If You're Jung at Heart

“You would invite illness, indeed, if you should give up your conscious and rational orientation,” wrote the psychologist Carl Jung. “On the other hand, it is equally true that life is not only rational. To a certain extent, you have to keep your senses open to the nonrational aspects of existence…”

“The unconscious itself is neither tricky nor evil — it is nature, both beautiful and terrible… The best way of dealing with the unconscious is the creative way…”

“By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality — taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be — by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude toward them.”