Jung the Mystic Quotes

“The Seven Sermons, Jung tells us, is what Philemon would have written, but by this time, Jung had assimilated this personification of his unconscious, and now Jung had to say it himself. It’s a curious work, sometimes reaching poetic power, sometimes reading like pastiche. Its central message is the need to differentiate from the mass, to achieve one’s own individuality. “The natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness.” “Ye all become equal and thus is your nature maimed.”37”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“One result of active imagination, according to some reports, is an increase in synchronistic and paranormal phenomena. 32 This was certainly true of Jung. In 1916, Jung again felt that something within wanted to get out. An eerie restlessness seemed to permeate his home. Jung, I have to say, was lucky to have his house in Küsnacht, where he retired to a room, his “intellectual cave,” decorated in colored glass, to commune with his interior voices; he demanded and got absolute silence, and neither his children nor Emma—nor even the maid—were allowed to enter.33 As his maternal grandfather did, Jung felt the presence of the dead. His children seemed to feel it, too. One daughter saw a strange white figure; another had her blankets snatched from her at night. His son drew a picture of a fisherman he had seen in a dream: a flaming chimney rose from the fisherman’s head, and a devil flew through the air, cursing the fisherman for stealing his fish. An angel warned the devil that he couldn’t hurt the fisherman because he only caught bad fish. Jung had yet to mention Philemon the Kingfisher to his family. Then, on a Sunday afternoon, the doorbell rang loudly when it was clear no one was there. The pressure increased and Jung finally demanded “What in the world is this?” Then he heard the voices. “We have come back from Jerusalem,” they said, “where we found not what we sought,” the beginning of one of the strangest works of “automatic writing,” Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, which he attributed to “Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“With practice one can follow the material as it develops and can actually speak with it, as Jung did, which means, of course, that it can speak to you. As Jung explained to a correspondent: “The point is that you start with any image . . . Contemplate it and carefully observe how the picture begins to unfold or to change. Don’t try to make it into something, just do nothing but observe what its spontaneous changes are. Any mental picture you contemplate in this way will sooner or later change through a spontaneous association that causes a slight alteration of the picture. You must carefully avoid impatient jumping from one subject to another. Hold fast to the one image you have chosen and wait until it changes by itself. Note all these changes and eventually step into the picture yourself, and if it is a speaking figure at all then say what you have to say to that figure and listen to what he or she has to say.”22”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“The Transcendent Function,” was written in 1916, while Jung was in the middle of his “deep reaching interior metamorphosis.” (He was serving a stint of military duty, stationed near the Gotthard Pass at the time.) Yet it wasn’t published until 1957, and only then when Jung was asked to contribute to a student publication, not something many of his readers would see. For forty years it remained in Jung’s files, off-limits to the general public. Jung discussed the ideas in seminars and lectures, but usually only with his closest students, rather like an initiate sharing the most profound mysteries with only his most devoted pupils. Although subsequent Jungian analysts have recognized their importance, neither idea plays a prominent role in any of Jung’s major works. For example, in Mysterium Coniunctionis , Jung’s alchemical magnum opus, active imagination warrants only a brief mention, again not by name, and the transcendent function is mentioned only twice. As is often the case with Jung’s ideas, we need to go to his followers for anything like a clear definition.19 Some suggest Jung kept quiet about active imagination because he considered it possibly dangerous. In a note, he cautioned that through it “subliminal contents . . . may overpower the conscious mind and take possession of the personality.”20 That Jung came upon it precisely when his own subliminal contents were mutinying against his ego makes this a reasonable concern. Yet there may have been other reasons. Weak egos might fragment practicing active imagination, but what would his peers think of a psychologist who talked to people in his head? As with his public and private opinions about spirits and the occult, Jung seems to have kept quiet about things that could threaten his persona as a scientist.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind,” Jung told his students, “one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator . . .”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Although Jung’s distaste for modern art would preclude it, he would have been relieved to know that his wasn’t the only sensitive consciousness at the time plagued with visions of destruction. In 1912 the German Expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner produced a series of “Apocalyptic Landscapes.” Meidner depicted cities laid to waste: comets rocket through the sky, the sun blackens, men run screaming through the streets, buildings collapse. Meidner painted his landscapes in a manic rush of inspiration, and his later work lacks this intensity: one is tempted to say that rather than Meidner having a flash of genius, some flash of genius briefly had him, the same one, perhaps, that invaded Jung’s own mind. Had Jung known of Meidner’s work, he would have surely seen it as confirmation of his belief that some individuals are mediums through whom future events are foreshadowed.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung had had enough, and in his reply he made clear his disgust with Freud’s infuriating practice of treating criticism of his ideas as mere psychological resistance to his infallibility. Jung had already complained that “the majority of psychoanalysts misuse psychoanalysis to devalue other people and their progress by insinuations about complexes,”19 and now he dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. Treating his followers like patients, he told Freud, was a “blunder” that produced “either slavish sons or impudent puppies.” “I am objective enough to see through your little trick,” he told the master. “You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of your sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as a father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyse the analyst instead of himself.” “You see, my dear Professor, so long as you hand out this stuff I don’t give a damn for my symptomatic actions; they shrink to nothing compared with the formidable beam in my brother Freud’s eye.”20”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“That life could be ugly wasn’t news, and Jung found that the neurotics who were supposed to be cured by making their neurosis clear to them, more often than not wallowed in it. What they needed was the realization that there was something more than the sort of thing Freud was revealing to them; to tell them that they should now find a “normal” place in society after being shown how “abnormal” we all are seemed pointless. Jung’s knight seemed to symbolize that “something more.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“The sexual content in myths, Jung suggested, was really a symbolic use of sexual themes in order to convey a spiritual or religious meaning. One sexual theme favored by Freud, incest, is not, Jung argues, meant to be taken literally, but symbolically; the idea of entering the mother shouldn’t be seen as a form of forbidden sexual gratification, but as a symbol for spiritual rebirth; in other words, as a symbol of individuation. This argument is set out in exhaustive and at times confusing detail in the second part of the book. Knowing that this stance would cost him his friendship with Freud, Jung put off finishing the book and spent months unable to pick up his pen. Tellingly, the most offending chapter is entitled “The Sacrifice.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“What troubled Jung most was Freud’s tendency to reduce any expression of spirituality—in a cultural or philosophical sense—to something smaller. Freud sniffed out sex everywhere; it was the central motive behind everything, and if it was not immediately visible, this was because it was camouflaged.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung was at first put off by Gross’ ideas about sexual liberation, believing that sexual repression was necessary for civilization. Yet Gross’ charisma soon overcame Jung’s antipathy, and the proper Swiss came to feel that the anarchic Gross was like a twin brother. He spent hours with him, taking time away from his other patients, and the two fell to analyzing each other. On one occasion, as with his first conversation with Freud, Jung and Gross talked for twelve hours straight. Gross introduced Jung to the ideas he absorbed in Schwabing’s cafés16 and amidst the sun worshippers on Monte Verità, among them paganism and the notion of an ancient matriarchal society, that had been advocated by Johann Bachofen, like Jung a Baseler. The rather straight-laced Jung found himself questioning his whole attitude to life, society, marriage, and the family;”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Gross was a habitué of the decadent bohemian café society of Munich’s Schwabing district—a kind of early-twentieth-century Haight-Ashbury—and embraced the radical social ideas prevalent in Monte Verità, the “Mountain of Truth,” an early alternative community established in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1900, where as the historian Martin Green argued, “the counterculture began.”15 Notables such as Hermann Hesse, Rudolf Steiner, Isadora Dun-can, and many more made the trek to Monte Verità to take the nature cure, practice nudity (not Steiner), meditate, grow their own vegetables, enjoy “free love,” and in general cast off the ills of an increasingly mechanized society. Gross was initially drawn to psychoanalysis because, with its emphasis on the dangers of sexual repression, it seemed a potent weapon against authoritarianism.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“one of the speakers was an eccentric character who would have as great an influence on Jung as the dark Sabina did. Otto Gross was the son of the judge and criminologist Hans Gross, whose lectures the writer Franz Kafka attended; Hans Gross’ ideas about degenerate “criminal types”—those who had not yet committed a crime but were bound to, a theme updated in Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report”—can be felt in Kafka’s disturbing novel The Trial, about a man who is arrested but never discovers why.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Sabina Spielrein arrived at the Burghölzli in August 1904. She was an eighteen-year-old Russian Jew (her grandfather was a rabbi) who wore pigtails and dressed like a child. Previous time in a private clinic proved unhelpful. She was highly sensitive, deeply emotional, intelligent, well-spoken, and suicidal. She cried, laughed or screamed uncontrollably, avoided eye contact and stuck her tongue out at anyone who touched her. Hysteria ran in her family, and Jung was surprised when Bleuler suggested he psychoanalyze her. Although Freud had introduced the idea almost a decade earlier, he hadn’t provided a manual, and Jung, in a sense, had to wing it. He met with Sabina for an hour or two every other day. Combining word association with the “talking cure,” he got her to tell her story. A beating by her father on her bare bottom when she was three aroused her (and seemed confirmation of Freud’s ideas about childhood sexuality, about which Jung maintained strong reservations), as did the sight of her father beating her older brother. Afterward she believed she had defecated on her father’s hand; this led to obsessive thoughts about excreta. When she reached her teens, Sabina couldn’t eat or see anyone else eating without thinking of feces, and the sight of her father’s hands excited her sexually. Anger at the sight of punishment turned into sexual fantasy, which gave way to open masturbation, depression, and rage.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“On that occasion, while paying his respects, he saw another young girl, a pigtailed teenager of fourteen, standing on the stairway. Out of the blue Jung turned to the friend he was with and said, “That girl is my wife!” Years later, recounting the incident, Jung told Aniela Jaffé that he was deeply shaken by this; he had only seen her for an instant, but knew with utter certainty that he would marry her. Jung was right.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Jung came to understand that in this regard, we are all fragmented, and that the work of individuation is to fuse our disparate parts into a new, more competent whole; as he remarked years later “so-called normal people are very fragmentary . . . they are not complete egos.”17”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“More daring, though, was Jung’s uninhibited interest in spiritualism, which by this time had become a controversial topic on both sides of the Atlantic, ever since 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, discovered they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. Soon after this, mediums, table turning, floating tambourines, ectoplasmic limbs, and a variety of other otherworldly phenomena became the focus of an international craze; the flood of disincarnate appearances led one investigator to speak of an “invasion of the spirit people.”7 Colorful characters like the Russian medium and mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky were involved, but also scientists and philosophers like William James, Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, and Frederick Myers. It is difficult for us today to realize that at the time, many of the most famous men and women in the world were involved in spiritualism, to one degree or another. Thomas Edison, for example, who joined Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, hoped to be able to record spirits on his “Spirit Phone.” Yet, for all this, the reductionist thought that dominates the academic world today was already securely in place, and Jung was risking his future career by openly advocating the unbiased study of the paranormal.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“we all have a shadow which we must get to know.”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

“Even more disturbing was a dream Jung says he had then, the earliest one he remembered. Standing before a dark hole, he peered into it, and seeing a stairway, he descended into a pit. Pushing aside a thick curtain, he entered a chamber and discovered a throne. On it he saw a kind of pillar, which he first thought was a tree trunk, about twelve feet tall, but which he soon realized was made of flesh. Its rounded head was faceless but crowned by a single, unblinking eye. Terrified the huge worm-like creature would approach him, he was petrified, then heard his mother’s voice speaking from above. “Yes,” she said, “just look at him. That is the man-eater!” Jung mentioned this remarkable dream of a ritual phallus to no one, and for several nights afterward he was frightened to sleep, fearful he would have another such nightmare.13”
― Gary Valentine Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings