher Jean Gebser, who had firsthand experience of Nazism, believed was at work: the “magical structure of consciousness,” which Gebser characterized as a “vegetative intertwining of all living things,” and which requires a “sacrifice of consciousness” and “occurs in the state of trance, or when consciousness dissolves as a result of mass reactions, slogans, or ‘isms.’ ” Curiously, Gebser believed the “magical structure” was also responsible for synchronicities,40 and in an interview in 1938, Jung himself said that “Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic.”41”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Opinions differ on the details, but most serious students today recognize that alchemy was, and is, a spiritual pursuit, and that whether or not an actual outer physical transformation takes place during its operations, if these are carried out correctly, an inner spiritual one does. “Aurum nostrum es non vulgi” (“Our gold is not the vulgar gold”), Gerhard Dorn, one of Jung’s favorite alchemists, said. The “gold” the true alchemists sought was inner transformation.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“he knew that reverting to this “twilight consciousness” was no answer. The Africans he met seemed to lack an ego, and to be moved by impulse and emotion alone. They lacked the ability to reflect on their experience, to intend something, to will, to act independently. They lived and worked as a group, prompted by ritual, beating drums, and shouting. Western man paid heavily for his independence—the coin was alienation from the unconscious—but Jung knew it was indispensable. Yet the attraction to what Jung called “archaic man” remained and would become a central theme in his work.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung’s remarks about how in North Africa he “felt cast back many centuries to an infinitely more naïve world of adolescents who were preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness” may seem politically incorrect from our oversensitive perspective, but they highlight the core insight of the trip. Although Jung knew a great deal about mythology and mythological thinking, his own thinking was decidedly Western and rational—he described himself as a “thorough Westerner”26—and in many ways, Jung was a typical “left-brainer,” with his detestation of “fantasy,” his formality and punctuality, his precision and need to be “scientific.” In his travels in North Africa, and later Taos and Central Africa, Jung was looking for signs of a consciousness not as differentiated from the unconscious matrix—what in the Seven Sermons he called “the Pleroma”—as ours, with its sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious. What Jung found in places such as Tunis, Sousse, Sfax, and the oasis city of Tozeur was a completely different sense of time. Coming from the land of cuckoo clocks and appointment books, this must have been a shock. Jung had entered a “dream of a static, age-old existence,” a kind of perpetual now, a condition associated with the right brain, which lacks a sense of time; there was none of the incessant activity that characterized even a relatively small city like Zürich. Jung enjoyed the contrast, which gave him an opportunity to entertain criticisms of modernity, a practice that would become something of a habit in later years, but he also felt this timelessness was threatened. Thinking of his pocket watch, “the symbol of Europe’s accelerated tempo,” Jung worried that the “god of time” and its demon, progress, would soon “chop into bits and pieces”—hours, minutes, seconds—the “duration” he sensed here and which was the “closest thing to eternity.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung told the Society that apparitions (ghosts) and materializations were “unconscious projections” or, as he spoke of them to Freud, “exteriorisations.” “I have repeatedly observed,” Jung told his audience, “the telepathic effects of unconscious complexes, and also a number of parapsychic phenomena, but in all this I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is forthcoming I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology.” This sounds scientific enough, but a year later20 when Jung was again in England, he encountered a somewhat more real ghost. Jung spent some weekends in a cottage in Aylesbury outside of London rented by Maurice Nicoll, and while there was serenaded by an assortment of eerie sounds—dripping water, knocks, inexplicable rustlings—while an unpleasant smell filled the bedroom. Locals said the place was haunted, and one particularly bad night, Jung opened his eyes to discover an old woman’s head on the pillow next to his; half of her face was missing. Jung leaped out of bed, lit a candle, and waited until morning in an armchair. The house was later torn down. One would think that having already encountered the dead on their return from Jerusalem, Jung wouldn’t be shaken by a fairly standard English ghost, but the experience rattled him.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung suggests taking a bad mood, and focusing on it, making it as conscious as possible. This crystallizes it into a symbol, fantasy image, or some other representation, achieving an “enrichment and clarification of the affect [emotion].”25 The unconscious seeks consciousness and Jung discovered that “as soon as the image was there, the unrest or sense of oppression vanished.” “The whole energy of these emotions,” Jung says, “was transformed into interest in and curiosity about the image [my italics].”26 With no exaggeration, focusing on his dark moods and transforming them into inner images saved Jung from madness.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Anyone who does creative work is familiar with this problem, and in many ways active imagination is similar to writing, painting, and so on; all creative work entails a give-and-take between inspiration (unconscious) and execution (conscious). (As I am writing this, for example, I have to allow my intuitions expression before I can start editing them.) The difference for Jung is that the aesthetic quality of the end product isn’t important; understanding it is. Nevertheless, one of the best introductions to active imagination are the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man by the poet Friedrich Schiller, a contemporary of Goethe, which discuss in detail the dialogue between the creative (unconscious) and critical (conscious) drives and their union in art, both creating and experiencing it.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“The importance of Jung’s discovery bears considering. Since the seventeenth century, we’ve been taught that what is “in our heads” is only “subjective,” that we are all island universes, separate worlds, and that everything in those worlds has been furnished with material taken from outside, from the senses, as if our minds began as empty rooms, waiting for the mental equivalent of a trip to Ikea. Yet anyone, like myself, who has had precognitive dreams or experienced synchronicities or telepathy or other “paranormal” phenomena knows this isn’t quite true. Jung knew this and is saying that there are things in our heads that have nothing to do with us or our senses. In his book Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley made the same point. “Like the earth of a hundred years ago,” Huxley wrote, “our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.” And while the creatures that inhabit these “far continents” of the mind seem “improbable,” they are nevertheless “facts of observation,” which argues for their “complete autonomy” and “self-sufficiency.”18 Huxley borrowed the title of his book from another extraordinary inner explorer, the Swedish sage Emanuel Swedenborg, who was a powerful influence on Jung, and who, like Jung, was a practiced hypnagogist and developed a method of entering similar inner worlds.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“the need to have a secret became a fundamental element in Jung’s philosophy. “Like the initiate of a secret society that has broken free from the undifferentiated collectivity,” Jung wrote, “the individual on his lonely path needs a secret which for various reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret reinforces him in the isolation of his individual aims.”16 Without this secret, Jung argues, we too easily fall into the herd-mind of the mass and lose our individuality.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“In his long and often stormy life, Jung was many things; the dichotomy between “Jung the scientist” and “Jung the mystic” highlights only two. Jung was a doctor, a husband, a lover, a friend, a parent, a teacher, a student, a genius. He was also, from another perspective and among other things, an opportunist, an adulterer, a crank, an egoist, an absentee father, and a bully.”
― Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Again, more than anyone else, Jung is responsible for the widespread resurgence of a more inner-oriented spirituality in the modern world, and his contribution is so fundamental that it can be easily overlooked. In essence, Jung taught more than one generation to look within and to embark on the great adventure of discovering themselves. Many today still take their first steps on that voyage with Jung in hand.”
― Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“As he argued in The Undiscovered Self, Jung told the “average” reader that any possibility of avoiding disaster “must begin with an individual.” “It might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look around and wait for someone else to do what he is loath to do himself.” And what must the individual do, given that all our conscious, rational, scientific efforts seem to only land us deeper in the mire? He must “ask himself whether by chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us.”24 The basic message of Jung’s last work is the one that cost him his friendship with Freud: that the unconscious is not some dark basement full of unwanted, disreputable things, but a living, creative, and often wise partner with consciousness in the business of a becoming fully actualized human being, a partner who frequently knows more than we—our conscious egos—do, and who speaks to us in symbols, those remarkable products of the transcendent function.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“The Aquarian age would “constellate the problem of the union of opposites.” The “real existence” of evil would have to be acknowledged; it could no longer be understood as the mere absence of good, as was the official Christian stance. This would come about not through politics or any collective effort but through the “individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit,” that is, the unconscious.7 As an example of how the archetypes work on the collective consciousness, Jung notes the then recent papal decree making the Assumption of Mary, Christ’s mother, part of Christian dogma. This was of enormous importance for Jung; it showed that Christianity recognized the need to include the feminine in the Godhead, something it had lacked and which had weakened its appeal. The idea that Mary didn’t die but was taken, body and soul, to heaven, had been accepted for nearly a century, but it wasn’t made part of divine revelation until Pope Pius XII’s decree on November 1, 1950. The masses demanded it and their insistence was, Jung writes, “the urge of the archetype to realize itself.”8”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Dulles knew of Jung through his wife, who had an interest in psychoanalysis and had trained as an analyst in Zürich before the war. He also knew of the reports of Jung’s Nazi fellow traveling. He had these checked and found they were unsubstantiated. Eventually Dulles and Jung met and began an “experimental marriage between espionage and psychology” involving the “psychological profile” of political and military leaders. Dulles was so impressed by Jung’s insights that he urged his OSS chiefs to pay great attention to his analyses, especially of Hitler, who Jung had cautioned wouldn’t shy from suicide if things got desperate. By this time, Hitler was living in an underground bunker in East Prussia, and required anyone wanting an interview to be disarmed and X-rayed. This is how Jung became “Agent 488,” his code name in Dulles’ OSS reports. Dulles was convinced that Jung’s assessments of Nazi and Fascist leaders “showed a deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for,” and in later life, Dulles remarked that “Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied cause during the war.” When asked for details, Dulles demurred, saying the information was “highly classified for the indefinite future,” which meant that Jung’s “services would have to remain undocumented.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“It is just because we live in an active and responsible time that we need more consciousness and self-reflection,” otherwise we will be “unconsciously swept along by events.” “Mass movements,” Jung told his Nazi interviewer, “have the peculiarity of overpowering the individual by mass suggestion and making him unconscious. The political or social movement gains nothing by this when it has swarms of hypnotized camp followers.” And when Weizsäcker remarked that “in Germany today psychology is suspect . . . precisely because it is concerned with the self-development of the so-called individual,” and asked how “when the collective forces of the whole community have taken the lead in moulding our way of life, are we to assess the efforts of psychology,” Jung replied that “the self-development of the individual is especially necessary in our time” and “only the self-development of the individual, which I consider to be the supreme goal of all psychological endeavour, can produce consciously responsible spokesmen and leaders.”45 Nazism, as is well known, had no use for individuals, and Jung’s emphasis on the importance of individuals and their self-development was an outright attack on Nazi ideology. Most critics of Jung, however, fail to point this out.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“In 1933 a German branch of the International Society was founded with Matthias Göring as president; needless to say it was gleichgeschaltet and Göring ensured that the rest of the society followed suit. Jung countered Göring by redrafting the society’s rules, allowing Jewish members who had been forced to resign from the German branch to join as individuals. As editor of the society’s journal, Jung made sure that work by Jewish members continued to be published, and that work by Jewish psychologists was reviewed. But as the journal was published in Germany, Jung had little hands-on control, and was enraged when Göring inserted a pro-Nazi statement in an issue in 1933, endorsing Mein Kampf as a core text for all psychotherapists and obliging all members to declare their loyalty to the Fuehrer. The statement was supposed to be included in only the German edition of the journal, but Göring overstepped Jung—something he did more than once—and Jung was furious to find his name among the statement’s endorsers.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“In the years leading up to Hitler, many völkisch groups appeared in Germany; the English equivalent “folk” doesn’t quite convey the blend of mythology, folklore, legend, and nationalism that the German term suggests. Jung’s emphasis on history and myth, as well as his rejection of scientific materialism, made these groups sympathetic to his work, as opposed to Freud’s which, along with being Jewish, was reductionist. Although much has been made of it,29 Jung’s own connection, if any,30 to the völkisch movement is unclear. The only strong link is his friendship with the German indologist J. W. Hauer, who founded the German Faith Movement in 1932, a religious society aimed at replacing Christianity in German-speaking countries with an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic modern paganism based on German literature and Hindu scripture. Hauer, an ardent Nazi, hoped his movement would become the official religion of the Reich. Hitler, however, thought little of Hauer and laughed at his followers who “made asses of themselves by worshipping Wotan and Odin and the ancient, but now obsolete, German mythology,”31 a remark that says much about Hitler’s cynicism toward the völkisch ideology he nevertheless exploited to gain power.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“On this second trip, Jung had something like a mystical or metaphysical experience. He suddenly understood the meaning of self-consciousness, in an otherwise apparently oblivious universe. It was through our awareness of existence, Jung understood, that it gains meaning. On a game preserve on the Athai Plains, Jung saw huge herds of animals: antelopes, zebras, gazelles stretched endlessly to the horizon. He felt he witnessed “the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world.” Jung separated from his companions until they were out of sight and imagined he was utterly alone. He was trying to re-create the first moment of self-consciousness, when consciousness first recognized the distinction between itself and the world, when it could first regard the world objectively, detached from it, as an observer. “In an invisible act of creation,” man had “put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Again Jung wanted to make contact with “archaic man” and he asked the Pueblo chief why he thought the whites were mad. Ochwiay told him it was because they think with their heads, while the Indians think with their hearts, a remark the esoteric Egyptologist René Schwaller de Lubicz would have appreciated.43 Ochwiay’s remark led Jung to a searing vision of Roman and Christian supremacy, bringing fear and suffering to their victims with “fire, sword, torture, and Christianity.” Western civilization, Jung saw, had the “face of a bird of prey seeking with cruel intentness for distant quarry,” a mea culpa regarding indigenous people well in advance of our own fashionable political correctness. One form of “thinking with the heart” impressed Jung deeply. The Pueblos performed a ritual that they insisted helped the sun in its daily course across the heavens. Jung, of course, knew that the sun was an average-sized star and that the earth moved around it, but in their hearts the Indians knew it was a god—the god—and that without their participation it would stop rising and then “it would be night forever.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung famously said that about a third of his cases weren’t suffering from some clinically definable illness, but from a sense of meaninglessness and aimlessness. Jung believed he could help them find some meaning. It had been his own quest, and understandably he felt he could help others in theirs. In a way, one could say Jung built his Tower so he would have a safe space for himself and some selected others to go crazy, without having to deal with the incomprehension of outsiders. Most people who visited the Tower certainly felt it had an unusual atmosphere. Jung had some strange relationship with his pots and utensils; he spoke with them, believing they had souls, and required his guests to as well, and he insisted that the stove in his Küsnacht study was human.39 He also felt the same about a bronze box that stored his tobacco, and even named it Habbakuk. 40 It isn’t surprising to read that at the Tower Jung could immerse himself deeply in active imagination, often sitting for long periods in utter stillness, in a room set apart for this, where he painted his fantasies on the wall. He would see images and faces in stone and then slowly carve them; one stone in particular, a huge “perfect cube” Jung received from a quarry by mistake, became a favorite, and over the years Jung worked on it, carving on its surface alchemical, Greek, and Latin sayings.41”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung told his students that in grasping the meaning of the union of conscious and unconscious, “we become aware of the ancestral lives that have gone into the making of our own lives,” and that through this comes a “feeling of immortality.” Individuation, in fact, leads to a “sense of the continuation of one’s life through the ages” and gives “a feeling of eternity on this earth,”37 a mystic insight Jung reserved for the initiated.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Western man, Jung saw, always wants to do something, to “get somewhere”; this kind of restlessness is characteristic of us all. A few years later, when Jung met the Pueblo chief Ochwiay Biano during his trip to Taos, he told Jung that the whites were always dissatisfied, and that this led to their cruelty. The kind of consciousness Jung encountered in North Africa was content with what is. At an oasis, Jung felt that “everything here was exactly the way it should be and the way it had always been.”28 Westerners usually feel this only after a few drinks or under the influence of drugs, hence their popularity. We find it inordinately difficult to relax, but what Jung found in North Africa was a consciousness that allowed the ego to slow down and sink into the warm embrace of the unconscious, as if after perpetually treading water, we suddenly discovered we could float.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings