Unconscious

"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied."

"Under normal conditions, every conflict stimulates the mind to activity for the purpose of creating a satisfactory solution. Usually—i.e., in the West—the conscious standpoint arbitrarily decides against the unconscious, since anything coming from inside suffers from the prejudice of being regarded as inferior or somehow wrong."

"The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not — which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams."

"It is only through the psyche that can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We are unable to distinguish whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are borderline concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically... there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this center. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype produces a symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity... The God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it: namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God-image empirically."

"The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine.""

"Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals."

"The idea of the unconscious mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective around 1900, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large number of individuals of varied interests in many lands."

"Belief in a transcendental divinity arose from a misinterpretation of intimations from the less conscious levels of the mind. ...God is in the unconscious, is the unconscious, perhaps. ...Hinduism, recognizing the impersonality of the Divine Being, identified it with the deeper Self of man."

"The unconscious mind is not blind, and its several levels sustain and nourish the intellect and the imagination. There exist interacting, cooperative levels of the healthy mind, still to be understood, toward which our first tentative approximations, "conscious" and "unconscious," only crudely point."