“… most of us recall no more than 1 percent of our dreams.”

“According to the Dartmouth neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, 98 percent of what the brain does is outside of conscious awareness, while a review of scientific evidence on this question published in 1999 conluded that 95 percent of our actions are unconsciously determined.”

“Studying the bizzare elements in dreams is in fact one of the directions Sophie Schwartz is pursuing in her current post in Switzerland at the University of Geneva’s Departments of Physiology and Clinical Neurosciences.”

“Schwartz is collaborating with Pierre Maquet, who is setting up a state-of-the-art brain imaging facility in his lab in Belgium to continue his investigation of how dreaming and other sleep stages contribute to learning and memory consolidation, using a technique called fMRI.”

“State of the art brain imaging is also central to new research indertaken in South Africa by Mark Solms, whose groundbraking studies of patients with brain lesions underscored the crucial role played by the forebrain in creating dreams.”

“Waking and dreaming are two states of consciousness, with differences that depend on chemistry.”

“We can safely conclude that REM sleep dreaming is mediated by acetylcholine when noradrenaline and serotonin are at very low levels.”

“Here is a sample hypothesis: we can trigger memory fragments with acetylcholine but cannot make new ones without noradrenaline and serotonin.”

“We still don’t understand why the brain self-activates during sleep, yet evidence suggests that it is certainly not only to replay previous experience.”

“We grieve by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it, and then letting it go.  At a brain level we are turning on each of the neural networks that were wired together to form our perception of the person, experiencing the memory with exceptional vividness, then saying goodbye one network at a time.  In grief, we learn to live without the one we love, but the reason this lesson is so hard is that we first must unlearn the idea that he person exists and can still be relied on.”

“… massive neuronal reorganization occurs at two life stages: when we fall in love and when we begin parenting.”

“Whereas dopamine induces excitement, puts us into high gear, and triggers sexual arousal, oxytocin induces a calm, warm mood that increases tender feelings and attachment and may lead us to lower our guard.”

“One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound.  When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter a.  Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated.  That is why visualizing can improve performance.”

“As the scientist Gerald Edelman has pointed out, the human cortex alone has 30 billion neurons and is capable of making 1 million billion synaptic connections.  Edelman writes, “If we considered the number of possible neural circuits, we would be dealing with hyperastronomical numbers: 10 followed by at least a million zeros.  (There are 10 followed by 79 zeros, give or take a few, of particles in the known universe.)” These staggering numbers explain why the human brain can be described as the most complex known object in the universe, and why it is capable of ongoing, massive microstructural change, and capable of performing so many different mental functions and behaviors, including our different cultural activities.”

“What a person is, and what he or she thinks, feels, and does, is by no stretch of the imagination influenced only by consciousness.  Many of our thoughts, feelings, and actions take place automatically, with consciousness only coming to know them as they happen, if at all.  Figuring out the mechanism of consciousness would surely be a major scientific coup, but it wouldn’t explain how the brain works, or how our brains make us the individuals we are.”

“In a fusion of faith and psychological theory, Descartes equated the soul with consciousness, and said only humans have conscious control of their behavior.  Therefore, only human souls can gain or lose access to heaven by their actions.  The behaviors of other animals were, in Descartes’s scheme, reflexive or automatic, and carried out without thoughts.  So, for Descartes, if it wasn’t conscious, it wasn’t mental.  Descartes didn’t exactly deny the existence of unconscious processes, but simply relegated them to the physical world, proposing that they function in humans the way they do in mindless (soulless) animals.

But if the ‘the physical’ and ‘the mental’ are completely different entities, how can the conscious soul (the mental) be responsible for the physical body?  Descartes’s solution was that the conscious soul substance can interact with the material body by means of a small region of the brain called the pineal gland.  While most parts of the brain exist in duplicate, the pineal gland is singular and centrally located, which suggested to Descartes that it must be the seat of mind-body interaction -  a place where commands from the soul can influence the body, and where information from the body (either about the outside world or the body itself) can enter the soul as perceptions, emotions, and knowledge.

In Descartes’s scheme, the nonphysical soul substance actually served the dual function of communicating with the physical body as well as with God.”

“Descartes’s framing of the philosophical question (How does the mind interact with the body?), and his particular answer to it (a mind-body interaction in the brain), set up the conundrum known as as the mind-body problem, which philosophers have struggled with ever since. “

“As hard as it may be to imagine, electrochemical conversations between neurons make possible all of the wondrous (and sometimes dreadful) accomplishments of human minds.  Your very understanding that the brain works this way is itself an electrochemical event.”

“The exact role of neural activity, though, is heatedly debated, with the main issue of contention being whether activity, especially activity initiated by environmental stimulation, helps create the mature connections or just selects from the initial set of intrinsically established connections those that will be retained.  This instruction vs. selection debate cuts deep into the heart of human nature: Is the self sculpted from a preexisting set of synaptic choices, or does experience instruct and add to the synaptic basis of the self as we go through early life?  As we will see, since environmentally triggered neural activity is involved in both instructing and selecting connectivity, this is not so much a debate about genes vs. environmental experience as one about the precise contribution of experience.”

“Only those cells that compete successfully for neurotrophins (those that are active) survive.  In the presence of neurotrophins, the surviving terminals (those that were active) also begin to sprout new connections.  Selection can be a step along the path toward activity-instructed growth – in other words, selection and instruction are partners in synaptic development.”

“In a review of this book, a prominent developmental expert, Mark Johnson, noted that the early years are crucial not because the window of opportunity closes but because what is learned at this time becomes the foundation for subsequent learning.  Indeed, much of the self is learned by making new memories out of old ones.  Just as learning is the process of creating memories, the memories created are dependent on things we’ve learned before.”

“Stimulus recognition requires only that an immediately present stimulus match some representation of a similar stimulus in memory.  There is no need to have conscious awareness to have recognition.”

“Pleasure, to the extent it is experienced, would not come during the anticipatory state but instead during consummation.  Since dopamine is involved only in the anticipatory phase, and not in the consummatory phase, its effects (at least in the case of primary need states) cannot be explained in terms of pleasure.”

“… animals become active or invigorated when dopamine is injected into the accumbens.  This occurs because dopamine facilitates synaptic transmission in the pathway from the accumbens to the pallidum, which in turn connects with movement-control regions in the cortex with movement-control regions in the cortex and brain stem.  With the pallidal output amplified, the motor regions are strongly activated, and movement is initiated.  Behavior can potentially be invigorated by anything that activates tegmental cells and causes them to release dopamine in the accumbens.  Novel stimuli, and conditioned and unconditioned incentives, are prime examples of invigorating stimuli.”

“But invigoration alone is not sufficient: behavior also needs to be guided or directed.  Guidance of behavior is the job of conditioned incentives processed by the amygdala.  The basal nucleus of the amygdala, as we’ve seen, receives information about a conditioned incentive from the lateral nucleus.  It then transfers this conditioned incentive to the accumbens.  When dopamine is elevated in the accumbens (as a result of the central nucleus’s activation of dopamine neurons in the tegmentum that release dopamine in the accumbens), the arrival of an incentive stimulus in the accumbens from the basal nucleus will have a bigger effect on the activity of accumbens cells, and presumably on neurons in the ventral pallidum that are downstream from the accumbens.  The incentive thus leads to the release of dopamine, and dopamine facilitates the ability of the incentive to both invigorate and direct behavior.”

“So it is that a man can find in such a woman an image or picture of the other part of himself, otherwise unknown to him, which indeed he does not recognize as belonging to himself. This image seems to be in her; he perceives it, but as though it were her feeling, not his own. “

“For the man, to find and love woman who bears for him the symbol of his soul, whose qualities reflect his unconscious feminine side, is potentially, an experience of deep spiritual significance, holding for him the possibility of development through the integration of parts of his psyche which were previously unrealized. For the woman who carries this symbol, however, the subjective experience is necessarily very different. Its value for her lies in evoking and tending the man’s interest – his love. The richer and more creative parts of her own feminine nature lie deeply buried within her, hidden even from herself. It is almost as though another woman (perhaps Mother Nature herself?) lies sleeping within her, inaccessible except as she may be quickened into life by the man, as Brunnhilde was awakened by Siegfried’s kiss.”

“This ‘opinionating’ is not to be confused with a real judgment based on external facts. It is true that in certain cases a man may be so occupied with his intellectual life that he has nothing to put into a relationship with a woman. But the falsity in the case I am considering rests in the a priori nature of the judgment that allows nothing to the situation. It is not that the woman has tried to find values in the relationship and failed, but that by her a priori judgment she blots out the man in one stroke. If a woman makes a critical atmosphere in the beginning, the man will certainly hesitate to leave his own masculine sphere where he feels himself secure. In the realm of feeling, which is properly the woman’s world, a man tends to feel hesitant, rather at a disadvantage, and if the woman’s attitude is critical he is forced over to the intellectual side and is prevented from functioning on any but the most impersonal basis.

This unseen hero may show himself only through the woman’s depreciation of real men. But this depreciation is proof of his presence in her unconscious as a criterion. He holds for the woman such overwhelming values that all other men pale in comparison. The woman cannot bring these values into life through a living relation to the man, for he only exists in her unconscious, nor, while he thus keeps her from life, can she obtain his values in any other way. “

“But the fact is, that deepest experiences of our inner life cannot be communicated. If one cannot have a secret, there are certain secret things from which one is shut out. Certain things in one’s own psyche will not tolerate exposure.”

“It almost seems that America is moving toward a matriarchal state of society, in which a strong efficient woman marries a rather undeveloped and feminine man who takes a filial relation to her. The woman is everything – mother, provider, organizer – and the man merely an adjunct, however necessary, to the household.”

“Unless the man can solve the problem of his masculine adaptation to the world, in his marriage he can be nothing but a son to the dominant mother-wife. Even in the place which has been left to him, he will son fail to satisfy her emotionally. For when a man is sexually involved with a woman who is psychologically his mother-provider, he is psychologically imprisoned, being held on that infantile level where pleasure and satisfaction represent happiness, and happiness for him remains a goal in itself. The sexuality of men is so closely linked with physical needs and satisfactions that a long discipline is always required to gain release on that plane from the dominance of the pleasure principle.”

“… not until the woman has done everything possible toward making herself conscious in the relationship to her husband and has left no stone unturned to work out something of reality between them, unblurred by assumptions, illusions and projections, is she justified in violently breaking her association with him.”

“The weak know no mercy. Their weakness makes demands on the strengths of the strong until the last gasp, and the strong cannot turn and throw them off. Their very strength hands them over, bound to those dependent on them.”

“In many women, however, love of the offspring remains of an almost animal-like quality, which cannot be called love of the child, of the person, at all. The child represents to such a mother a little piece of herself which has become partly separated and which she passionately loves on account of the still unbroken bond with herself.”

“During the period of infancy mother and child form a natural unit, unbreakable except at the cost of great violence to both. As time goes on, however, this oneness, at least on the physical side, is gradually broken up. Simultaneously the child should win for himself an emotional, or psychological, separateness, but the achievement of independence is a difficult task in which the mother must share if it is to be successfully accomplished. “

“The power which determines the daughter’s action and hampers her in the living of her own life is not the woman who is her mother but, instead, it is the imago of mother which her individual mother carries.”

“There is another more subtle aspect of the mother-child problem which cannot be overlooked. It depends on the identification between the unconscious of mother and child… Because of this identification with his mother’s unconscious the child is in a condition of participation mystique with her. Whatever lives unrecognized in her unconscious exists also in the psyche of the child, albeit in nebulous form. A recognition of this link is a most powerful incentive to a woman to grapple more seriously than ever before with the problems of her own psychological development. For when she becomes a mother, a woman incurs the deepest obligation to acquaint herself with her unconscious problems, not only for her own sake but also in order to safeguard her child from harm of a most subtle and insidious kind.”

“Children are in participation mystique with their mother, and the illness of her unconscious will also be their illness. If they are not to be harmed, she must keep her problems in consciousness and really struggle with them – then the children will not suffer. But if she remains unaware of something of which she should be conscious the child will be affected unfavorably.”

“In myths the acquiring of individuality, of personal autonomy, is always represented as a theft, a stealing of something which the gods have reserved for themselves; for to be individual is to be godlike. Thus we have Adam and Eve stealing the knowledge of good and evil – a knowledge in their case closely linked with the stealing of instinct. The story of Prometheus stealing the divine fire and bringing it to earth has the same motif.”

“Sexuality can never be trivial to a woman who is in touch with the feminine principle, the Eros, within. Only by repressing and disregarding her emotions can she accept the embrace of a man who does not profoundly stir her, and if she does accept it, she no longer functions as a woman, but takes her sexuality in masculine fashion. The majority of girls, however, who have fallen into this way of acting are really entirely unawakened – their emotions are sleeping. “

“A girl who allows herself to be guided in this way bu the man’s desire loses touch more and more with herself. Perhaps she yielded at first to an idea of what would bring her happiness. She was disillusioned by the event. She thought that she had experienced all that life had to offer in that field.”

“There must be no attempt at self-justification to save one’s face, no patronizing or impertinent dissection of the partner’s character and psychology, no wandering from the actual incident into easy generalities.  Truth may be served only if each one holds loyally to his purpose of discovering his own hidden motives through an understanding of this bit of life.  If the discussion is carried on in order to gain a realization of the unconscious elements of the incident, then the very difficulties which inevitably arise between two people serve to tear down the veil of unconsciousness in which many of their motives are masked from themselves.  In this way a relationship unlike any other may be built up.”

“Misunderstanding between two people who love each other are practically always due to unrecognized ego desires or to dark unknown shadowy things lurking in the hinterland of consciousness.  The difficulty often touches the weakest spot, the most intimate inferiority.  It is connected with things hardly admitted to oneself; the deepest instinct of self-preservation hides them even from the nearest and dearest friend.”

“A persona is as necessary to a conscious woman as to an unconscious one – only instead of being a mask of conventional design which is mechanically worn, it must be developed as a living function relating the human being in a purposive way to the outer world.  Above all it must have complete flexibility, so that it never conceals the individual from herself nor prevents her from appearing to others exactly as she feels whenever she wishes to do so.

In dreams the persona is often represented by clothing, and the symbol is an apt one, for clothes signify much.”

“The persona must agree closely with the inner reality, but this obligation does not mean that a woman can take the liberty in every situation of expressing the whole of her thought entirely unclothed, as it were… Thoughts and feelings must always be mediated by an appropriate mask of manner and word, so that they may be adapted to the situation and comprehensible to the audience.  Fully as many people fail to make satisfactory relationships through lack of a persona as through too much persona – a fact that few realize.  Women especially are apt to be sinners in this respect.  They expect the world to be tolerant of them if only they are true to themselves.  But they forget that one person’s truth may be contrary to another’s, may indeed be quite destructive to it.  For truth is a powerful and a dangerous commodity and needs to be adequately guarded.  It should be clothed for the occasion, and not indiscriminately exposed. “

“We are obliged in everyday life to deal with the surface – the mask of the person is worn by us ourselves no less than by others.  We do not know what is behind that mask.  If we are good judges of character, we may be able to guess something of what lies behind, but such knowledge does not necessarily make for relatedness.  Only conscious people can be related in the psychological sense of the term, for they alone can reveal themselves intentionally.  Conscious relationship demands not only that A know what is behind B’s mask, but that B shall know too, and shall be willing for A to know.  And the same must be true of A and his mask in relation to B.”

“We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. Our task is to observe inner processes like dreams and fantasies carefully, religiously giving them their own reality.”

“Yin, whose symbol is the tiger, is the dark, primordial ground of the soul, the dead of night, the place that the sun never touches. It is the earth principle in both its good and its dark, even dangerous, aspects.”

“The exclusion of the dark aspect is an injury, a violation of psychic wholeness which brings pain and suffering.”

“Not being loved is equated with being strange, different, even sick; with being leprous and contagious; with being marked by a stigma. The world was not open to receive the beginnings of a child. It was cold and threatening, devouring and undependable, a treacherous place. The individual who has had this experience feels guilty and seeks the cause for it in his own person. He introjects what has happened and feels that he is to blame. He carries a stigma that marks him and clings to him.”

“We discover, beside the ego with its goals and intentions, another wider and greater personality that embraces all the archaic forces and impulses that well up from the roots of our very being, often manifesting themselves against our will. Whenever the self comes to the fore, man has to grapple with all the dubious forces within. In this struggle, ego-consciousness becomes the ‘visibility of the self’. The other one, the all encompassing one, becomes visible through the ego, albeit dimly, as the part never fully comprehends the whole.”

“The car, as a tool of consciousness, is normally under the control of the ego.”

“Any misfortune is a hard and bitter lot, but sickness belongs more intimately to us, is closer to our skin. It gets to the very foundation, to the very core of man’s life, an inescapable reality which changes the outlook and rhythm of our daily existence.

Dreams images of illness, then, communicate a disturbance in the flow of life. Although the dreamer himself may have felt that all is not well and that he is in a bad way frustrated, cut off and depressed; although he may be tormented and complain and bemoan his fate, he will hardly ever think of himself as being sick. The more striking it is, then, when the dream pictures him as a sick man.

What is behind his sickness? He suffers because he is torn. The opposites are at war in him, in open conflict, with no solution in sight. There is nothing at present that can reconcile consciousness and the unconscious, which together make up the total man.”

“We can accept the conflict more readily when we find some meaning in it.”

“The process of individuation confronts us with the task of gathering the pieces of ourselves that are strewn all over the place, contained in projections on people and things, since they may hold a shadow content that the ego finds unacceptable. But the shadow, as Jung puts it, contains about 80 percent pure gold; all those positive values projected on other people who might embody the creativity and independence we so badly need for our own development.

In the same way we have to come to grips with those parts of ourselves what we encounter as forces of the inner world, without finding them in projection.”

“Thus consciousness is active in two ways in the individuation process: First it gathers together what belongs to the personality; and second it confronts the instinctual and archetypal forces of the psyche and tries to relate to them, so they may be transformed through the dialogue.”

“Any psychic development, any maturing, requires concentration on the emotion which caused the disturbance in the first place. Without turning inside, the struggle between the opposites will not lead to any clarification.”

“When a man is loyal to his inner law, he takes upon himself his own burden and conflicts: the burden of his complexity, his contradictions. If he does not evade the darkness, but faces it squarely, then he has truly left father and mother and is on the journey that leads into the core of his very existence.”

“All religions, all mythology, acknowledge the motif of the dual descent, i.e., the descent from human and divine parents.”

“It belongs to human nature that life does not only want to be lived in and for itself, but also wants to become conscious, recognized, realized, i.e., that it wants to be known to man.”

“Thus an outer event or outer object becomes the symbol-carrier when an inner image is projected onto it and amalgamates with it.”

“The images of myths and dreams arise from the primordial creative ground that was there before consciousness. Since it is common to all mankind, Jung named it “the collective unconscious.” It is also called “the objective psyche” because it functions independently from the subject.”

“God wants to become man. These forces demand to be related to integrated. At stake is man’s place, the ego’s place, to stand up and transform; and by transforming to be transformed. This is man’s problem, the human problem, the meaning in man’s life that goes beyond him.”

“When a dream pictures an outer situation, a setting, scenery, or a dream figure true to the outer reality and circumstances, then we can take its message on an objective level.”

“The conscience, madame, is a bad business.  I, and other people like me, work hard all our lives to swindle our consciences into feeling pleased and satisfied.  We are feckless creatures, and aside from a few good hours we go around weighted down, sick and sore with the knowledge of our own futility.  We hate the useful; we know it is vulgar and unlovely, and we defend this position, as a man defends something that is absolutely necessary to his existence.  Yet all the while conscience is gnawing at us, to such an extent that we are simply one wound.  Added to that, our whole inner life, our view of the world, our way of working, is of a kind – its effects is frightfully unhealthy, undermining, irritating, and this only aggravates the situation.  Well, then, there are certain little counter-irritants, without which we would most certainly not hold out.  A kind of decorum, a hygienic regimen, for instance, becomes a necessity for some of us.  To get up early, to get up ghastly early, take a cold bath, and go out walking in a snowstorm – that may give us a sense of self-satisfaction that lasts as much as an hour. “

“… when there is no sun one becomes more profound …”

“For his words did not come in a rush; they came with such pathetic slowness, considering the man was a writer by trade, you would have drawn the conclusion, watching him, that a writer is one to whom writing comes harder than to anybody else.”

“The world is full of what I call the unconscious type, and I cannot endure it; I cannot endure all these unconscious types!  I cannot bear all these dull, uncomprehending, unperceiving living and behaving, this world of maddening naivete about me!  It tortures me until I am driven irresistably to set it all in relief, in the round, to explain, express, and make self-conscious everything in the world – so far as my powers will reach – quite unhampered by the result, whether it be for good or evil, whether it brings consolation and healing or piles grief on grief.”

“Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you.  I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty.  I cannot say I despise you – for I am honest.  You are stronger than I.  I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak.  Today I have availed myself of this weapon.”

“It not infrequently happens that a race with sober, practical burgeois traditions will towards the end of its days flare up in some from of art.”

“Answering the following questions, for example, often enlightens the consciousness: Where am I like that snake? Where am I the stomach cramp? How am I this dream figure? When did I react of behave like that gestalt? What are my everyday problems and how does my imagination help? How is my physical behavior called into question by my body work? Only when these questions are asked is Mercury forced to give his gifts.”

“… marriage appears not just as a commitment to an outer partner but as a bondage to oneself, to one’s own reality, to time and cultural demands. Without the marriage bond and associated guilt feelings, the tendency to avoid inner and outer reality would prevail. A commitment to a partner necessitates working out conflicts. Outer partners, of course, are – in one sense at least – easier to split off and divorce. But not working out problems with an outer partner mirrors the tendency of divorcing inner conflicts as well. Marriage therefore symbolizes, among other things, the conscious commitment, to suffer through inner conflicts and to try and transform relationships.”

“For example, let us say that choose to do something. We can test to see if the energy that chose that thing comes from the voluntary nervous system and is a compulsion, or if it comes from the Self. First, mechanically stop yourself from accomplishing the act. Sit quietly or meditate until a peaceful condition is reached. (During the achievement of this peaceful state the impulses to do the act may reappear as fantasies. These fantasies are often associated to “marriage” partners.) In time, however, the strength of doing impulses subsides and you may experience the harmonious rhythm of the autonomous nervous system. The earlier impulses are still there, but now at a distance they appear as senseless compulsions. You experience a split. Something would like to commit certain acts but you lack the ego energy to accomplish them. Only when the energy persists after such an experience is the original act meant, because it is not being powered by what Jung called the Self. However, if the direction of consciousness has truly changed, the act you wanted to accomplish as an “anima or animus possession” of the voluntary nervous system which had become split off from the Self.”

“Sit quietly and do nothing. After a few minutes begin to count exhalations of breath. Count 1, 2, 3, etc., with each exhalation to 10. Then repeat. After a few minutes or so, your counting will be disturbed by some physical motion or internal dialogue. At this point, people who have not developed the capacity to concentrate on imagination and those who are simply overworked and tired will fall asleep. But if awareness is sharpened, then one will catch a fantasy or inner dialogue which disturbs counting. If one is aware of what is happening, one can note this dialogue and make it conscious, and also note how this inner conversation or fantasy affects breathing.”

“The hero’s job is to uproot doing’s compulsion. Then the body does the rest. When new energy is awakened it produces almost indescribable effects. These effects are phenomena of introverted, inner concentration and meditation, which belong to the lonely realm where one confronts the life process on its own terms. An analyst or therapist can barely deal with this realm of the patient which, in the end, can be touched only by the individual himself.

But our tale also gives us a warning: Active imagination coupled with body meditation may create temporary peace and a sense of physical well-being, but it does not solve conflicts with the world and the possessive hold of mundane interests. Reaching nirvana and engaging in deep meditation are Eastern versions of Western tranquilizers. Coupling inner harmonies with outer obligations must remain a challenge.”

“Life itself is a raven. We are ejected from the womb, plummeted into the life and left to fate. People with negative parent experiences have an excess amount of raven psychology in them. They live like ravens, are overly cautious, and suspicious. A raven-like feeling of abandonment complicates intimate relationships when partners accuse each other of being raven parents and not caring. But the raven crying for help is a dreambody which cannot care for itself. The dreambody calls out for help. Unconsciously, people project their raven problem onto someone else, claiming that others do not care enough. In reality it is one’s own innermost center that is crying out for love; only ego consciousness can give this love by focusing on dream messages and body motions.

When the hero kills his horse and feeds it to the ravens, he takes the energy he was using to horsepower himself through life and feeds it to his soul… When the raven is fed, the individual follows the flow of his fantasies and body movements and knows that the greatest loneliness is the desperation of the Self, unattended by consciousness and in danger of dying… The raven is often related to the devil in myths. If the Self is not cared for and fed, if the subtle body experience is not amplified by consciousness, then it manifests negatively in the form of symptoms and accompanying fears of death. Behind death fears connected to body symptoms is the call of the raven, the soul that has not been fed.”

“Anything can be done as long as it belongs to one’s individuation, but if reality must be mastered for ego purposes only, the work becomes unbearable.”

“The variations and differentiation of physical contact remain only a tempting potential in a semi-forbidden area. When this area is entered consciously, immediate relief occurs in many persons, especially those who are gifted in body communication.”

“I remember listening to a finger that began to speak in the middle of a boring conversation I was having.”

“Fearful people see danger in everything; they practically invent dangers in order to intensify the pleasure of avoiding them. All in vain too, because the fear is born on the inside.”

“Excess reveals lies; truth doesn’t want superlatives.”

“Only prayer can interrupt the solitude of dying.”

“To challenge one’s limits as an end to itself derives from the fear of accepting one’s limits. Never before as in this age has pushing beyond one’s limits constituted an escape from recognizing them.”

“For a writer, evil is a saving grace and good is a curse…To speak well of good is unforgivable.”

“At first, one has to project, or there is no contact, but then one should be able to correct the projection, and it is the same not only as regards human beings, but everything else also. The projection apparatus must of necessity work in us, nothing can ever be seen without the unconscious projection factor. “

“That is why Jung says – and this is a subtle point which is seldom understood when people think about projection – that we can only speak of projection, in the proper sense of the word, when there already exists a certain uneasiness, when the feeling identity is disturbed; that is, when I have an uneasy feeling as to whether what I have said about X is true or not. Until that has happened autonomously within me, there is no projection.”

“But what role does the unconscious play? The unconscious seems to deliver models which can be arrived at directly from within without looking at outer facts, and which afterwards seem to fit outer reality. Is that a miracle or not? There are two possible explanations: either the unconscious knows about other realities, or what we call the unconscious is a part of the same thing as outer reality, for we do not know how the unconscious is linked with matter.”

“Knowledge is either poisonous or healing, it is one or the other, and that is why some myths say that knowledge brings about the corruption of the world and others that knowledge is healing, and then we have the biblical idea which says that it is first corruption, but later turns, thank God, into healing. In the Old Testament it meant corruption, but Christ, who made something out of it, turned it into healing, so one has to have a double attitude about it, the teaching of the felix culpra.

In the actual situation, however, you cannot assume a double attitude. Each time there is the terrible problem, shall I tell them, or not? You have the whole ethical responsibility and each time do not know whether you have done the right or the wrong thing. It is the problem of consciousness…Consciousness, or knowledge, is a terrific problem which we have not solved yet.”

“Jung in his writings sometimes refers to instinct as if it were the same thing as the archetype and sometimes as if it were different. What he means is that the archetype, if we look at it as opposite to instinct, would be an inherited and instinctive way of having emotions, ideas, and representations with symbols, and instinct would be the inherited way of acting physically, a certain kind of physical action.”

“Actual physical behavior according to pattern would be instinct, and the concomitant inner representations, emotions, auditions, visions, would be manifestations of the archetype.

Man has a structural inherited something in him which makes him act and think in a certain way, which is why we are sometimes not clear about the two. Since these contents of the unconscious have a kind of physical aspect, and also a somatic and psychological aspect, sometimes something which should go through the psychological aspect switches over into the physical, or the physical aspect switches into the psychological; they are like communicating taps, and if there is a blockage in one the water flows out from the other.”

“That is one of the eternal conflicts – shall I live it concretely, or shall I take it symbolically? Is this meant as a realization, or must it be simply lived, without thinking about it too much? That is one of our great problems. Here it is said that by blocking, or delaying, a physical urge a progress in consciousness takes place.”

“The search for immortality was actually the search for an incorruptible essence in man which would survive death, an essential part of the human being which could be preserved. Thus the search for immortality, for the eternal in man, is to be found at the very beginning of alchemy. We can say that the emotional drive and interest in the phenomenon of matter was not a modern scientific interest, in the sense of curiosity as to what matter looked like, but that what gave the impulse and libido for the search to understand the mystery of matter was a real emotional drive and desire to find the immortal part of man.”

“A return to the primitive self-evident attitude towards life is a requisite for the experience of the Self, which cannot be found through the conscious mind and with the developed part of the personality, but by first returning to that primitive human attitude.”

“In Chinese philosophy, it is tantamount to paying constant attention to Tao, whether what I am now doing is right, in Tao. Naturally there are also personal arguments, the pros and cons, but to live in a religious way would mean being constantly on the alert for those unknown powers which also guide one’s life.”

“The great difficulty, therefore, to return to the alchemical language, is to extract Osiris from the lead, to save the fantasy which is life giving and cut away the childishness of the wish to realize it. That is so damn subtle. The whole task is to save the nucleus, the fantasy of the Self, and cut away all the childishness, the primitive desires, and so on which surround it, which would mean getting Osiris out of the lead coffin. That is what the alchemist did in a projected form when he said that the divine man had to be extracted from the lead coffin or from the corruptible matter.”

“If you have to learn about the subject you do not love, where you have no projection, which means that you have no relationship to it, it does not mean anything to you and is not connected with your flow of libido, so you have to toil and seat at something and learn it for the exam, but ten minutes later you have forgotten it again. If you are fascinated, however, which means that a projection has taken place, then you get emotional and acquire a tremendous amount of consciousness very easily and quickly. That is the whole secret of teaching and learning. You can say that those are simply two aspects of what as a general description one might call attention, which is created either by the concentration of consciousness, or by love, and behind both is projection. Fascination always involves projection.”

“We know quite well that we never make the projection, but that it is done to us…When the Greeks fell in love they were modest enough not to say, “I have fallen in love,” but expressed it more accurately by saying: “The god of love shot an arrow at me.” And that is how it really happens – one suddenly has the painful sting which one has not made oneself, one finds oneself being shot at. “

“…in general we can say that it is always the unconscious, or some aspect of it, which produces the projection. It is the Self or a god. It is always a god who produces the projection, which means that it is always an archetype, the ego complex does not do it.”

“Only when within myself I feel insecure can I begin to speak or projection, and not before. Projection implies that I am no longer entirely convinced, that I am already to a certain extent out of the participation mystique, or archaic identity; until then there is no projection.

Naturally, the onlooker doubts, which is why if one takes a modern case, for instance X falls in love with Y, the onlooker will call that a projection of the animus. But for the person involved there is no projection, and it would be an analytical mistake to say there was – that would be infecting the other person with one’s own doubt. For X that man is now the beloved, and not simply an image of the animus. If I doubt because I am not in the same participation, I have no right to poison the other with that doubt. I have to wait until the analysand begins to feel some disquiet, until the man she loves does not behave as she had expected he would. Once this state of disquiet has manifested, I can say that perhaps she has projected onto that man something within her. But as long as there is no uneasiness, I have no right to cut into that participation by calling it a projection; that is a horrible poisonous mistake people constantly make.

We no longer believe that trees and animals are gods, but it would be wrong to assert that it is projection in the case of the primitive, for what to us is projection is to the primitive the whole experience of reality. It is their truth.”

“Projections die autonomously – suddenly the thing has disappeared, and that happens completely without conscious cooperation. Such things are psychological events per se. Afterwards I can say there was a projection, but that is only a relative and not an absolute truth.”

“Instead of arguing with the drives which carry us away, we prefer to cook them and decide to fantasize about them and ask them what they want. One has to be quite objective, without opinions and without condemning the thing as unreasonable. One must try to find out amicably what the drive really wants, that is, what it is driving at, for it has an objective.

That can be discovered by active imagination, or through a fantasy, or through experimenting in reality, but always with the introverted attitude of observing objectively what the drive really wants or desires to get at. That would be cooking the red sulphur. Generally, strong drives emanate a fantasy content, they comprise a bunch of fantasy material. You could just as well say that to cook something until its soul appears would mean to let the fantasy material emanate from the drive, allow that fantasy material connected with the drive to emerge.”

“The devil is the one who wants the concrete thing. He is the great realizer who says that something which has no existence in concrete reality is just not real, and then begins the conflict between spiritualization of the problem and the concrete thing.”

“We think we are conscious but that is not true; we are conscious in the realm of the collective and we do not even know how little our individual consciousness is. It needs quite a search to find even fragments of consciousness that are personal. If you analyze an individual the sun is always shining; that is collective consciousness in which individual consciousness is enclosed, and the conflict is then either against the unconscious or against reality. People when they have a conflict either are fighting with outer reality – outside things are wrong and they want them corrected – or they are in trouble with their unconscious. Something from within, or something from without, is in opposition. It is quite rightly said that the enemy with which consciousness is confronted is secretly double, for people come saying they have an outer conflict but you discover it is an inner one, or vice versa.”

“We try to bring about a conscious attitude with which the person can keep the door to the unconscious open, which means that one must never be too sure of oneself, never be sure that what one says is the only possibility, never be too sure about a decision.

One should always have an eye and an ear open towards the opposite, the other thing. That does not mean to be spineless, it doesn’t mean just to sit there. It means to act according to one’s conscious conviction, but still always having the humility to keep the door open and be proved wrong. That would be an attitude of consciousness in living connection with the other, dark side.”

“All one’s dreams are critical at first; the unconscious is full of drives and dissociating factors, destructive factors, and then if we penetrate deeper we see something very light and meaningful. Enlightenment can come from that dark place; that is, if we direct the ray of consciousness upon it, if we warm it up by our conscious attention, then something white comes out and that would be the moon, the enlightenment which comes from the unconscious.

Sometimes one has an awkward dream which disgusts one on waking; it is either indecent or obscene, dreadfully silly or stupid and it is irritating. One wanted a wonderful archetypal dream and then it comes! But then I say, now wait a minute, let us investigate that, and find out what it means and generally it is just such dreams that are the most enlightening if one can get to the meaning. The meaning was not known but it had a dynamic content by which you are much enriched. It is just those dreams which are so valuable; they have an unapproachable, disgusting shell of depressing blackness but within that is the light of the conscious. It is often in the depressing motifs of the dream that the light is to be found, and naturally it is also to be found in the shadowy impulses which are full of meaning if one can lovingly investigate them with an attitude that accepts the paradox.”

“Words are only instruments and not the thing itself.”

“Drivenness – pushing the ego from behind – would illustrate the dark, demonic side of the sun, and there is a misuse of consciousness to justify the drive when the ego is not strong enough to decide on the objective facts but is swept away through the weakness of its passions: fear, power, or sex. Perfection also, in itself, is hostile to nature.”

“Man, with his consciousness, is a disturbing factor in the order of nature; one could really question whether man was a good invention on the part of nature or not…Whether he is a mistake, or the crown of creation, depends on the functioning of his sun with or without justice. If consciousness functions as it should, it is helpful to life, but when it gets off the track it becomes destructive.

One aim of analysis is to get consciousness to function again according to nature.”

“Every time we make a rule, we have to make an exception, for otherwise consciousness and life are not in accord.”

“It is the quality of genius to produce the unexpected; it is the surprising thing which clicks and yet is not banal. You can never guess what a creative person will produce for it is a new creation and there is no knowing what it will be. From the mind come ideas and from the feeling side come reactions which in such a person are absolutely unique.

The individuation process leads to unique creativeness in each moment and the shut chamber alludes to this secret center of the personality, the secret source of life. It is the shut chamber of the heart, the unique creativeness in each moment of life. Where the process of individuation leads to the realization of this uniqueness others can no longer guess about you, for they cannot see into the shut chamber of your heart from where the unexpected, creative reactions spring.”

“… for ultimately the individual is unique and closed system, a unique thing which centers round and unpredictable source of life. If that becomes real in an individual the one feels the mystery of a unique personality. That has to do with shutting the house, which means separation from collective entanglements and contamination, not only outwardly, but inwardly, separating within oneself from what is ordinary and not oneself.”

“As soon as one touches the uniqueness of the partner in analysis, discretion is imposed. Before it was just a conventional rule, not really necessary, but if the uniqueness is touched upon it is natural never to talk about it to a third person. One realizes it is unique and that it should never be talked about with anybody else, quite naturally. It cannon be, and that has to do with the mystery of meeting with uniqueness in any love relationship, for then the house shuts naturally, by itself.”

“It is Christ Himself, as God Himself, who promises to share His Kingdom, so we must conclude that the person speaking – and the adjectives which here refer to the “I” are always feminine – is the Wisdom of God, in absolute identity with God and Christ, who speaks out of the darkness of the nigredo and calls for help, asking for a human being who will save her soul from the underworld. This shows the tremendous turnabout which has taken place, for suddenly it is the Wisdom of God who cries for help from the depths of the earth, and who needs a human being so as to be pulled out of the darkness. First she appeared as an overwhelming divine factor from above, and now she calls as a helpless feminine being from below who needs the understanding of the human soul.

This is one of the most striking sections and illustrates what Jung described also in Psychology and Alchemy as one of the great mythological themes of alchemical thinking, namely the idea that the divine soul, or the Wisdom of God, or the anima mundi – a kind of feminine figure – falls off the original man, the original Adam, into matter and then has to be rescued.

If you remember, Jung explains that this represents what happens when something is projected, namely that there is the archetypal idea of the divine man, of the feminine Godhead, and that archetype is projected into matter, which actually means the image falls into matter. Such myths amplify what the alchemist did not know consciously, or only in part – that really they were looking for the unconscious, or the image of the feminine Godhead, or for the experience of the divine man in matter. That was what they sought, as I tried to explain with the Greek alchemical text.

That would correspond to a modern man getting to know a woman, being very much attracted to her and then dreaming that an image of the goddess entered her. The image of the Godhead before was carried within and now has entered this woman. That is how the unconscious pictures a projection; it is not something we do or even realize, it just happens to us and such dreams often show that a projection has taken place. Here the alchemical imagery says that this has happened and the alchemist is unconsciously searching for such a figure.”

“The Wisdom of God is simply an experience of God Himself but in His feminine form, and the beloved bridegroom of this feminine appearance of God is the author who replaces Christ and becomes Christlike.

Christ Himself predicted that through the spreading of the Holy Ghost many would do greater works than He, leading to the idea of the Christlikeness of each individual. Christ was not the unique case of the incarnation of God, but through the Holy Ghost this would continue and spread among the many and every individual would, to a certain extent, become Christ and therefore deified. This was predicted in the Bible by Christ Himself but has been ignored in theological interpretation because it is an awkward statement and means nothing more nor less than that each human individual could potentially live the same fate as Christ and be identical with the Godhead.

This aspect was ignored in medieval theology and not brought out into the light; it was carefully not preached about because it is nothing other than the process of individuation. It means that to follow Christ is not to follow outer rules, not the outward imitation, but to take upon oneself the total experience of Christ Himself in one’s own form – to go through the whole process oneself. Because this was too difficult, or people were not up to such a task, it was ignored and therefore reappears here as unconscious pressure in the form of God who, as a woman, elects a human being as her bridegroom, a human who understands her. As the text says, this is the relationship of God the Father and God the Son.”

“Many repetitions are required before the experience is consolidated, until finally the work holds.”

“Unconscious feeling, or thinking in a certain way, is a corruptible humidity which we do not notice and it is the aim of the opus to cook all that out. The dreams spot the fact and by interpreting and integrating what they say we slowly get rid of that corruptible humidity. But if we go on too long, if we overanalyse, we miss a certain very decisive moment in the process which should be contained only for a certain time since if it is contained too long people become unspontaneous.

You may have met such overanalysed people who have lost any kind of spontaneity in life. Before they even greet you they say they know they will project the anima onto you, or they come and say that they hate So-and-So and are sure it is a shadow projection. But why shouldn’t one dislike somebody? Overanalysing, continuing the process too long, creates a second neurosis, which is a very general disease and very difficult to cure. Naturally it is a kind of unconsciousness too. We could therefore call it the second phase, the return to the water of life, the return to spontaneity, return to an immediate and natural and spontaneous way of living without forgetting what one has learned.”

“… as Dr. Jung says, one does not solve conflicts, one outgrows them. Therefore to come out of a problem means an evolution, either long or short.”

“It is as if a part of the conscious alertness of the personality remained steadily concentrated on the meaningfulness of any event in life, so that one is never unconsciously lost or caught in it. Psychological captivity is an emotional factor. Being caught is simply being caught in something emotional or instinctive. If one is caught in a projection, or feeling of hate or love, one can’t get out of it, which is why people always say: “I am awffully sorry, but I can’t help it.”

That is a prison, for a prison is any kind of psychological factor in which one feels trapped, while if one has an awareness of and constant alertness to the Self, one is no longer caught in anything; there is an innermost part of the personality which remains free and cannot be caught any more. The state of helplessness in which one is caught by one’s own inner processes stops, which amounts to a tremendous steadying of the innermost core of the personality; that is comparable to the philosopher’s stone, which is symbolically what the steady inner experience forms.”

“If one is filled with 10,000 devils one can only be burnt up in them until they quiet down and are still, and the infantile demand on the analyst or anybody else, that he should redeem one with some kind of comforting trick, does not help. If an analyst pretends he can do that, then he is just a quack, because there is no such thing, and anyway it would be meaningless. If he tries to get analysands out of the suffering it means he takes away from them what is most valuable; cheap comforting is wrong, for by that you get people away from the heat, the place where the process of individuation takes place.

Sitting in hell and roasting there is what brings forth the philosopher’s stone; and it is said here, the fire is extinguished with its own inner measure. Passion has its own inner measure; there is no such thing as chaotic libido, for we know that the unconscious itself, as pure nature, has an inner balance. The lack of balance comes from childishness of the conscious attitude. If you only follow your own passion according to its own indications it will never to too far, it will always lead to its own defeat.

Inordinate passion seeks defeat. People who have an inordinately passionate nature, a kind of devilish nature, are lovingly searching for a human person, or a situation, against which they can knock their heads, and they despise any partner or situation, against which they can knock their heads, and they despise any partner or situation in which their passion wins out. Instinctively they seek defeat. It is as though something within them knows this devil has to be hit on the head, which is why if one is friendly or weak, or understanding towards such fire, one does not help the person; generally such people walk out on you, because that is not what they want. The fire of the passion looks for that which will extinguish it, and that is why the urge for individuation, as long as it is a natural inordinate urge, seeks impossible situations; it will always lead to its own defeat.”

“When, for instance, an analysand refuses to discuss something, that would be hardening and that covers up a weakness; obstinacy and rigidity are hard, and that usually has to do with destructive and negative childhood experiences. For instance, such people write off love or this or that, and in the process even write off themselves. They set their will on success and money or something of that kind and inwardly they are as if frozen up.

Very often the analytical process consists in softening the hard corners of the personality, which is generally in a suffering cramp. To harden is a symptom of weakness, therefore solidifying what is weak would be a part of the same process, for it si where one feels weak that one stiffens, while where one is strong one remains flexible. The rigidity of people springs from weakness and fear – fright stiffens them and makes them close up – therefore at the same time weakness has to be strengthened – ego weakness or feeling weakness or whatever it may be, there are many weaknesses. So the psychological process often consists in softening up those parts of the personality which have stiffened, and at the same time solidifying the nucleus of the personality, the Self, and that would be bringing together the opposites of male and female.

Then comes the fourth effect, illumination. That is where one experiences a feeling of comprehension, when certain problems become clear. That is also called the coloring and whitening, for things become clear and the life feeling begins to flow again. Then the spirit segregates the pure from the impure so that all accidental things are removed – bad odors and so on.

To comment on that alchemically, very often the philosopher’s stone is surrounded by foreign material which does not belong to it and therefore has to be either washed or burnt away. It is a fact that in the alchemical process not everything has to be integrated; there is something called either the damned earth, terra damnata, or res extraneae, exterior or outer things, which have to be cast out and not integrated. They have just to be thrown away. Often people who have read a little about Jungian psychology think that everything, whatever happens, belongs to the process of and must be integrated, but that is only true cum grano salis; it is a fact that not everything belongs. Like all psychological truths, it all belongs in one way and not at all in another.”

“Libido and energy should not be wasted on things which do not belong. Therefore it can be said that there is just as much separation as integration, and that would be regeneration through fire until, as the text says, one reaches a condition of tranquility, for when people can let go of wrong ideals or collective attitudes they suddenly become peaceful. “

“… there are many layers and something can always be understood on a new and deeper level. You understand it with a part of yourself and then the penny drops deeper, as it were, and you realize the same thing but in a much more living and rich way than before, and that can continue indefinitely until it becomes completely real. Even if you feel you have realized something you should always have the humility to say that that is how you feel for the time being; a few years later you may say you did not know at all before but now can understand what was meant.”

“If one has experienced for long enough those great ups and downs which are entailed by the meeting with the unconscious, then slowly an unshakable kernel is formed. I think that even a psychological cure or development, which is the same thing, does not change the conflict or cure a problem; what is really changed is the ability to stand it better, and that is the real development.”

“… but the first step is to be able to stand it better, not to be dissolved by it, to be detached and have a standpoint, to know that it is one’s weakness to which one does not intent to give way and that it will pass.”

“If you have touched the bottom of hell there is nothing further down, and that is where the solid rock begins.”

“… it is a rock which is also a well, and therefore it is the most liquid thing and the opposite of rigidity or hardening.”

“… one cannot force a process of growth. It is foolish to storm at a little oak tree, telling it to grow more quickly, for that is against nature. It would be better to water it and put some dung at its roots.”