My life is a story of the self-realisation of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome.
Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition.
When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilisations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes.
The rhizome remains. In the end the only events worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions.
These form the prima materia of my scientific work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked was crystallised. Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared.
But my encounters with the “other” reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.
Therefore my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them, for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings.
It is these that make up the singularity of my life. I had the earliest dream I can remember, a dream which was to preoccupy me all my life. I was then between three and four years old.
In the dream I was in the meadow. I discovered a rectangular stone-lined hole in the ground. I had never seen it before.
I ran forward curiously and peered down into it. Then I saw a stone stairway leading down. Hesitantly and fearfully, I descended.
At the bottom was a doorway with a round arch, closed off by a green curtain. Curious to see what might be hidden behind, I pushed it aside. I saw before me in the dim light a rectangular chamber about thirty feet long.
On this platform stood a wonderfully rich golden throne. Something was standing on it which I thought at first was a tree trunk. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling.
But it was of a curious composition: it was made of skin and naked flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upwards. The thing did not move, yet I have the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep towards me.
I was paralysed with terror. At that moment I heard from outside and above me my mother’s voice. She called out, “Yes, just look at him.
That is the man-eater! ” That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death. For many nights afterwards I was afraid to go to sleep, because I feared I might have another dream like that.
This dream haunted me for years. Only much later did I realise that what I had seen was a ritual phallus. At all events, the phallus of this dream seems to be a subterranean God “not to be named”, and such it remained throughout my youth, reappearing whenever anyone spoke too emphatically about Lord Jesus, for again and again I would think of his underground counterpart, a frightful revelation which had been accorded me without my seeking it.
Consciously, I was religious in the Christian sense, though always with the reservation, “What about that thing under the ground? ” There is something else, something very secret that people don’t know about. Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the earth.
What happened then was a kind of burial in the earth, and many years were to pass before I came out again. Today I know it happened in order to bring the greatest possible amount of light into the darkness. It was an initiation into the realm of darkness.
In our garden there was a slope in which was embedded a stone that stuck out—my stone. Often, when I was alone, I sat down on this stone, and then began an imaginary game that went something like this, “Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting? ” The answer remained totally unclear, and my uncertainty was accompanied by a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness.
But there was no doubt whatsoever that this stone stood in some secret relationship to me. I could sit on it for hours, fascinated by the puzzle it set me. “The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years”, I would think, “while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.
” I was but the sum of my emotions, and the “Other” in me was the timeless, imperishable stone. I had another important experience at about this time. I had the overwhelming impression of having just emerged from a dense cloud.
I knew all at once: now I am myself! It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an “I”. But at this moment I came upon myself.
I always knew I was two persons. One was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent, and clean than many other boys. The other was grown up — old, in fact — sceptical, mistrustful, remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever “God” worked directly in him.
As soon as I was alone, I could pass over into this state. I therefore sought the peace and solitude of this “Other”, personality No. 2.
The play and counterplay between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a “split” or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense.
On the contrary, it is played out in every individual. In the course of my life it has often happened to me that I suddenly knew something which I really could not know at all. The knowledge came to me as though it were my own idea.
I learned that religion was “a spiritual act consisting in man’s establishing his own relationship to God. ” I disagreed with that, for I understood religion as something that God did to me; it was an act on His part, to which I must simply yield. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way.
One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. Otherwise all is folly and meaninglessness. Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the most certain and immediate experiences.
The question of my choice of a profession was drawing alarmingly close. I looked forward with longing to the end of my school days. Then I would go to the university and study—natural science, of course.
Then I would know something real. But no sooner had I made myself this promise than my doubts began. Was not my bent rather toward history and philosophy?
Then again, I was intensely interested in everything Egyptian and Babylonian, and would have liked best to be an archaeologist. But I did not have the money. For a long time I could not make up my mind and constantly postponed the decision.
During this time I had two dreams. In the first dream I was in a dark wood that stretched along the Rhine. I came to a little hill, a burial mound, and began to dig.
After a while I turned up, to my astonishment, some bones of prehistoric animals. This interested me enormously, and at that moment I knew: I must get to know nature, the world in which we live, and the things around us. Then came a second dream.
Again I was in a wood; it was threaded with watercourses, and in the darkest place I saw a circular pool, surrounded by dense undergrowth. Half immersed in the water lay the strangest and most wonderful creature: a round animal, shimmering in opalescent hues, and consisting of innumerable little cells, or of organs shaped like tentacles. It seemed to me indescribably wonderful that this magnificent creature should be lying there undisturbed, in the hidden place, in the clear, deep water.
It aroused in me an intense desire for knowledge, so that I awoke with a beating heart. These two dreams decided me overwhelmingly in favour of science, and removed all my doubts. The inspiration suddenly came to me that I could study medicine.
The choice seemed to lie between surgery and internal medicine. In preparing myself for the state examination. The textbook on psychiatry was the last I attacked.
I expected nothing of it. The author called the psychoses “diseases of personality”. My heart suddenly began to pound.
I had to stand up and draw a breath. My excitement was intense, for it had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed.
Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality. About this time I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me.
It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment.
I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. This little light was my consciousness.
Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light. This dream was a great illumination for me. Now I knew that No.
1 was the bearer of light, and that No. 2 followed him like a shadow. I recognised clearly that my path led irrevocably outwards, into the limitations and darkness of three-dimensionality.
Dominating my interests and research was the burning question: "What actually takes place inside the mentally ill? " From the clinical point of view which then prevailed, the human personality of the patient, his individuality, did not matter at all. In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of.
To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient’s secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment.
The doctor’s task is to find out how to gain that knowledge. In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality.
Through my work with the patients I realised that paranoid ideas and hallucinations contain a germ of meaning. A personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the psychosis. The fault is ours if we do not understand them.
Regarding them from the outside, all we see of the mentally ill is their tragic destruction, rarely the life of that side of the psyche which is turned away from us. Outward appearances are frequently deceptive, as I discovered to my astonishment in the case of a young catatonic patient. She was eighteen years old, and came from a cultivated family.
At the age of fifteen she had been seduced by her brother and abused by a schoolmate. From her sixteenth year on, she retreated into isolation. She grew steadily odder, and at seventeen she was taken to the mental hospital.
She heard voices, refused food, and no longer spoke. When I first saw her she was in a typical catatonic state. In the course of many weeks I succeeded, very gradually, in persuading her to speak.
After overcoming many resistances, she told me that she had lived on the moon. This world was not beautiful, she said, but the moon was beautiful, and life there was rich in meaning. As a result of the incest to which she had been subjected as a girl, she felt humiliated in the eyes of the world, but elevated in the realm of fantasy.
She became “extra-mundane”, as it were, and lost contact with humanity. She plunged into cosmic distances, into outer space, where she met with the winged demon. By telling me her story she had in a sense betrayed the demon and attached herself to an earthly human being.
Hence she was able to return to life and even to marry. Thereafter I regarded the sufferings of the mentally ill in a different light. For I had gained insight into the richness and importance of their inner experiences.
The cure ought to grow naturally out of the patient himself. I treat every patient as individually as possible, because the solution of the problem is always an individual one. A solution which would be out of the question for me may be just the right one for someone else.
The crucial point is that I confront the patient as one human being to another. Analyst and patient sit facing one another, eye to eye; the doctor has something to say, but so has the patient. For psychotherapy to be effective a close rapport is needed, so close that the doctor cannot shut his eyes to the heights and depths of human suffering.
Only if the doctor knows how to cope with himself and his own problems will he be able to teach the patient to do the same. The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. “Only the wounded physician heals.
” Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fright, and many run away. The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. My patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I could not help learning essential things from them.
Encounters with people of so many different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities. The finest and most significant conversations of my life were anonymous. After the parting of the ways with Freud, a period of inner uncertainty began for me.
I lived as if under constant inner pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there was some psychic disturbance in myself. Thereupon I said to myself, “Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me.
” Thus I consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious. The first thing that came to the surface was a childhood memory from perhaps my tenth or eleventh year. At that time I had had a spell of playing passionately with building blocks.
I distinctly recalled how I had built little houses and castles. To my astonishment, this memory was accompanied by a good deal of emotion. “Aha”, I said to myself, “there is still life in these things.
The small boy is still around, and possesses a creative life which I lack. This moment was a turning point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless resistances and with a sense of recognition. For it was a painfully humiliating experience to realise that there was nothing to be done except play childish games.
Nevertheless, I began accumulating suitable stones, gathering them partly from the lake shore and partly from the water. And I started building: cottages, a castle, a whole village. As soon as I was through eating, I began playing, and continued to do so until the patients arrived; and if I was finished with my work early enough in the evening, I went back to building.
In the course of this activity my thoughts clarified, and I was able to grasp the fantasies whose presence in myself I dimly felt. Towards the autumn of 1913, the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to be moving outwards, as though there were something in the air. In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overwhelming vision.
I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.
Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred. An inner voice spoke. “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so.
You cannot doubt it. ” I drew the conclusion that they had to do with me myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war did not occur at all.
On 1st August the world war broke out. Now my task was clear: I had to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general. Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche.
An incessant stream of fantasies had been released, and I did my best not to lose my head but to find some way to understand these strange things. To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images—that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions—I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.
In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me “underground”, I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. After prolonged hesitation, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realised that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me.
I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself. Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts are like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.
” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me.
At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru. The essential thing is to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time bring them into relationship with consciousness.
That is the technique for stripping them of their power. Particularly at this time, when I was working on the fantasies, I needed a point of support in "this world," and I may say that my family and my professional work were that to me. It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world.
The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts—which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality.
For me, such irreality was the quintessence of horror, for I aimed, after all, at this world and this life. No matter how deeply absorbed or how blown about I was, I always knew that everything I was experiencing was ultimately directed at this real life of mine. I meant to meet its obligations and fulfil its meanings.
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which were presented to me anew each day.
In them I saw the self that is, my whole being actively at work. To be sure, at first I could only dimly understand them; but they seemed to me highly significant, and I guarded them like precious pearls. I had the distinct feeling that they were something central, and in time I acquired through them a living conception of the self.
I saw that everything, all the paths I had been following, all the steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths.
It is the path to the centre, to individuation. I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.
The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life—in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the latter details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work.
As my life entered its second half, I was already embarked on the confrontation with the contents of the unconscious. My work on this was an extremely long-drawn-out affair, and it was only after some twenty years of it that I reached some degree of understanding of my fantasies. First I had to find evidence for the historical prefiguration of my inner experiences.
My encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious. I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy.
The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. My life has been permeated and held together by one idea and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the secret of the personality.
Everything can be explained from this central point, and all my works relate to this one theme. Gradually, through my scientific work, I was able to put my fantasies and the contents of the unconscious on a solid footing. Words and paper, however, did not seem real enough to me; something more was needed.
I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Or, to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone. This was the beginning of the “Tower,” the house which I built for myself at Bollingen.
From the beginning I felt the Tower as in some way a place of maturation—a maternal womb or a maternal figure in which I could become what I was, what I am and will be. It gave me a feeling as if I were being reborn in stone. At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself.
Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings. At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.
I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well.
I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple! In Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live “in modest harmony with nature.
” Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote future. Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play are close together. At the beginning of 1944 I broke my foot, and this misadventure was followed by a heart attack.
In a state of unconsciousness I experienced deliriums and visions which must have begun when I hung on the edge of death. My nurse afterwards told me, “It was as if you were surrounded by a bright glow. ” This was a phenomenon she had sometimes observed in the dying, she added.
It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.
The sight of the earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen. After contemplating it for a while, I turned round. Something new entered my field of vision.
A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It was floating in space, and I myself was floating in space. An entrance led into a small antechamber.
To the right of the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench, and I knew that he expected me. As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me—an extremely painful process. Nevertheless, something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me.
I consisted of my own history, and felt with great certainty: this is what I am. This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired.
I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived. Something else engaged my attention: as I approached the temple I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand what historical nexus I or my life fitted into.
I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. While I was thinking over these matters, an image floated up.
It was my doctor. He had been delegated by the earth to deliver a message to me, to tell me that there was a protest against my going away. I had no right to leave the earth and must return.
The moment I heard that, the vision ceased. I was profoundly disappointed, for now it all seemed to have been for nothing. In reality, a good three weeks were still to pass before I could truly make up my mind to live again.
I could not eat, because all food repelled me. The view of the city and mountains from my sick-bed seemed to me like a painted curtain with black holes in it. Disappointed, I thought, “Now I must return to the ‘box system’ again.
” For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. Life and the whole world struck me as a prison. By day I was usually depressed.
Towards evening I would fall asleep, and my sleep would last until about midnight. Then I would come to myself and lie awake for about an hour, but in an utterly transformed state. It was as if I were in an ecstasy.
I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were safe in the womb of the universe—in a tremendous void, but filled with the highest possible feeling of happiness. “This is eternal bliss”, I thought. It is impossible to convey the beauty and intensity of emotion during those visions.
They were the most tremendous things I have ever experienced. Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it. I would never have imagined that any such experience was possible.
The visions and experiences were utterly real; there is nothing subjective about them; they all had a quality of absolute objectivity. We shy away from the word “eternal”, but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past, and future are one. Everything that happens in time had been brought together into a concrete whole.
The only thing that feeling could grasp would be a sum, an iridescent whole containing all at once expectation of a beginning, surprise at what is now happening, and satisfaction or disappointment with the result of what happened. One is interwoven into an indescribable whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity. I don’t know how it will be, existence after death.
What happens to consciousness? It is conceivable that after death individual consciousness returns to a universal consciousness. But that is a great mystery.
I feel quite certain, though, that the process of becoming conscious continues after death. My burning interest now is of course the situation after death, what one can experience there. Are time and space necessary conditions?
To experience something, two elements are required: the one having the experience – the I – and the object being experienced. We don’t know whether this distinction between subject and object is also present after death. This raises the question of whether we have consciousness after death and if so, how much.
That is the big question: whether one dies with a developed consciousness or not. Or whether one then simply is, and is blown out into existence again by the great universal wind. Although the question of reincarnation seems reasonable to me, I cannot rationally understand how it would be possible.
If one believes in the possibility of reincarnation, the idea logically follows that those people who are reincarnated did not complete something in their life that they were meant to do. Perhaps there is after all something to the idea that one chooses one’s life before birth. In this case there would be a connection between previous fantasies and a specific life.
You may harbour a yearning for something during your life and have fantasies about the unlived aspect right up until you die. People often regret not having done something or other. If there were a continuation, according to the laws of the psyche an impulse would arise to realise these compensatory fantasies.
I could imagine that I might compensate for my current life in the future by again being a pioneer, but in a different field, perhaps in the natural sciences. What excites me most is insight. It is conceivable that in the “beyond”, after death, one will have unlimited access to insights.
That is certainly possible, if we descend into a universal consciousness after death, into an existence beyond opposites, where the division between the subject having the experience and the object being experienced no longer exists. But such insights would still not be comprehensive. Because they would give information about facts and connections: i.
e. , breadth rather than depth. It would be a direct knowledge of things, without the limitations of space and time.
Conversely, I see the recognition of that which gives one’s own life meaning, and insights that one has gained from this life, as knowledge attaining depth. Increased breadth of knowledge and acquisition of information would simply be an aid for such insights into the realm of depths. That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being “brings over” at the time of his death is so important.
Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man’s metaphysical task. The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?
That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying his life.
If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. Everyone has the possibility of achieving something particular. We must not make the mistake of thinking there is a specific panacea, one remedy for all.
It is not about something defined for all. It is about doing one’s best in the position one is in, with those means one has. Someone who does something small to the best of their ability also helps humanity to progress.
It is not about this or that, but rather whether my existence here in this three-dimensional system has answered the individual call. Whether I have engaged myself with whatever was meant for me, in order to fulfill my life’s purpose and complete the task that was assigned to me. And not just thinking or talking about it, without then actually doing it.
In my case it must have been primarily a passionate urge towards understanding which brought about my birth. For that is the strongest element in my nature. True connection with other people, with the world, with the cosmos, is impossible unless we know what is going on inside ourselves.
Our task is to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. We need to battle for our lives with all the fibers of our being, with the aim of achieving as much consciousness and knowledge as possible – knowledge about ourselves, about the world, about eternity.
That is what gives meaning to life. If we don’t accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality.
One cannot do more than live what one really is. Today I can say: I have been true to myself, I have done what I could to the best of my knowledge and conscience. Whether it was right or not, I cannot say.
Suffering was inevitable in any case. But I want to suffer for those things which really belong to me. A decisive factor for me in choosing this path was the knowledge that if I did not respond fully to my life’s purpose and challenges, then they would be inherited by my children, who would have to bear the burden of my unlived life in addition to their own difficulties.
I have seen the fate of those who have not lived their own lives, and it is simply horrible. People who live out their destiny and fulfill it to the best of their knowledge and abilities have no reason for regret. In psychology one has not really understood something until one has lived it.
Just having a term for something means nothing. It needs to touch the heart or affect one’s life. A word has to get under our skin, sink in deep, so that it becomes part of us, that we live in it.
Only when this is the case, when it is about more than words, does one know what the heart says and what the spirit thinks, only then is one faced with the problem of a conscious individuation process – a very difficult and often painful task. Everyone who experiences psychology in this way is isolated from others to a certain extent. But it is only when you allow yourself to be touched directly that deep life-changing consequences arise, and only then can one’s totality unfold.
This is the true effect of psychology. I am satisfied with the course my life has taken. It has been bountiful, and has given me a great deal.
How could I ever have expected so much? Nothing but unexpected things kept happening to me. Much might have been different if I myself had been different.
But it was as it had to be; for all came about because I am as I am. I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous.
I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the same. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along.
I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. When Lao-tzu says: “All are clear, I alone am clouded”, he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.
Lao-tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning. The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true. This is old age, and a limitation.
Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. A few days before his death Jung told the last dream he was able to communicate.
He saw a great round stone in a high place in the full sun. Carved into it were the words, “Take this as a symbol of the wholeness you have achieved and the singleness you have become. ” Then he saw a square and trees growing in it.
The roots of the trees, intertwined with gold, enveloped him. It is as if nature were saying to him, “You have earned the freedom to move on. You have done your work.
You have done it well and it will grow. ” For two days before he died, he was away in some far country, perhaps seeing wonderful and beautiful things. He smiled often and was happy.
Jung died on the 6th of June, 1961, in the midst of the great images that filled his soul. Soon after he died, there was a tremendous storm, and lightning struck his favourite tree in the garden.
