Nietzsche's Zarathustra Quotes

“But when a thing is tangibly idiotic, you can be sure that it is very powerful, very dangerous. You see, when we call a thing stupid, we think that we undo it, that we have overcome it somehow. Of course nothing of the sort happens; we have simply made a statement that it is very important, have advertised it, and it appeals to everybody. People think, thank heaven, here is something we can understand, and they eat it. But if we say something is very intelligent, they vanish and won't touch it.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“But he (Nietzsche) never would be able to realize that he is like ordinary people and he should realize that too. For instance, if he were really a sage, he would say to himself "Go out into the street, go to the little people, be one of them and see how you like it, how much you enjoy being such a small thing. That is yourself." And so he would learn that he was not his own greatness.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“Now, the fact that Nietzsche, after the chapter about "Delights and Passions," arrives at the chapter or the stage of "The Pale Criminal" is not abnormal in itself, but perfectly normal; for if one follows the path of passion one will surely come to the place where one's passion becomes abnormal, asocial or criminal, and that is a quality which is in everybody. Therefore, one says, principiis obsta, resist delights and passions, resist in the beginning before it is too late, don't have passions, it is not good taste, it is bad form. The deeper reason is that if one slips too far into such flames, one is sure to land in criminality. But how can you live and have no passion-for then you would escape suffering? Nobody can escape suffering, and to try to escape passion is to try to escape suffering. But as you cannot escape suffering you cannot escape passion; you will suffer from passion either directly or indirectly, and it is much better to suffer directly because indirect suffering has no merit. It is exactly as if nothing has happened. So the indirect suffering in a neurosis has no moral merit. Years lost in neurosis are just lost, without gain. But if you suffer directly and you know for what you suffer, that is never lost. Therefore, Christ said that if you know what you are doing you are blessed, but if you don't know you are cursed.? For then it is a neurosis.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 463-464)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“If you fulfill the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes

“You see, that will start, for instance, with the recognition that what you call good is very bad for other people, or what they call good is very bad for you. So you come to the conclusion that they are human beings too and they must have their point of view as you have yours. And then you are already out of it, already static, already au dessus de la mêlée. Of course you can take such a standpoint illegitimately before you have gone through the turmoil, just in order to avoid the conflict; people sometimes like to play that stunt, but that has no merit and they are tempted all the time to climb down into the turmoil. But if you have gone through the turmoil, if you cannot stand you any more, if the unconscious itself spits you out, then life itself spits you out as old Jonah was spit out by the whale; and then it islegitimate that you contentedly sit on the top of life, having a look at it. Then you can congeal the pairs of opposites in a beautiful static structure.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1110-1111). Princeton University Press.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“So the fact that Nietzsche feels that Christ died too early is a general idea only; we really have the need to ask the question: "What would Jesus have taught if he had been a married man, with eight children for instance? How would he have dealt with certain situations in life which only occur when you are in life, when you share it?" Of course he was in his own life but it was a very partial one - he was not really in life as we know it. He would perhaps be a good teacher inasmuch as one is meant to live his particular life, the life of a philosophical tramp who really has the idealistic purpose of teaching a new saving truth, who recognizes no other responsibility. You see, he had no profession and no human connections which were valid to him. He separated himself from his family, was the lord of his disciples, who had to follow him while he had to follow no one, being under no obligations. This is an exceedingly simple situation, tragically simple, which is so rare that one cannot assume that the teaching coming from such a life can be possible or applicable to an entirely different type of life.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 779-780)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“To think of the moral side, that we should improve the criminal, is nonsense. That is all trash, having nothing to do with justice. It is just to put the criminal to death because we are in his crime too; everyone of us contains a criminal who wants to commit crimes though we don't know it. [...] Instead of trying to improve that man, hang him. Our criminal instinct is not satisfied by this damned reasonableness, so we get bitter and poisonous and more and more reasonable, but we are really just waiting for the time when we can take a revolver and kill; we are waiting for an age of revolution, for an age of cruelty. So it would be much better if we could begin at the beginning and put the criminal to death by public execution; it doesn't make us any more cruel than we are already.

Look at the things that happen in the world! The amount of quite open cruelty is incredible. One reads about in in the papers. Yet we still go on believing that we are growing better and better every day and in every way until we shall arrive in heaven. But we are in hell, and I tell you, if in our most reasonable town we had some juicy shooting, people would feel grand. I saw a policeman a while ago in the country, a perfectly harmless fellow, who said. "But just wait till the next time I get at a machine-gun!" He promises himself a marvelous feast. And that is so everywhere.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 466)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“Zen is the Japanese word for the Indian dhyana which means enlightenment; they have another word satori, and also sambodhi, which mean the same-illumination. A Chinese statesman, a follower of Confucius, came to the master and asked to be initiated into the mysteries of Zen, and the master consented, and added, "You know, your master Confucius once said to his disciples: 'I have told you everything, I have kept nothing back.' " And the statesman said that was true. A few days later the master and the statesman took a walk together in the hills at the time when the wild laurel was in bloom and the air was full of its perfume. Then the master said to his initiant: "Do you smell it?" And the initiant replied that he did. Then the master said: "There, I have told you everything, I have kept nothing back." And the statesman was enlightened. He realized. It broke through into consciousness. Understand that if you can!

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1290)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“It looks here as if Nietzsche shared the belief of his time, a materialistic conviction that other worlds-metaphysical matters-have no existence except in the imagination of man. He is paying a tribute to his age, not seeing what the imagination of man really means. When anybody says a thing is merely imagination, he is really saying something quite formidable; for whatever our imagination may be, that is our world, unfortunately. [...] For any imagination is a potentiality. The chair upon which I am sitting and the house in which I am, have once been the imagination of a builder; first he made a drawing of it and then he built this house, and if it comes down on my head I shall be crushed. There is nothing in our civilized world which has not been imagination. So imaginations are potential realities, exactly like a loaded revolver, a shot that has not gone off yet; but some ass might pull the trigger and I would be dead.

[...] I am certain, for instance, that the primitives live in an entirely different world from ours; we assume that it is the same, but that is by no means true. They have different impressions, different imaginations about it; it functions in an entirely different way.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 341)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“It is necessary to have metaphysical ideas-we cannot do without them-but it is also necessary to submit them very seriously to the test whether they agree with the human being: a good metaphysical idea does not spoil one's stomach. For instance, if I hold a metaphysical conviction that we live on after death for fifty thousand years instead of fifty million-if that is a solution-! try what it means if I believe in fifty thousand years only; perhaps that is good for my digestion-or bad. You see, I have no other criterion. Of course, it sounds funny, but I start from the conviction that man has also a living body and if something is true for one side, it must be true for the other. For what is the body? The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience of the body. So it is really one and the same thing. Therefore, a good truth must be true for the whole system, not only for half of it. According to my imagination, something seems to be good-it f-its in with my imagination-but it proves to be entirely wrong for my body. And something might apparently be quite nice for the body, but it is very bad for the experience of the soul, and in that case I have a metaphysical enteritis. So I must be careful to bring the two systems together; the only criterion is that both are balanced. When life flows, then I can say it is probably all right, but if I get upset I know something must be wrong, out of order at least.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 355).”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“Now he comes to the explanation of the Pale Criminal; hitherto he speaks simply of the criminal. The paleness comes from the fact that the man was made pale by an idea; he begins to think over what he has done, and he gives it a name. You remember we came across this idea before; it was represented as a particular mistake to give a name to your virtues. Of course, unavoidably you will do so; you don't live your virtues simply as the recognition of an indescribable something about yourself which has value, but say it is this or that, and so you give it a name and make it exclusive and cause trouble-quarrels, conflicts between duties and between virtues. While if you have not given it a name, you will have retained the value. So you cause a conflict by giving names, but one cannot see how to do otherwise.

The criminal has to give it a name, then. He adopts an idea about his deed and says he has done so and so, and then cannot stand it because he sees himself with ten thousand pairs of eyes. For a name is a collective thing, a word in everybody's mouth. He has heard that word from ten thousand other mouths already; when he says to himself that he has committed a murder, he sees it in printed letters in the newspaper, and what he has done is just that awful thing which is called murder. While if he did not give it a name, it would have remained his individual deed, his individual experience, which is not expressed by the collective noun murder. Such a criminal usually says: "I just beat him over the head, or "I put a knife into him," or "I wanted to tell him something and I put a bullet into him, and afterwards they said he was dead." You see, it was an individual series of events which were not named. Even the premeditated murder is very often accounted for in such a way: "I simply had to give that fellow something to make him quiet because I wanted to get at such and such a thing; naturally I had to shove him aside. And then it turned out that he was dead." That is the way such people use a revolver-as a means to change something. It is a sort of aftereffect or a concomitant circumstance that a corpse was left. How awkward! That it is murder only dawns upon them a long time afterwards when they are told. Then they realize it and get pale, but as long as somebody simply has been removed, well, it was awkward that he was found afterwards with a fractured skull, but that does not make one pale: it is simply regrettable.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 469-470). Princeton University Press.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“For instance, let us assume you live in a time when the static principle is ruling. There you will find mystics, and the mystics themselves are then the ones who are suppressed by the static principle, and they begin to boil, to move-with no clear ideas, but they move, they are alive. It is typical for the mystics that they live; their most characteristic quality is the intensity of their liveslife counts with them. They are a reaction against the static principle. But in a time when mysticism is really living, as it is now, movement prevails. We live in such a period and we are looking for a static system in which to find peace. And we are going to create one, for after a time of turmoil we are longing for rest, for sleep, even for a kind of suffocation after that eternal boiling and vibrating. You see, it is always a question of one-sidedness. When the static principle goes too far there will be an uprush of dynamic movement, or if you have the contrary, then that will create its compensation. That is the mechanism in this chapter: it is like a piece of life.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1108-1109). Princeton University Press.”
― C.G. Jung, Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra

“You see, the word passio means suffering, and the German word Leidenschaft has been explained by a poet in a very nice way: Leidenschaft ist das was Leid schafft, passion is that which creates suffering. Leidenschaft is really sufferingness. That is the Buddhistic explanation too: the desirousness, the concupiscentia, of man, creates the great suffering of the world. This passio, then, is the flame which turns man into ashes if he exposes himself to it. But Nietzsche did not. He avoided it, and I cannot blame him, for if anybody can avoid the fire he is very wise to do so.

Now, there is another saying of Jesus, similar to those found at Oxyrhynchus, which is not in the Canon. It runs: Whoever is close to me is close to the fire.[3] That means that whoever is close to Christ, is close to Christ's passio, and is apt to have Christ's own psychology and the same fate. He was the one who took up his passio. He submitted to it and suffered correspondingly, and whoever is close to him will do the same. This is exceedingly intelligent and exceedingly true, and would therefore have been abolished if the father of the church who quoted it had not been too stupid to understand it.

[3] "Jesus says: "He who is near me is near the fire, and he who is far from me is far from the Kingdom." See Apocrypha, for Origen on Jeremiah, p. 35·

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 340). Princeton University Press.”
― C.G. Jung, Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra

“One could say that he (Jesus Christ) himself was the ripe fruit of antiquity; he gathered up in himself the essence of the wisdom of the Near East, contained the juice of Egypt and of Greece, and came together with the mob. And that caused a great whirlwind which moved masses and formed them, which brought about that form which we call Christianity.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1032)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“

That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power and supremacy: that doth he here teach us the plainest parable.
How divinely do vault and arch here contrast in the struggle: how with light and shade they strive against each other, the divinely striving ones. —

This is a clear description of the Gothic cathedral where you really feel that life itself has become congealed-one could say it was congealed life. It is often compared to a wood or to the branches of a tree; all sorts of animals run up and down those columns and spires. It is wood that has become stone, or spirit that has become incorruptible matter, and the architecture symbolizes the struggle from which it arose. One sees the struggle itself represented in Norman art, in those manifold representations of the fight between man and monsters, particularly. In the Gothic cathedral this conflict is fully developed and fully represented in the enormous height and depth, in the light and the shadow, and in the extraordinary complication of all those architectural forms melting into each other, or fighting one another. It is also expressed in the peculiar arches built outside the church to support the walls inside; it gives one the idea of tremendous tension, of a thing that is almost bursting. When you look, for instance, in Notre Dame in Paris, at the tension of the walls inside supported by the arches, you realize how daring the whole enterprise was-to catch so much spirit in matterand what they had to do in order to secure it. There is no such thing in the Norman cathedrals; they are really made of stone, while in the Gothic cathedrals one begins to doubt the weight of the stone. And a little later one sees the same peculiarity in sculpture. In the cinquecento sculpture of Michelangelo and the later men, they seemed to deny the immobility of the stone; up to that time, stone had been practically immovable, even Greek sculpture, but with Michelangelo, the stone began to move with a surplus of life which is hardly believable. It seems as if it either were not stone or as if something wrong had happened. There is too much life, the stone seems to walk away. It begins to move till the whole thing falls asunder. You see, that is what Nietzsche is describing here. He calls them the divinely striving ones that are no longer striving; they have congealed, they have come to rest.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1109-1110)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“I once saw a striking contrast in the use made of material in Florence. I saw first in the Boboli gardens the two wonderful figures of the barbarians-you remember perhaps those antique stone statues. They are made of stone, consist of stone, represent the spirit of stone: you feel that stone has had the word! Then I went to the tombs of the Medici and saw what Michelangelo did to stone; there the stone has been brought to a super-life. It makes gestures which stone never would make; it is hysterical and exaggerated. The difference was amazing. Or go further to a man like Houdon and you see that the stone becomes absolutely acrobatic. There is the same difference between the Norman and Gothic styles. In the Gothic frame of mind stone behaves like a plant, not like a normal stone, while the Norman style is completely suggested by the stone. The stone speaks. Also an antique Egyptian temple is a most marvelous example of what stone can say; the Greek temple already plays tricks with stone, but the Egyptian temple is made of stone. It grows out of stone — the temple of Abu Simbel, for example, is amazing in that respect. Then in those cave temples in India one sees again the thing man brings into stone. He takes it into his hands and makes it jump, fills it with an uncanny sort of life which destroys the peculiar spirit of the stone. And in my opinion it is always to the detriment of art when matter has no say in the game of the artist. The quality of the matter is exceedingly important — it is all-important. For instance, I think it makes a tremendous difference whether one paints with chemical colors or with so-called natural colors. All that fuss medieval painters made about the preparation of their backgrounds or the making and mixing of their colors had a great advantage. No modern artist has ever brought out anything like the colors which those old masters produced. If one studies an old picture, one feels directly that the color speaks, the color has its own life, but with a modern artist it is most questionable whether the color has a life of its own. It is all made by man, made in Germany or anywhere else, and one feels it. So the projection into matter is not only a very important but an indispensable quality of art.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 948-949)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“And of course if you ill-treat the body, it can throw you out of the house entirely, out of your body. It is like ill-treating objects. You know, objects are inanimate things; they lie about heavily, have no legs or wings, and people are often quite impatient with them. For instance, this book would like it very much better, I am sure, if it were lying near the center of the table where it is safe, but I have put it on the edge. It is an awkward position for that poor creature of a book. It may fall down and get injured. If I am impatient, if I touch them in an awkward way, it is a lamentable plight for the poor objects. Then they take their revenge on me. Because I illtreat them they turn against me and become contradictory in a peculiar way. I say, "Oh, these damned objects, dead things, despicable!"- and instantly they take on life. They begin to behave as if they were animated living things. You will then observe what the German philosopher tells about the die Tücke des Objekts. And the more you curse them, the more you use speech figures which insinuate life into them. For instance, "Where has that book hidden itself now? It has walked off and concealed itself somewhere." Or, "The devil is in that watch, where has it gone ?"Objects really take on dangerous qualities with people who are particularly impatient with them: they jump into your eyes, they bite your legs, they creep onto a chair and stick up a point upon which you sit-such things.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 351-352)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“No good breaking the tables of values, they are weak enough already; you had better hold that little bit of value together. They need no particular wildness because they will break up all by themselves and altogether too early; we know from history that values begin to break up long before there are new ones to take their place. Therefore, we always go through a time of destruction when people are without orientation and without laws. Usually only the greatest misery forces people to create new laws and new values. If Zarathustra were not so impatient, the man Nietzsche could follow him. He could give Zarathustra the right rhythm, prevent him from being too impatient. Then he would not talk of breaking the tables of values. They could be preserved a little longer. They are weak enough: they will break up without our help. It is not necessary to destroy churches. Nobody attacks Islam, but the mosques are empty; nobody attacks Protestantism, but innumerable people never go to church on Sundays.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 215-216)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“And so Nietzsche, inflated by that archetype Zarathustra, was inhuman; a person who is assimilated by such an archetype is necessarily not human. He is a Superman, and how can one have a friendship with a Superman? Absolutely impossible. One can only worship him as a superior being. But I wouldn't drink a glass of beer with a Superman. One cannot eat at the same table; one can only hold communion where he is the lord.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 205)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“This condition of the crucifixion, then, is a symbolic expression for the state of extreme conflict, where one simply has to give up, where one no longer knows, where one almost loses one's mind. Out of that condition grows the thing which is really fought for. For Nietzsche, it would be the birth of the Superman. We would say it was the birth of the self. Only through extreme pain do you experience yourself; you believe then that you are a unit. Before that, you can imagine that you are anybody, the Pope or Mussolini-you are not necessarily yourself. Afterwards, when you have undergone this extraordinary experience of the self, there are no illusions any longer.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 449)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“The deeper the worry, the greater the tragedy becomes, the more he loses himself in the enthusiasm of the divine mania. And that is prepared here. To a man like Nietzsche, gripped by an extraordinary suffering, it is a real consolation when somebody says: "All that terrible trouble which burns you now with the tortures of hell, will come to an end; you will go to sleep and not know what is happening to your body." If you have ever experienced such a state of oblivion in your life, where only your body lives, then you know all the bliss of the Dionysian revelation. And Nietzsche had that revelation.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 144)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“You know, he (Nietzsche) belongs to the people living east of the Rhine where there is no anima psychology yet; masculine psychology, the Puer Eternus psychology, prevails there on account of the youth of those tribes. In the older civilization west of the Rhine the anima problem comes up, but east of the Rhine there is generally the problem of the relationship between man and the subordinate principle — an idea or an enthusiasm, for instance, or a big enterprise. It is entirely the psychology of the youth who is entering life where the world consists mainly of men. There are female appendages who serve a certain purpose, for the propagation of the tribe or for the romantic feelings, but there is no other use for them. Therefore, you actually see the idea spreading again that a woman belongs in the kitchen and is only useful to produce children — that she has no psychological problem, andno potentiality for soul-development.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“Everything that is beyond the ordinary is paid for. You make no mistake if you never envy any kind of success, for every success is dearly paid for. If you think it is not, you simply don't know; somebody has paid.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“But it is quite understandable that even the best of people are accessible to the idea of a state because, as I said, a state functions as something very real. You see, when the state claims to be like God’s finger creating order out of chaos, it is true to a certain extend; it is monstrous, not human, but a people in its wholeness is not human. It is a big animal, and therefore it needs another monster to tame it.”
― Carl Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“The state is a terrible concretization,but if such things begin to concretize it is the very devil, as Nietzsche feels […] But surely the state is not the word of God. It is the invention of the many and therefore dangerous and poisonous; it is a devilish invention replacing the eternal plan of God that should rule the world. It is man instead of the divine competence, the limited mind instead of the infinite mind, things based upon temporal assumptions instead of upon eternal verities.”
― Carl Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“If you fulfil the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. You radiate; from your abundance something overflows. But if you hate and despise yourself-if you have not accepted your pattern-then there are hungry animals (prowling cats and other beasts and vermin) in your constitution which get at your neighbors like flies in order to satisfy the appetites which you have failed to satisfy. [...]

The Catholic practice of confession and repentance and absolution is just that: you repent and then you tell about it and are given absolution. You are washed of your sin, and then you can do it again-you are a clean slate so you can write on it once more. That is the reason the Reformation did away with confession, in one way fortunately, in another unfortunately, because people cannot get rid of their sins. And that is the reason entre autres for the success of the Oxford Movement, where you can hand over your sin to other people and they run away with it. But that is bad. The Protestant must be alone with his sin. He may confess it but he knows that doesn't give him absolution; even if he confesses ten thousand times, he can only familiarize himself with the fact that he should never lose sight of what he has done. That is good for him. He should arrive at a level where he can say, "Yes, I have done that thing, and I must curse myself for it." But I cannot be nice to a man who has given offence to me if I am not nice with myself. I must agree with my brother for my worst brother is myself. So I have to be patient, and I have to be very Christian inside. If I fulfil my pattern, then I can even accept my sinfulness and can say, "It is too bad, but it is so — l have to agree with it." And then I am fulfilled, then the gold begins to glow. You see, people who can agree with themselves are like gold. They taste very good. All the flies are after them.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 801-803).”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“We know selfishness as individualism, as a hungry or thirsty kind of craving to impose upon others, to steal from others, to take away their values; one can call it morbid-selfishness in the sense of egotism. But there is another selfishness which is holy, only nobody has any idea of it; this idea has died out for us since the early Middle Ages. We have the idea that when somebody withdraws into himself, when he does not allow other people to eat him, that he is morbid or terribly egotistical. This simply comes from the fact that late Christianity believes in the early teaching of Christ: "Love thy neighbor, "and then what Christ really taught, "as thyself," is never mentioned. But if you don't love yourself, how can you love anybody else? You come to him as a begging bowl, and he has to give. While if you love yourself, you are rich, you are warm, you have abundance; then you can say that you love because you are really a gift, you are agreeable. For you must feel well when you go to your friends; you must be able to give something in order to be a loving friend. Otherwise you are a burden. If you are black and hungry and thirsty you are just a damned nuisance, just an empty sack. That is what these Christians are; they are empty and they make demands upon one. They say, "We love you and you ought to" — those devils put one under an obligation. But I always point out that Christ said: "Love thy neighbor as thyself," so love yourself first.

And this is so difficult that for a long time you won't ask anybody to love you, because you know what an awful hell it is. You hate yourself, are despicable to yourself, cannot stand two hours in a room alone. Like the clergyman I told you about. He was occupied from seven in the morning till eleven at night with people, so he was quite empty and therefore suffered from all sorts of disturbances. You see, you lmust give something to yourself. How can you give to people when you don't understand yourself? Learn to understand yourself first. I had the greatest trouble in the world to teach that man that he should sometimes be alone with himself. He thought that if he read a book or played the piano with his wife he would be alone, and that if he were actually alone one hour every day he would get crazy and melancholic. If you cannot stand yourself for any length of time, you may be sure that your room is full of animals-you develop an evil smell. And yet you demand that your neighbor should love you. It is just as if a dinner was served to you which was so bad you couldn't eat it, and then you say to your friend or mother or father, "Eat it, I love you, it is very bad." But no, you tell them it is very good, you cheat people. You see, whoever is not able to love himself is unworthy of loving other people and people kick him out of the house. And they are quite right. It is very difficult to love oneself, as it is very difficult to really love other people. But inasmuch as you can love yourself you can love other people; the proof is whether you can love yourself, whether you can stand yourself. That is exceedingly difficult; there is no meal worse than one's own flesh. Try to eat it in a ritual way, try to celebrate communion with yourself, eat your own flesh and drink your own bloodsee how the thing tastes. You will marvel. Then you see what you are to your friends and relations; just as bad as you seem to yourself are you to them. Of course they are all blindfolded, late Christians, so they may not see the poison they eat in loving you; but if you know this, you can understand how important it is to be alone sometimes. It is the only way in which you can establish decent relations to other people. Otherwise, it is always a question, not of give and take, but of stealing.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 799-800)”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“Samadhi is one of those terms which was used in the past in India, and is still used in the actual religious movements of the present time. But it is used with no very definite meaning. To think that these Indian concepts have a definite meaning is one of our Western mistakes; that is doing them an injustice. The Indian mind is peculiarly indefinite, and they try to make up for it by a lot of terms which are very difficult to translate, the difficulty chiefly consisting in the fact that we give them a definite meaning which does not belong to them. And their mind is extraordinarily descriptive; they want to give a picture of a thing rather than a logical definition. But in trying to give a good description, it sounds as if they were trying to give a definite concept, and that is the cause of the most baffling misunderstandings between the Indian and the Westerner; that we give a definite meaning to a concept which is not definite in itself, which only sounds definite, brings about endless misinterpretations. The terms, samadhi, dhyana, sahasrara, and so on, apparently have a definite meaning but in reality they have not. Even the Indians are absolutely at sea with these concepts.

[...] When you compare the translation of the Patanjali Yogasutra made by Hauer with the one by Deussen, and with the English translation, you see at once the difficulty; they have all been put to the greatest pains to find the proper Western terms." That is due to the Eastern mentality which, despite all their efforts at terminology, remains indefinite; such painstaking terminology is always a compensatory attempt to make certain of something which is not certain at all. As I said before, if you want a blade of grass or a pebble, they give you a whole landscape; "a blade of grass" means grass and it means a meadow and it is also the green surface of the earth.

Of course that conveys truth, too, and leads eventually to Chinese concepts-the peculiar way in which the Chinese mind looks at the world as a totality for instance, where everything is in connection with everything else, where everything is contained in the same stream. While we on the other hand are content to look at things when they are singled out, extracted, or selected, we have learned to detach detail from nature. If I ask a European, even a quite uneducated man, to give me a particular pebble or leaf, he is capable of doing so without bringing in the whole landscape. But the Easterner, particularly when it is a matter of a conscientious mind, is quite incapable of giving one a piece of definite information. It is somewhat the same with learned people: you ask a learned man for some bit of information and would be perfectly satisfied with yes or no, but he will say yes-under-such-conditions, and no-under-such-conditions, and finally you don't know what it is all about. Of course for other learned individuals this is excellent information: a trained mind would get very definite information in this way, but for the ordinary mind it is less than nothing. In my many conversations with Indian philosophers, I remember that their answers seemed less like yes-under-such-and-such-conditions, and more like a yea-and-nay-but-under-no-conditions. We think it is a sort-of unnecessary clumsiness, but when you look carefully at what they give you, you see really a marvelous picture; you get a vision of the whole thing.


Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1372-1374). Princeton University Press.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“For instance, if you have a peculiar sensation in your hand, and at the same time in your foot, there is a conflict between the two; one is above and the other below, and you don't know whether you should look first here or there. So all the pluralistic elements of your mind can be the cause for a conflict, if it is only the struggle for the priority of attention — you don't know to which you should attend first. It is also like a flock and a shepherd; the flock consists of a plurality, and if the units of a flock disperse, the shepherd must gather them together. And so the ego consciousness is the shepherd of a flock of psychical units, and if the shepherd is killed, the flock disperses. That would be schizophrenia. The splitting of the mind is a separating of the units, and then each unit behaves as if it were a little ego consciousness, and if there is a remnant of the shepherd left somewhere, if his ears at least remain, he will hear voices. The units behave like little egos and they speak with sheeplike intelligence.

One observes the same phenomenon in mediumistic experiments, where certain fragments of the mind are split off. The psyche is exceedingly dissociable. The fact that the mind really is based upon a plurality makes this a serious danger. One also observes very frequently in schizophrenics that as soon as the flock disperses, as soon as the war breaks out, the fragments of consciousness are projected into different parts of the body, so that they begin to speak with a certain amount of consciousness. [...] It is a very frequent thing that patients localize their voices somewhere in the body. We say quite normally, "It was as if my heart said to me," or, "as if I heard a voice within." But schizophrenics hear voices coming out of their feet or head or eyes. I have a patient who says: "Today I have voices in my upper lip." Or, "Now they are occupied with my navel." The voices are also personified as infinitely small men, who in thousands, like ants, walk over the body. That famous case, Schreber, was such a fellow. He found dozens of little men upon his eyelids, trying to raise or lower them, or walking upon his skin; and time and again one of the little men lost his independence and merged with the patient's consciousness. He always got angry and cursed when that happened. That would be a relative dissociation — the parts are not all absolutely independent; at times they join on again. It would be as if the frozen surface of a lake were broken up so that fragments were drifting on the surface, and then occasionally two pieces would join and freeze together and become a unit again. That is the moment when the little man says "Damn it!" — and merges with consciousness.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 363-364). Princeton University Press.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung

“Mr. Baumann: In the beginning of Faust there is a monologue where he was considering which was first, spirit, the word-or the deed, the action. Wasn't he putting the spirit into the body there?

Prof.Jung: Faust is already modern in that Goethe felt that the word alone was not enough. But it is the only available term to translate Logos, for Logos is most certainly not action. For the antique man, however, it was action, the word was the action of the spirit. [...] The mantra is the word which is supposed to open the magic door and is used in order to produce magic effects. It is a piece of old memory. It once was the face of God, and for those people in whom a bit of the old spirit is still alive, it can produce magic effects; but to us it means nothing. It is a word.

Mrs. Fierz: Originally the word was not at all clear; it was dark, and therefore it carried the secret meaning.

Prof. Jung: Yes, the words of God were the words of an oracle, for instance. And the words were dark; they were not concepts but the expression of the divine power. It was not necessary to understand. One had only to accept the divine word and one had accepted God. But you see, we expect words which we understand, and then they are just words. So a mantra means a world to people to whom it means anything at all, but to us it means nothing. For we simply judge by the words, or we judge by the extraordinary aspect of symbols. We find Mithraic symbols in a grotto, and ask what they mean, or think perhaps that they are foolish or poor. We don't know what spirit has created them, nor what spirit is behind them. Those symbols were expressions of a tremendous phenomenon. In themselves they are just traces, the footprints of something that has passed. But the footprints, of course, are not the being; you see, those people really beheld the being and therefore paid little attention to the footprints. Only when the thing had passed, when people were asking if there was anything left, they said, "Ah, here are footprints," and then they made a great story about them. So our situation is exactly reversed: we are now in the age where there is nothing but words, footprints-but we can do nothing with them, they are dead. Therefore, we must turn away from them and go back to the source where the whole thing began originally. And here is a message: Zarathustra says to go back to the body, go into the body, and then everything will be right, for there the greatest intelligence is hidden. Out of that living body everything originally has come. Well, that is true. One can say nothing else.

Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 369-370). Princeton University Press.”
― C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung