Principle of Individuation Quotes

“This transformation from one state (the spiritual) to another (the psychological) is described as sublimation.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“This is a thumbnail sketch of the psychological opus of individuation. It is an operation of sublimation, which transforms the spiritual into the psychological and renders numinous experience practical and useful. The archetypal images exposed in numinous experiences become integrated into psychological functioning and assimilated into the contemporary world.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“In other words, the attainment to numinous experiences, while significant in itself, was not of final import; rather, it provided the essential ingredients (the alchemical prima materia) for further stages of refinement in the individuation opus.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“From this forceful realization that the numinous element in spirituality can heal, an individual was freed from his addiction to alcohol and a worldwide self-help organization was born. Once the true underlying craving for spirit was effectively addressed and integrated into daily life, the desire for alcoholic ecstasy could be held in check.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Are not all addictions, one wonders after having seen such a wide variety of them in clinical practice, a search for something so elusive as to be considered somehow “of the spirit”?”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Numinous experience creates a potentially convincing link to the Infinite, and this often leads to the feeling that character flaws like addictions or behavioral disorders are trivial by comparison with the profound vision of wholeness and unity imparted in the mystical state.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“individuation as Jung presented it in a multitude of writings is vastly more complex and has essentially to do with casting light into the darkness of psychological life and integrating the various polarities and tensions”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Individuation is an imperative that drives us forward and, if successful, releases us from the trap of endlessly repeating the patterns that have conditioned us.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“The human opus—the work we as individuals and to some degree as communities can do and where we can make a difference—is to become conscious of what is given to us, whether it comes by way of biology, personal or collective history, or the endlessly creative unconscious, and to develop it to the best of our ability. In doing so, we also contribute a dimension to existence that did not exist previously, the dimension of consciousness. I take my cue from C.G. Jung, who saw this as the human contribution to the universe.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“The human opus—the work we as individuals and to some degree as communities can do and where we can make a difference—is to become conscious of what is given to us, whether it comes by way of biology, personal or collective history, or the endlessly creative unconscious, and to develop it to the best of our ability. In doing so, we also contribute a dimension to existence that did not exist previously, the dimension of consciousness.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“PEOPLE DO NOT CREATE their personalities willfully by choosing a specific identity or character any more than they form their physiques by picking out a complexion, a size of foot or hand, or a particular combination of facial features.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Individuation is not, therefore, tantamount to a mystic journey, which prizes the experience of union with God or the vision of the Mysterium tremendum as the apex. Individuation does not culminate in an act of worship. Nor is it identical with the resolute via negativa of such religious traditions as Zen Buddhism. It has elements of both—experiencing the numinous and cleansing the mirror of consciousness—but it includes these as two movements within a greater opus.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“An understandable wariness about the grand enthusiasms generated by religion, ideology, or mythopoetic hermeneutics has introduced in some people an uneasy suspicion of Jung’s psychology and classical Jungian perspectives on dream interpretation and the hermeneutical methods of amplification and active imagination”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness