“When a man is in the wilderness, it is the darkness that brings the dreams.”

C. G. Jung

“We do not have any clear, common and simple relation to reality and to ourselves. That is the big problem of the Western world.”

Martin Heidegger

C.G. Jung.

I am missing information about this photo. (Dallas ?)

C.G. Jung's Tour at Bollingen, Switzerland.

“Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”

 - Plato

 Art: Pablo Picasso

The Philemon Foundation has recently announced the publication of C. G. Jung’s Black Books, from 1913 to 1932, in a facsimile edition, accompanied by translation, introduction and notes, in collaboration with the Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung. The Black Books are not personal diaries but the records of the unique self-experimentation that Jung called his ‘confrontation with the unconscious.’ The Black Books shed light on Jung’s ‘confrontation with the unconscious,’ for which they are the prime documentation, as well as the genesis of The Red Book, the further elaboration of Jung’s personal cosmology, and the making of analytical psychology.

Jung's Black Books

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Art: Roma Velarde

“There is, however, yet another thing to be learnt from this example, namely that these transpersonal contents are not just inert or dead matter that can be annexed at will. Rather they are living entities which exert an attractive force upon the conscious mind. Identification with one's office or one's title is very attractive indeed, which is precisely why so many men are nothing more than the decorum accorded to them by society. In vain would one look for a personality behind the husk. Underneath all the padding one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office—or whatever this outer husk may be—is so attractive: it offers easy compensation for personal deficiencies.”

~ Carl G. Jung (Book: The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung https://amzn.to/3cI3HYe)

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

~ Erich Fromm

Art: Alessandro Sicioldr

The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness.

C.G. Jung, Coll Works vol 5 par. 646

Very interesting!

‘The usual mistake of a Western man when faced with this problem of grasping the ideas of the East is like that of the student in Faust. Misled by the devil, he contemptuously turns his back on science and, carried away by Eastern occultism, takes over yoga practices word for word and becomes a pitiable imitator. Thus he abandons the one sure foundation of the Western mind and loses himself in a mist of words and ideas that could never have originated in European brains and can never be profitably grafted upon them.’

C. G Jung – Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower

He isn't against it but against direct transplantation of ideas grown from a different mental soil and so rendering opposite results for people of western cultures.
Eg, you can see plenty of inflated, misguided "yogis" out of touch with any reality on social media for example.

Yes, indeed, they have developed the Yoga for Health of the body, which might serve that purpose, but which it is not Yoga, at all, even though there is a branch of Yoga, the Hatta Yoga, that deals with the body healing part.

But of course, at least, it is adapted to the Western culture. 

"Never forget that you are a man and therefore you must bleed for the goal of humanity. Listen you are still too juvenile for your age. You should get older, the years are dwindling and yet your work has not been accomplished.

Practice solitude assiduously without grumbling so that everything will in time become ready. You should not die unfulfilled. Your years are numbered and many years are still needed for your fulfilment. You should become serious and your work sink heavy as iron into the ground of mankind.

Let go of too much science. There lies the way that is not the way. Your way goes toward the depths, toward the rarest and deepest."

C. G. Jung - Black Books.

"We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness."

~ Hunter Thompson

Book: The Proud Highway

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error... Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."

― Gustave Le Bon

WOW!

Jung with children and grandchildren

When you neglect your own welfare in seeking the welfare of the children, you leave the children a bad inheritance, a very bad impression of the past. If you torture yourself in order to produce something for the children, you give them the picture of a tortured life. Therefore away with all that.

If you are always preparing for the happiness of the children, you don't know how to look after your own happiness, nor do the children learn how to look after theirs. They in turn may go on to prepare for the happiness of your grandchildren, and the grandchildren for the great-grandchildren, and so happiness is always somewhere in the future.

You think happiness is something to be attained in the future, that you cannot attain it, but your children will have it. So you fill your life with ambitions for that kingdom to come and it never does. Every generation is doing something towards it. They all torture themselves in order that the children shall attain it, but the children grow up and are the same fools we are.

Try to make it here and now, for yourself. That is good teaching. Then the children will try to make it here and now for themselves - then it can come into the real world. Don't be unnatural and seek happiness in the next generations. If you are too concerned about your children and grandchildren, you simply burden them with the debts you have contracted. While if you contract no debts, if you live simply and make yourselves as happy as possible, you leave the best of conditions to your children. At all events, you leave a good example of how to take care of themselves. If the parents can take care of themselves, the children will also. They will not be looking for the happiness of the grandchildren, but will do what is necessary to have a reasonable amount of happiness themselves.

C. G. Jung - Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra

So true, dear Luna, he was such a wise man.

"My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room."

*-Leonard Cohen *

Good idea!

“Again, more than anyone else, Jung is responsible for the widespread resurgence of a more inner-oriented spirituality in the modern world, and his contribution is so fundamental that it can be easily overlooked. In essence, Jung taught more than one generation to look within and to embark on the great adventure of discovering themselves. Many today still take their first steps on that voyage with Jung in hand.”

Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

Well, in all ancient doctrines and even religions, these things were known, but perhaps in the Christian World they were not...

Art: Graham Little

“What is progress? That we can drive faster on the roads? No, progress is the rest the body needs and the peace the soul requires. Progress is man"s well being.”

Knut Hamsun

Art: Ferdinand Hodler

What the impending ecological crisis forces us to confront is that we have sacrificed meaning, morality, and almost all higher values for the ‘sordid boon’ of material wealth and wordly power. To keep drinking from this poisoned chalice will bring only sickness and death.

William Ophuls

Indeed, that is where the leaders of our countries are at!

Camus and his cat

[…] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.”

Albert Camus

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

James Baldwin

Art: Ferdinand Hodler

“To love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.”

 - Ellen Bass

Only him, could have described so well...

“For it is not only lethargy alone which causes human relationships to repeat themselves in the same old way with such unspeakable monotony in instance after instance; it is the fearful shying away from any kind of new, unforeseeable experience which we think we may not be equal to. But only someone who is ready for anything and rules nothing out, not even the most enigmatic things, will experience the relationship with another as a living thing and will himself live his own existence to the full.”

 Rainer Maria Rilke

Ah, he was sop wise, and adventurous!

D.H. Lawrence under a tree.

Why don't people leave off being lovable

Or thinking they are lovable, or wanting to be lovable,

And be a bit elemental instead?

Since man is made up of the elements

Fire, and rain, and air, and live loam

And none of these is lovable

But elemental,

Man is lop-sided on the side of the angels.

I wish men would get back their balance among the elements

And be a bit more fiery, as incapable of telling lies

As fire is.

I wish they'd be true to their own variation, as water is,

Which goes through all the stages of steam and stream and ice

Without losing its head.

I am sick of lovable people,

Somehow they are a lie.

 D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence was writing from the perspective of a society still breaking free from hundreds of years of repressed id.

And I’m guessing he wrote this before WW II 

It seems our desire to be elemental is as likely to produce a Hitler or Manson, as it is to produce a noble savage.

I think there’s a very wide spectrum as to how we approach our shadow.

With 7 billion possibilities, the specific biochemistry of each person will incline them to be more or less passionate. More or less logical.

Swedenborg or Blake? Either/or. Or some of both!

"Yellow, Red, Blue", by Wassily Kandinsky

"The art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts."

- C.G. Jung

Well, what makes people lovable is nothing inherent in themselves, but the way view them. 

What is lovable tome may not be to anyone else. 

If I am full of love, every one seems lovable to me. 

"The gods have become our diseases.”

― C.G. Jung

“Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive and they will
come forth later in uglier ways.”

~ Sigmund Freud

I love both Jung and Kandinsky!

Freud? sometimes, not always.

But there come times - perhaps this is one of them -
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die…

…we are always like this, rootless, dismembered: knowing this makes the difference.

Birth stripped our birthright from us,
tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves so early on

And the whole chorus throbbing out our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed to know ,
nothing that could re-member us.

Homesick for myself, for her…

Excerpt from Adrienne Rich’s - Transcendental Etude

Photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson

"The most beautiful people I was allowed to meet were those who have lost, suffered, struggled, lost, who have found their way to pull their heads out of the water, who have skinned those who have broken their lives.

These people have an appreciation, sensitivity, and understanding of life that fills them with compassion, tenderness, and deep love for others.

Pretty people don't come out of nowhere."

~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

That is so true!

He who has suffer, can understand everything and everyone. 

“I did not myself know what I wanted:

I feared life, desired to escape from it,

yet still hoped something of it.”

~ Leo Tolstoy

That is the human dilemma, until we learn what life is all about:

"The learning experience and the opportunity to grow within as well as without"

"It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”

― D.W. Winnicott

Indeed!

So true!