Man and His Symbols

Sensation (i.e., sense perception) tells you that something exists; thinking tells you what it is; feeling tells you whether it is agreeable or not; and intuition tells you whence it comes and where it is going.

The attitude of modern civilized man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic patient in my clinic who was himself a doctor. One morning I asked him how he was. He replied that he had had a wonderful night disinfecting the whole of heaven with mercuric chloride, but that in the course of this thorough-going sanitary process he had found no trace of God.

For most people the years of youth are characterized by a state of gradual awakening in which the individual slowly becomes aware of the world and of himself. Childhood is a period of great emotional intensity, and a child's earliest dreams often manifest in symbolic form the basic structure of the psyche, indicating how it will later shape the destiny of the individual concerned. The actual process of individuation — the conscious coming-to-terms with one's own inner center or Self — generally begins with a wounding of the personality and the suffering that accompanies it. This initial shock amounts to a sort of "call," although it is often not recognized as such. One [seeks] something that is impossible to find or about which nothing is known. In such moments all well-meant, sensible advice is completely useless. None of that helps, or at best only rarely. There is only one thing that seems to work; and that us to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you.