Symbols of Transformation Quotes

“The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.

(on being 36 yrs old)”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation

“That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation

“For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’-the-wisps.”
― C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation

“The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. (Cf. fig. 35 and pl. LXII.) For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’-the-wisps.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles.”
― Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation

“It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past—our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The conclusion that the myth-makers thought in much the same way as we still think in dreams is almost self-evident. The first attempts at myth-making can, of course, be observed in children, whose games of make-believe often contain historical echoes. But one must certainly put a large question-mark after the assertion that myths spring from the “infantile” psychic life of the race. They are on the contrary the most mature product of that young humanity.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.”
― C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation

“There is only one answer to this: the ancients, with a few illustrious exceptions, entirely lacked the capacity to concentrate their interest on the transformations of inanimate matter and to reproduce the natural process artificially, by which means alone they could have gained control of the forces of nature. What they lacked was training in directed thinking.15 The secret of cultural development is the mobility and disposability of psychic energy. Directed thinking, as we know it today, is a more or less modern acquisition which earlier ages lacked.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Ah, my brother, you will never know the happiness of thinking nothing and doing nothing. This is the most delightful thing there is, next to sleep. So we were before birth, and so we shall be after death.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Ethical decision is possible only when one is conscious of the conflict in all its aspects.”
― Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation

“The name Mithras is related to Modern Persian mihr, meaning ‘love’ and ‘sun.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Being wounded by one’s own arrow signifies, therefore, a state of introversion. What this means we already know: the libido sinks “into its own depths” (a favourite image of Nietzsche’s), and discovers in the darkness a substitute for the upper world it has abandoned—the world of memories (“Amidst a hundred memories”), the strongest and most influential of which are the earliest ones. It is the world of the child, the paradisal state of early infancy, from which we are driven out by the relentless law of time. In this subterranean kingdom slumber sweet feelings of home and the hopes of all that is to be. As Heinrich says of his miraculous work in Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell: It sings a song, long lost and long forgotten, A song of home, a childlike song of love, Born in the waters of some fairy well, Known to all mortals, and yet heard of none.54”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“To anyone who understands libido merely as the psychic energy over which he has conscious control, the religious relationship, as we have defined it, is bound to appear as a ridiculous game of hide-and-seek with oneself. But it is rather a question of the energy which belongs to the archetype, to the unconscious, and which is therefore not his to dispose of. This “game with oneself” is anything but ridiculous; on the contrary, it is extremely important. To carry a god around in yourself means a great deal; it is a guarantee of happiness, of power, and even of omnipotence, in so far as these are attributes of divinity. To carry a god within oneself is practically the same as being God oneself. In Christianity, despite the weeding out of the most grossly sensual ideas and symbols, we can still find traces of this psychology. The idea of “becoming a god” is even more obvious in the pagan mystery cults, where the neophyte, after initiation, is himself lifted up to divine status: at the conclusion of the consecration rites in the syncretistic Isis mysteries 14 he was crowned with a crown of palm leaves, set up on a pedestal, and worshipped as Helios. (Pl. VI.) In a magic papyrus, published by Dieterich as a Mithraic liturgy, there is a ἱερὸς λόγος in which the neophyte says: “I am a star wandering together with you and shining up from the depths.”15”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“It consisted essentially in a dialectical gymnastics which gave the symbol of speech, the word, an absolute meaning, so that words came in the end to have a substantiality with which the ancients could invest their Logos only by attributing to it a mystical value. The great achievement of scholasticism was that it laid the foundations of a solidly built intellectual function, the sine qua non of modern science and technology.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Dreams, visions, fantasies, and delusions are expressive of a situation.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Freud’s incest theory describes certain fantasies that accompany the regression of libido and are especially characteristic of the personal unconscious as found in hysterical patients. Up to a point they are infantile-sexual fantasies which show very clearly just where the hysterical attitude is defective and why it is so incongruous. They reveal the shadow. Obviously the language used by this compensation will be dramatic and exaggerated. The theory derived from it exactly matches the hysterical attitude that causes the patient to be neurotic. One should not, therefore, take this mode of expression quite as seriously as Freud himself took it. It is just as unconvincing as the ostensibly sexual traumata of hysterics. The neurotic sexual theory is further discomfited by the fact that the last act of the drama consists in a return to the mother’s body. This is usually effected not through the natural channels but through the mouth, through being devoured and swallowed (pl. LXII), thereby giving rise to an even more infantile theory which has been elaborated by Otto Rank. All these allegories are mere makeshifts. The real point is that the regression goes back to the deeper layer of the nutritive function, which is anterior to sexuality, and there clothes itself in the experiences of infancy. In other words, the sexual language of regression changes, on retreating still further back, into metaphors derived from the nutritive and digestive functions, and which cannot be taken as anything more than a façon de parler. The so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this level into a “Jonah-and-the-Whale” complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on. Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the “mysteries” (“représentations collectives”) in the whale’s belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“These songs describe more vividly than one could hope to do in plain language the poet’s steady withdrawal and increasing estrangement from life, his gradual submersion in the abyss of memory. After these nostalgic longings the apocalyptic vision of Patmos bursts upon us like a mysterious visitor from another world, a vision swirled round by mists from the abyss, by the gathering clouds of insanity bred by the mother. Mythological ideas again flash forth, symbolic intimations of death and the resurrection of life.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“the lined face are pitiless reminders that whether or not we expose ourselves to the destructive forces of life, the poison of the stealthily creeping serpent of time consumes our bodies nonetheless.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“An invasion from the unconscious is very dangerous for the conscious mind when the latter is not in a position to understand and integrate the contents that have irrupted into it.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Joël describes here, in unmistakable symbolism, the merging of subject and object as the reunion of mother and child. The symbols agree with those of mythology even in their details. There is a distinct allusion to the encircling and devouring motif. The sea that devours the sun and gives birth to it again is an old acquaintance. The moment of the rise of consciousness, of the separation of subject and object, is indeed a birth. It is as though philosophical speculation hung with lame wings on a few primordial figures of human speech, beyond whose simple grandeur no thought can fly. The image of the jelly-fish is far from accidental. Once when I was explaining to a patient the maternal significance of water, she experienced a very disagreeable sensation at this contact with the mother-complex. “It makes me squirm,” she said, “as if I’d touched a jelly-fish.” The blessed state of sleep before birth and after death is, as Joël observes, rather like an old shadowy memory of that unsuspecting state of early childhood, when there is as yet no opposition to disturb the peaceful flow of slumbering life. Again and again an inner longing draws us back, but always the life of action must struggle in deadly fear to break free lest it fall into a state of sleep. Long before Joël, an Indian chieftain had expressed the same thing in the same words to one of the restless white men: “Ah, my brother, you will never know the happiness of thinking nothing and doing nothing. This is the most delightful thing there is, next to sleep. So we were before birth, and so we shall be after death.”34”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“I lie on the seashore, the sparkling flood blue-shimmering in my dreamy eyes; light breezes flutter in the distance; the thud of the waves, charging and breaking over in foam, beats thrillingly and drowsily upon the shore—or upon the ear? I cannot tell. The far and the near become blurred into one; outside and inside merge into one another. Nearer and nearer, friendlier, like a homecoming, sounds the thud of the waves; now, like a thundering pulse, they beat in my head, now they beat over my soul, wrapping it round, consuming it, while at the same time my soul floats out of me as a blue waste of waters. Outside and inside are one. The whole symphony of sensations fades away into one tone, all senses become one sense, which is one with feeling; the world expires in the soul and the soul dissolves in the world. Our little life is rounded by a great sleep. Sleep our cradle, sleep our grave, sleep our home, from which we go forth in the morning, returning again at evening; our life a short pilgrimage, the interval between emergence from original oneness and sinking back into it! Blue shimmers the infinite sea, where the jelly-fish dreams of that primeval existence to which our thoughts still filter down through aeons of memory. For every experience entails a change and a guarantee of life’s unity. At that moment when they are no longer blended together, when the experient lifts his head, still blind and dripping, from immersion in the stream of experience, from flowing away with the thing experienced; when man, amazed and estranged, detaches the change from himself and holds it before him as something alien—at that moment of estrangement the two sides of the experience are substantialized into subject and object, and at that moment consciousness is born.33”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The instincts operate most smoothly when there is no consciousness to conflict with them, or when what consciousness there is remains firmly attached to instinct. This condition no longer applies even to primitive man, for everywhere we find psychic systems at work which are in some measure opposed to pure instinctuality. And if a primitive tribe shows even the smallest traces of culture, we find that creative fantasy is continually engaged in producing analogies to instinctual processes in order to free the libido from sheer instinctuality by guiding it towards analogical ideas. These systems have to be constituted in such a way that they offer the libido a kind of natural gradient. For the libido does not incline to anything, otherwise it would be possible to turn it in any direction one chose. But that is the case only with voluntary processes, and then only to a limited degree. The libido has, as it were, a natural penchant: it is like water, which must have a gradient if it is to flow. The nature of these analogies is therefore a serious problem because, as we have said, they must be ideas which attract the libido. Their special character is, I believe, to be discerned in the fact that they are archetypes, that is, universal and inherited patterns which, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious. When Christ, for instance, speaks to Nicodemus of spirit and water, these are not just random ideas, but typical ones which have always exerted a powerful fascination on the mind. Christ is here touching on the archetype, and that, if anything, will convince Nicodemus, for the archetypes are the forms or river-beds along which the current of psychic life has always flowed.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“O contrite hearts, seek with your eyes The visage of salvation; Blissful in that gaze, arise Through glad regeneration. Now may every pulse of good Seek to serve before thy face, Virgin, Queen of Motherhood, Keep us, Goddess, in thy grace.34”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The water and tree symbolism, which we found as further attributes of the symbol of the city, likewise refer to the libido that is unconsciously attached to the mother-imago. In certain passages of the Apocalypse we catch a clear glimpse of this longing for the mother.32 Also, the author’s eschatological expectations end with the mother: “And there shall be no more curse.” There shall be no more sin, no more repression, no more disharmony with oneself, no guilt, no fear of death and no pain of separation, because through the marriage of the Lamb the son is united with the mother-bride and the ultimate bliss is attained. This symbol recurs in the nuptiae chymicae, the coniunctio of alchemy.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The various meanings of the tree—sun, tree of Paradise, mother, phallus—are explained by the fact that it is a libido-symbol and not an allegory of this or that concrete object. Thus a phallic symbol does not denote the sexual organ, but the libido, and however clearly it appears as such, it does not mean itself but is always a symbol of the libido. Symbols are not signs or allegories for something known; they seek rather to express something that is little known or completely unknown. The tertium comparationis for all these symbols is the libido, and the unity of meaning lies in the fact that they are all analogies of the same thing. In this realm the fixed meaning of things comes to an end. The sole reality is the libido, whose nature we can only experience through its effect on us. Thus it is not the real mother who is symbolized, but the libido of the son, whose object was once the mother. We take mythological symbols much too concretely and are puzzled at every turn by the endless contradictions of myths. But we always forget that it is the unconscious creative force which wraps itself in images. When, therefore, we read: “His mother was a wicked witch,” we must translate it as: the son is unable to detach his libido from the mother-imago, he suffers from resistances because he is tied to the mother.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Not only the gods, but the goddesses, too, are libido-symbols, when regarded from the point of view of their dynamism. The libido expresses itself in images of sun, light, fire, sex, fertility, and growth. In this way the goddesses, as we have seen, come to possess phallic symbols, even though the latter are essentially masculine. One of the main reasons for this is that, just as the female lies hidden in the male (pl. XXIX), so the male lies hidden in the female.28 The feminine quality of the tree that represents the goddess (cf. pl. XXXI) is contaminated with phallic symbolism, as is evident from the genealogical tree that grows out of Adam’s body. In my Psychology and Alchemy I have reproduced, from a manuscript in Florence, a picture of Adam showing the membrum υirile as a tree.29 Thus the tree has a bisexual character, as is also suggested by the fact that in Latin the names of trees have masculine endings and the feminine gender.30”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly intertwining branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this domed cavern then strike you as with the presence of a deity? Or when you see a cave penetrating into the rock at the foot of an overhanging mountain, not made by human hands, but hollowed out to a great depth by nature, is not your soul suffused with a religious fear? We worship the sources of great rivers, we erect altars at the place where a sudden rush of water bursts from the bowels of the earth, warm springs we adore, and certain pools we hold sacred on account of their sombre darkness or their immense depth.64”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation