Statue of Lord Shiva in Bangalore, India, performing yogic meditation in the Padmasana posture.

The power of the yogi operates within limits acceptable to his environment.  The European, on the other hand, can blow up mountains, and the World War has given us a bitter foretaste of what he is capable of when free rein is given to an intellect that has grown estranged from human nature. As a European, I cannot wish the
European more “control” and more power over the nature within and around us. Indeed, I must confess to my shame that I owe my best insights (and there are some quite good ones among them) to the circumstance that I have always done just the opposite of what the rules of yoga prescribe. Through his historical development, the European has become so far removed from his roots that his mind was finally split into faith and knowledge, in the same way that every psychological exaggeration breaks up into…

Dear Professor Schmid, 9 February 1960

Best thanks for your kind letter.

It is indeed a great honour that you wish to dedicate your essays on Goethe and Schiller to me.

Thank you very much.

I am looking forward to seeing what you mean by “completion.”

You are too modest!

In reality you create images and viewpoints which have only been helped along by some of my ideas.

This gives me great satisfaction, because what alone has always mattered to me was to find out whether my way of looking at things is in accord with life or not.

If it is, then it will live on and express something alive.

If there’s one thing that terrified me, it was dead conceptualism.

Again with best thanks,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung

~Carl Jung, Collected Letters Vol. II, Page 543

Gilgamesh got up and revealed the dream, saying to his mother: 

Soon after this on an autumn night I heard the voice of an old man (and this time I knew that it was Diahmon). He said: I want to turn you around. I want to master you. I want to emboss you like a coin. I want to do business with you. One should buy and sell you. You should pass from hand to hand. Self-willing is not for you. You are the will of the whole. Gold is no master out of its own will and yet it rules the whole, despised and greedily demanded, an inexorable ruler: it lies and waits. He who sees it longs for it.

It does not follow one around, but lies silently, with a brightly gleaming countenance, self-sufficient, a king that needs no proof of its power. Everyone seeks after it, few find it, but even the smallest piece is highly esteemed. It…

Carl Jung; Red Book; Illustration 121.

Truly; I have shot down a proud enemy; I have forced a greater and stronger one to be my friend. Nothing should separate me from him, the dark one. If I want to leave him, he follows me like my shadow. If I do not think of him, he is still uncannily near.
He will turn into fear if I deny him. I must amply commemorate him, I must prepare a sacrificial meal for him. I fill a plate for him at my table. Much that I would have done earlier for men, I now must do for him. Hence they consider me selfish, for they do not know that I go with my friend, and that many days are consecrated to him. But unrest has moved in, a quiet underground earthquake, a distant great roaring. Ways have been opened to the primordial and…