"We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Concequently, we cannot have any final judgement about ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know everything - but at most that is only pretence. At bottom we never know how it has all come about. The story of life begins somewhere, at some particular point we happen to remember; and even then it was already highly complex. We do not know how life is going to turn out. Therefore the story has no beginning and the end can only be vaguely hinted at.
The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago...
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 the 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 civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
In the end the only event in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted 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.
All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings... Recollections 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."
C G Jung.
Some Links:
Prologue from Memories, Dreams, Reflections
The implications of a plural self for the creative writing process
More of the Chopra Forum stuff from April 2001 ... which is when the Jung stuff was posted ...
