The collective unconscious: Nature as a proper guide

The collective unconscious: 

Nature as a proper guide

Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her.

She is like the needle of the compass pointing to the North, which is most useful when you have a good man-made ship and when you know how to navigate.

If you follow the river, you surely come to the sea finally. But if you take it literally you soon get stuck in an impassable gorge and you complain of being misguided.

The unconscious is useless without the human mind.

It always seeks its collective purposes, or the common good, and never your individual destiny (interest).

Your destiny is the result of the collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious.~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 283.

It is an astonishing fact, indeed, that the collective unconscious seems to be in contact with nearly everything. There is of course no empirical evidence for such a generalization, but plenty of it for its indefinite extension. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

There is even no absolute certainty about the psyche being definitely dependent upon the brain since we know that there are facts proving that the mind can relativize space and time, as the Rhine experiments and general experience have proved sufficiently. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.

If you want to be quite accurate, both statements, viz. that the psyche is founded upon an organic process of the body, or that the psyche is independent of the body, are unanswerable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.


The integration of the collective unconscious amounts roughly to taking cognizance of the world and adapting to it. This does not mean that one would have to learn to know the whole world, or that one must have lived in all climates and continents of the world. The integration of the unconscious is always, of course, only a very relative affair, and refers only to the constellated material, not to its total theoretical scope. John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the Soul" has nothing to do with this. Rather, integration is a conscious confrontation, a dialectical process such as I have described in my essay "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious."
--C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 159.

What we need is the development of the inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in man's unconscious psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 201-208