Just as Jung called complexes splinter personalities, so one may call symptoms and complexes splinter, or fractile, mythologies. Each has a core energic structure, each has valence, each has an identity, each has a fractionated agenda. When evoked, each has a tendency toward the repetition compulsion, and yet each is an opening to the dynamics of pathology and a clue to the healing agenda obliged. Again, how can depth psychology be performed without a knowledge of the essential mythopoetic process of psyche?

James Hollis (Is Something Mything)

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. In this latter case, unfortunately, there is no scientific test that would prove the discrepancy between perception and reality. Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naively projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based entirely on projection.
(Jung, CW 8, par 507)

"But why on earth," you may ask, "should it be necesarry for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?" This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead of the real answer I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals exists. From a low hill on the plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this, is. The entire world around me was still in a primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man. ...Every advance, even the smallest, along this path of conscious realization adds that much to the world.
(Jung, 9-1 CW, par 177)

An Ancient Chinese Story

The story concerns a carpenter and his apprentice as they observed a large oak tree growing near an earth-altar (a simple round or square structure upon which people make sacrifices to the local god who “ owned” this piece of land.)

A wandering carpenter, called Stone, saw on his travels a gigantic old oak tree standing in a field near an earth-altar. The carpenter said to his apprentice, who was admiring the oak: “this is a useless tree. If you wanted to make a ship, it would soon rot; if you wanted to make tools, they would soon break. You can’t do anything useful with this tree, and that’s why it has become so old.”

But in an inn, that same evening, when the carpenter went to sleep, the old oak tree appeared to him in a dream and said: “Why do you compare me to your cultivated trees such as white-thorn, pear, orange and apple trees, and all the others that bear fruit? Even before they can ripen their fruit, people attack and violate them. Their branches are broken, their twigs are torn. Their own gifts bring harm to them, and they cannot live out their natural span. That is what happens everywhere, and that is why I have long since tried to become completely useless. You poor mortal! Imagine if I had been useful in any way, would I have reached this size? Furthermore, you and I are both creatures, and how can one creature set himself so high as to judge another creature? You useless mortal man, what do you know about useless trees?”

The carpenter woke up and meditated upon his dream, and later, when his apprentice asked him why just this one tree served to protect the earth altar, he answered, “Keep your mouth shut! Let’s hear no more about it! The tree grew here on purpose because anywhere else people would have ill-treated it. If it were not the tree of the earth altar, it might have been chopped down”

- Chuang-Tzu. (Source- Man and His Symbols, edited by Carl G. Jung, Arkana, 1990, ` P. 163)

Philosophers on Self..

Kierkegaard (The Sickness Unto Death):

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which
relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates
itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to
its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom
and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man
is not yet a self.


Cassirer (Language and Myth):

It was a long evolutionary course which the human mind had to traverse, to pass from the belief in a physico-magical power comprised in the Word to a realization of its spiritual power. Indeed, it is the Word, it is language that reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches his weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a "Thee," can his subjectivity assert itself as a "Me."
But here again the creative act, while it is in progress, is not recognized as such; all the energy of that spiritual achievement is projected into the result of it, and seems bound up in that object from which it seems to emanate as by reflection. Here, too, as in the case of tools and instruments, all spontaneity is felt as receptivity, all creativity as being and every product of subjectivity as so much substantiality.

Nietzsche (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense):

Deze komt nog...

Cassirer

It was a long evolutionary course which the human mind had to traverse, to pass from the belief in a physico-magical power comprised in the Word to a realization of its spiritual power. Indeed, it is the Word, it is language that reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches his weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a "Thee," can his subjectivity assert itself as a "Me."
But here again the creative act, while it is in progress, is not recognized as such; all the energy of that spiritual achievement is projected into the result of it, and seems bound up in that object from which it seems to emanate as by reflection. Here, too, as in the case of tools and instruments, all spontaneity is felt as receptivity, all creativity as being and every product of subjectivity as so much substantiality. And yet, this very hypostatization of the Word is of crucial importance in the development of human mentality. For it is the first form in which the spiritual power inherent in language can be apprehended at all; the Word has to be conceived in the mythic mode, as a substantive being and power, before it can be comprehended as an ideal instrument, an organon of the mind, and as a fundamental function in the construction and development of spiritual reality.

Nietzsche!

Beyond Good and Evil

69

One has watched life badly if one has not also seen the hand that considerately -- kills.

87

Tethered heart, free spirit.-- If one tethers one's heart severely and imprisons it, one can give one's spirit many liberties: I have said that once before. But one does not believe me, unless one already knows it--

94

A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.

96

One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa -- blessing it rather than in love with it.

97

What? A great man? I always see only the actor of his own ideal.

108

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena--

117

The will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, affects.

125

When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.

128

The more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it.

134

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

136

One seeks a midwife for his thoughts, another someone whom he can help: origin of a good conversation.

138

When we are awake we also do what we do in our dreams: we invent and make up the person with whom we associate -- and immediately forget it.

154

Objections, digressions, gay mistrust, the delight in mockery are signs of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology.

158

To our strongest drive, the tyrant in us, not only our reason bows, but also our conscience.

164

Jesus said to his Jews: "The law was for servants -- love God as I love him, as his son! What are morals to us sons of God!"

167

In men who are hard, intimacy involves shame -- and is precious.

172

From love of man one occasionally embraces someone at random ( because one can not embrace all ): but one must not tell him this--

175

In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired.

176

The vanity of other offends our taste only when it offends our vanity.

183

"Not that you lied to me, but that I no longer believe you, has shaken me" --

185

"I don't like him," -- Why? -- "I am not equal to him." -- Has any human being ever answered that way?