Carl Jung’s writings and our plight

This entry reads even more ominously today, a dozen years later. I have always been steeped in history, and now I know why.  In robbing us of the truth of where we have been — of what we have been — various agencies have very possibly assured our destruction via the retaliation of what we may think of as the group or racial unconscious. It is only by consciously living in history that we stitch together the ever-moving present moment and the background in which we are rooted.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

10:45 PM. Striking that while I am playing at writing a novel of self transformation called (for no reason I know of) Babe In The Woods, I see in The Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious a discussion of the divine child that has its points of application.

“… we are confronted, at every new stage in the differentiation of consciousness to which civilization attains, with the task of finding a new interpretation appropriate to this stage, in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it. If this link-up does not take place, a kind of rootless consciousness comes into being no longer oriented to the past, a consciousness which succumbs helplessly to all manner of suggestions and, in practice, is susceptible to psychic epidemics. With the loss of the past, now become “insignificant,” devalued, and incapable of reevaluation, the savior is lost too, for the savior is either the insignificant thing itself or else arises out of it.” Page 157

We cannot explain archetypes:

“The most we can do is to dream the myth onward and give it a modern dress.”        Page 160

“But our progressiveness, though it may result in a great many wish-fulfillments, piles up an equally gigantic Promethean debt which has to be paid off from time to time in the form of hideous catastrophes. For ages man has dreamed of flying, and all we have got for it is saturation bombing!” Page 163

“The hero’s main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: It is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious….. The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before.” Page 167

“… the conscious mind knows nothing beyond the opposites and, as a result, has no knowledge of the thing that unites them.” Page 168

“A meaningful but unknown content always has a secret fascination for the conscious mind.” Page 168

“Everything that man should, and yet cannot, be or do – be it in a positive or negative sense – lives on as a mythological figure and anticipation alongside his consciousness, either as a religious projection or – what is still more dangerous – as unconscious contents which then project themselves spontaneously into incongruous objects, e.g. hygienic or other “salvationist” doctrines or practices. All these are so many rationalized substitutes for mythology, and their unnaturalness does more harm than good.” Page 169

“Higher consciousness, or knowledge going beyond our present-day consciousness, is equivalent to being all alone in the world.” Page 169

More quotes pages 170-180.

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