Cg Holi Quotes

Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present. In my opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which is man's strongest weapon), but unfortunately many believers seem to be so afraid of science (and incidentally of psychology) that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man's fate. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.

The experiences of BPM I typically have strong mystical overtones; they feel sacred or holy. More precise, perhaps, would be the term numinous, which C.G. Jung used to avoid religious jargon. When we have experiences of this kind, we feel that we have encountered dimnensions of reality that belong to a superior order.

But God, who also does not hear our prayers, wants to become man, and for that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darkness—the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels.

nothing is holy any longer.

He who is most guilty is most innocent; the most holy man is the one most conscious of his sin.

So meaning is only a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning. Oh, that Siegfried, blond and blue-eyed, the German hero, had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous! He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride. I would have gone under in the same battle, and so only assassination was left to me. If I wanted to go on living, it could only be through trickery and cunning. Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near Eastern god who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. The courageous were overcome by a certain contempt for themselves. But their life force bade them to go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful wild Gods, their holy trees and their awe of the German forests.

In my opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which is man's strongest weapon), but unfortunately many believers seem to be afraid of science (and incidentally of psychology) that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man's fate. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.

Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present. In my opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which is man’s strongest weapon), but unfortunately many believers seem to be so afraid of science (and incidentally of psychology) that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man’s fate. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.

In earlier ages, as instinctive concepts welled up in the mind of man, his conscious mind could no doubt integrate them into a coherent psychic pattern. But the “civilized” man is no longer able to do this. His “advanced” consciousness has deprived itself of the means by which the auxiliary contributions of the instincts and the unconscious can be assimilated. These organs of assimilation and integration were numinous symbols, held holy by common consent.

… A destitute joins me and wants admittance into my soul, and I am thus not destitute enough. Where was my destitution when I did not live it? I was a player at life, one who thought earnestly about life and lived it easily. The destitute was far away and forgotten. Life had become difficult and murkier. Winter kept on going, and the destitute stood in snow and froze. I join myself with him, since I need him. He makes living light and easy. He leads to the depths, to the ground where I can see the heights. Without the depths , I do not have the heights. I may be on the heights, but precisely because of that I do not become aware of the heights. I therefore need the bottommost for my renewal. If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me. But because I do not want to have it, my best becomes a horror to me. Because of that I myself become a horror, a horror to myself and to others, and a bad spirit of torment. Be respectful and know that your best has become a horror, with that you save yourself and others from useless torment. A man who can no longer climb down from his heights is sick, and he brings himself and others to torment. If you have reached your depths, then you see your height light up brightly over you, worthy of desire and far-off, as if unreachable, since secretly you would prefer not to reach it since it seems unattainable to you. For you also love to praise your heights when you are low and to tell yourself that you would have only left them with pain, and that you did not live so long as you missed them. It is a good thing that you have almost become the other nature that makes you speak this way. But at bottom you know that it is not quite true. At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs. Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can you become if you never are? Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become. If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self. If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being. What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is as its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings. Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves. Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve those from which we suffer, but not those which please us. To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.

In line with the Acts of Thomas is the Ophite view that the Holy Ghost is the “first word,” the “Mother of All Living,” and the Valentinian idea that the Third Person is the “Word of the Mother from Above.” It is clear from all this that Wagner’s Brünhilde is one of the numerous anima-figures who are attributed to masculine deities, and who without exception represent a dissociation in the masculine psyche—a “split-off” with a tendency to lead an obsessive existence of its own. This tendency to autonomy causes the anima to anticipate the thoughts and decisions of the masculine consciousness, with the result that the latter is constantly confronted with unlooked-for situations which it has apparently done nothing to provoke. Such is the situation of Wotan, and indeed of every hero who is unconscious of his own intriguing femininity.

Even man’s strength comes from Brahman. It is clear from these examples, which could be multiplied indefinitely, that the Brahman concept, by virtue of all its attributes and symbols, coincides with that of a dynamic or creative principle which I have termed libido. The word Brahman means prayer, incantation, sacred speech, sacred knowledge (veda), holy life, the sacred caste (the Brahmans), the Absolute. Deussen stresses the prayer connotation as being especially characteristic.71 The word derives from barh (cf. L. farcire), ‘to swell,’72 whence “prayer” is conceived as “the upward-striving will of man towards the holy, the divine.” This derivation indicates a particular psychological state, a specific concentration of libido, which through overflowing innervations produces a general state of tension associated with the feeling of swelling. Hence, in common speech, one frequently uses images like “overflowing with emotion,” “unable to restrain oneself,” “bursting” when referring to such a state. (“What filleth the heart, goeth out by the mouth.”) The yogi seeks to induce this concentration or accumulation of libido by systematically withdrawing attention (libido) both from external objects and from interior psychic states, in a word, from the opposites. The elimination of sense-perception and the blotting out of conscious contents enforce a lowering of consciousness (as in hypnosis) and an activation of the contents of the unconscious, i.e., the primordial images, which, because of their universality and immense antiquity, possess a cosmic and suprahuman character. This accounts for all those sun, fire, flame, wind, breath similes that from time immemorial have been symbols of the procreative and creative power that moves the world. As I have made a special study of these libido symbols in my book Symbols of Transformation, I need not expand on this theme here.

St. John would say that the natural working of the faculties is not adequate to attain to union with God, and the beginner is drawn to spiritual exercises as much by the satisfaction as by any purely spiritual motives. For the psychologist, even while he is refraining from making any judgment about the religious object, is often painfully aware that if interior experiences are viewed as if they had nothing to do with the overall dynamics of the psyche, then their recipient runs the risk of damaging his psychic balance. If temptations must be seen only as the direct working of the devil and inspirations and revelations the direct working of the Holy Spirit, then the totality of the psyche and the flow of its energy will be misunderstood. The biggest danger to the beginner experiencing sensible fervor, or any other tangible phenomenon, is that they will equate their experience purely and simply with union with God. The very combination of genuine spiritual gifts and how these graces work through the psyche creates a sense of conviction that this, indeed, is the work of God, but this conviction is often extended to deny the human dimension as if any participation by the psyche is a denial of divine origin. The beginner, then, can become impervious to psychological and spiritual advice. The sense of consolation, the feeling of completion, the visions seen, or the voices heard, the tongue spoken, or the healings witnessed, are all identified with the exclusive direct action of God as if there were no psyche that received and conditioned these inspirations. This same attitude is then carried over into daily life and how God's action is viewed in this world. If God is so immediately present, miracles must be taking place daily. God must be intervening day-by-day, even in the minor mundane affairs of the recipients of His Spirit. This does not mean that genuine miracles do not take place, nor that genuine inspirations do not play a role in daily life, but rather, if we believe that they are conceptually distinguishable from the ordinary working of consciousness, we run the risk of identifying God's action with our own perceptions, feelings and emotions. The initial conversion state, precisely because of the degree of emotional energy it is charged with, is often clung to as if the intensity of this energy is a guarantee of its spiritual character. As beginners under the vital force of these tangible experiences we take up an attitude of inner expectancy. We look to a realm beyond the arena of the ego and assume that what transpires there is supernatural. We reach and grasp for interior messages. Thus arises a real danger of misinterpreting what we perceive. What Jung says about the inability to discern between God and the unconscious at the level of empirical experience is verified here. We run the risk of confusing the spiritual with the psychic, our own perceptions with God Himself. An even greater danger is that we will erect this kind of knowledge into a whole theology of the spiritual life, and thus judge our progress by the presence of these phenomena. “The same problem can arise in a completely different context, which could be called a pseudo-Jungian Christianity. In it the realities of the psyche which Jung described are identified with the Christian faith. Thus, at one stroke a vivid sense of experience, even mysticism, if you will, arises. The numinous experience of the unconscious becomes equivalent to the workings of the Holy Spirit. Dreams and the psychological events that take place during the process of individuation are taken for the stages of the life of prayer and the ascent of the soul to God by faith. But this mysticism is no more to be identified with St. John's than the previous one of visions and revelations.

A strange feeling spreads through Avery’s chest, a slow, honeyed warmth he can’t ignore. It seeps over the fear, the sorrow, the bitter wretched dread that has always lived inside him, and it clings like a stain against his ribcage. This feeling that is somehow terrible and holy and beautiful all at once. He is not alone.

But we have evidence that John must have belonged to a certain religious movement, current in those days, which must have been something like the Essenes, also called the Therapeuts, who were chiefly occupied in healing the sick and interpreting dreams. [...] Then we know from Philo Judaeus of Alexandria that monasteries existed in those days and that there were considerable settlements on the Dead Sea and in Egypt, and they naturally had a body of teaching. There are still disciples of John in the neighborhood of Basra and Kut-el-Amara in Mesopotamia; they have a collection of sacred books, one of them has been translated recently, the Mandaean Book of John. The Mandaeans were disciples of John and they were Gnostics. Peculiarly enough, the Gnostic Evangel is also called the Evangel of St. John; this is obscure, but since it was written only at the beginning of the second century, it is possible that the name of John covers the Gnostic side of Christian origins. [...] So we are almost forced to assume that Christ received Gnostic teaching and some of his sayings — like the parable of the Unjust Steward which we recently mentioned, and particularly the so-called "Sayings of Jesus" which are not contained in the New Testament — are closely related to Gnosticism. Also those Evangels which were not accepted by the church, and therefore mostly destroyed, contained Gnostic teaching; we can substantiate this from the knowledge of the fragments which we still possess, the Gospel of the Egyptians, for instance, and among the Apocrypha of the New Testament, the Acts of St. Thomas, where the Holy Ghost is called Sophia and where she is the blessed mother. So already in its origins, Christianity was so closely surrounded by Gnostic and by Alexandrian wisdom that it is more than probable that Christ received a Gnostic initiation and possessed a rather profound understanding of the human soul and the peculiarities of spiritual development. One could say that he himself was the ripe fruit of antiquity; he gathered up in himself the essence of the wisdom of the Near East, contained the juice of Egypt and of Greece, and came together with the mob. And that caused a great whirlwind which moved masses and formed them, which brought about that form which we call Christianity. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1031-1032). Princeton University Press.

Spirit is a very peculiar concept which has in many cases lost its original character, but the history of the word spirit, or the German word Geist, tells us what it originally meant. The Greek word pneuma and the Latin word spiritus mean wind, and the Latin word animus is the same as the Greek word anemos, and they also mean wind. Pneuma is still the term in the Greek Orthodox church for the Holy Ghost, which is the sacred wind; it is a movement, a force. And Geist comes from a root which means to well up; it is a sort of enthusiasm, an emotional condition. The English word aghast is an emotional word which comes from it, and the word ghost is related to it. Geist was understood to be like a geyser, a welling up, an inspiration. In the miracle of Pentecost, all those symbolic phenomena are together; the fiery tongues mean the fire of enthusiasm: the apostles were like drunken people, and a powerful wind filled the house. That was spirit, but to us spirit has become something exceedingly lame and ineffectual, a mere two-dimensional picture — sort of beliefs or ideas that have no body and no force; one must believe them to give them any force. In the philosophy of Klages, one learns that the spirit is now the devil that destroys life, but he at least attributes a destructive power to it. And Scheler, who tried to restore a certain amount of importance to the spirit, made again a very lame thing of it; it is neither very destructive nor very effective. That powerful wind, which was destructive as well as generative or emotional, has gone. It is a poor thing with us now, no longer what it used to be. This process has come about within two thousand years. It was God in the beginning, and before that time it was latent in what man calls "God," that incomprehensible power in the depth of his own soul. And man supposes that this is in the depth of the universe in general because the microcosm is in no way different from the macrocosm; so what is in the depth of the soul was in the universe before, in that eternal source of life. Then it became visible or audible; it became the evangelion, the glad tidings, and people received it. But later it grew into an organization, so the effect was lost in created things. You see, the creative impulse comes to an end with the creation, just because it has become a creation; for a while there is no longer an impulse — until one has liberated oneself again from that which one has created. If one sticks to the creation, one will create nothing more. And so the time comes when the world is absolutely empty of spirit, when nobody knows what spirit is, when there are only the effects of the spirit — though those effects make visible efforts to remember the times when they were young, as old people like to speak about their youth just because they have it no longer. This descent which has happened to us within the last two thousand years, then, is the phenomenon to which Nietzsche here refers — of course in a more or less negative way. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 494-495). Princeton University Press.

We know selfishness as individualism, as a hungry or thirsty kind of craving to impose upon others, to steal from others, to take away their values; one can call it morbid-selfishness in the sense of egotism. But there is another selfishness which is holy, only nobody has any idea of it; this idea has died out for us since the early Middle Ages. We have the idea that when somebody withdraws into himself, when he does not allow other people to eat him, that he is morbid or terribly egotistical. This simply comes from the fact that late Christianity believes in the early teaching of Christ: "Love thy neighbor, "and then what Christ really taught, "as thyself," is never mentioned. But if you don't love yourself, how can you love anybody else? You come to him as a begging bowl, and he has to give. While if you love yourself, you are rich, you are warm, you have abundance; then you can say that you love because you are really a gift, you are agreeable. For you must feel well when you go to your friends; you must be able to give something in order to be a loving friend. Otherwise you are a burden. If you are black and hungry and thirsty you are just a damned nuisance, just an empty sack. That is what these Christians are; they are empty and they make demands upon one. They say, "We love you and you ought to" — those devils put one under an obligation. But I always point out that Christ said: "Love thy neighbor as thyself," so love yourself first. And this is so difficult that for a long time you won't ask anybody to love you, because you know what an awful hell it is. You hate yourself, are despicable to yourself, cannot stand two hours in a room alone. Like the clergyman I told you about. He was occupied from seven in the morning till eleven at night with people, so he was quite empty and therefore suffered from all sorts of disturbances. You see, you lmust give something to yourself. How can you give to people when you don't understand yourself? Learn to understand yourself first. I had the greatest trouble in the world to teach that man that he should sometimes be alone with himself. He thought that if he read a book or played the piano with his wife he would be alone, and that if he were actually alone one hour every day he would get crazy and melancholic. If you cannot stand yourself for any length of time, you may be sure that your room is full of animals-you develop an evil smell. And yet you demand that your neighbor should love you. It is just as if a dinner was served to you which was so bad you couldn't eat it, and then you say to your friend or mother or father, "Eat it, I love you, it is very bad." But no, you tell them it is very good, you cheat people. You see, whoever is not able to love himself is unworthy of loving other people and people kick him out of the house. And they are quite right. It is very difficult to love oneself, as it is very difficult to really love other people. But inasmuch as you can love yourself you can love other people; the proof is whether you can love yourself, whether you can stand yourself. That is exceedingly difficult; there is no meal worse than one's own flesh. Try to eat it in a ritual way, try to celebrate communion with yourself, eat your own flesh and drink your own bloodsee how the thing tastes. You will marvel. Then you see what you are to your friends and relations; just as bad as you seem to yourself are you to them. Of course they are all blindfolded, late Christians, so they may not see the poison they eat in loving you; but if you know this, you can understand how important it is to be alone sometimes. It is the only way in which you can establish decent relations to other people. Otherwise, it is always a question, not of give and take, but of stealing. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 799-800)