Many / One

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C. G. Jung: Letters, 1906-1950
Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors

1 "The collective unconscious behaves as if it were ONE and not as if it were split up into many individuals."

2 "The scales of the whole hang balanced."

3 "Do the next thing with diligence and devotion and earn the goodwill of others. In every littlest thing you do in this way you will find yourself."

4 "I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche."

5 "If you take the concept of prayer in its widest sense and if you include also Buddhist contemplation and Hindu meditation (as being equivalent to prayer), one can say that it is the most universal form of religious or philosophical concentration of the mind and thus not only one of the most original but also the most frequent means to change the condition of mind. If this psychological method had been inefficient, it would have been extinguished long ago, but nobody with a certain amount of human experience could deny its efficacy."

6 "There is only one certainty – nothing can put out the light within."

7 "So far as I can grasp the nature of the collective unconscious, it seems to me like an omnipresent continuum, an unextended Everywhere. That is to say, when something happens here at point A which touches upon or affects the collective unconscious, it has happened everywhere."

8 "We must understand the divinity within us."

9 "There is only one collective unconscious, which is everywhere identical with itself."

10 "I am deeply convinced of the unity of the self, as demonstrated by mandala symbolism."

11 "It seems to me as if I am ready to die, although as it looks to me some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine, they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning."

12 "Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart."

13 "This spectacle of old age would be unendurable did we not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death a birth."

14 "The Divine Presence is more than anything else."

15 "We live in so many lives and so many lives live in us."

16 "Anyone who does not understand himself cannot understand others."

17 "It is a great consolation to know that one is included in the prayers of fellow beings."

18 "The archetype as a phenomenon is conditioned by place and time, but on the other hand, it is an invisible structural pattern independent of place and time, and like the instincts, proves to be an essential component of the psyche."

19 "When the confusion is at its height a new revelation comes."

20 "There is one, absolute, transcendent truth, which is manifested differently in the different forms of religion. This 'transcendent unity' of religion has been compared to a white light, which is broken up into different and apparently contrasting colours, but which remains identical under all its forms. Or it can be said that all religions are different paths to the same goal; they all converge on the infinite, transcendent mystery in which their true meaning is to be found."

21 "Blind are the eyes of anyone who does not know his own heart."

22 "My personal view is that man's vital energy or libido is the divine pneuma all right."

23 "There is only one 'imago Dei' [God image], which belongs to the existential ground of all….I cannot speak of 'my' imago Dei but only of 'the' imago Dei. It is the principle by which man is shaped, one and the same, immutable, eternal."

24 "We live in order to attain the greatest possible amount of spiritual development and self-awareness."

25 "It would be advisable to counter every negative remark with a positive one, otherwise one gets the impression of a catastrophic tragedy with no grace from above. But that doesn't accord with experience."

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite