If
a =
b and
b =
c, then
a =
c, even though by definition a meant something other than
b, and, being different, could therefore not be equated with
b, let alone with
c.
What had led me astray during the crisis was my passion for being alone, my dleight in solitude. Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.
Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed.
Thus the pattern of my relationship to the world was already prefigured: today as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not even want to know.
"The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years," (skip) I was but the sum of my emotions, and the Other in me was the timeless, imperishable stone.
Certainly the world is immeasurably beatiful, but it is quite as horrible. In small village in the country, where there are few people and nothing much happens, "old age, disease, and death" are experienced more intesely, in greater detail, and more nakedly than elsewhere.
But somewhere and at some time there must have been people who sought the truth as I was doing, who thought rationally and did not wish to deceive themselves and others and deny the sorrowful reality of the world.
For everywhere in the realm of religious questions I encountered only locked doors, and if ever one door should chance to open I was disappointed by what lay behind it. Other people all seemed to have totally different concerns. I felt completely alone with my certainties. More than ever I wnated someone to talk with, but nowhere did I find a pint of contact; on the contrary, I sensed in others an estrangement, a distrust, an apprehension which robbed me of speech.
there was a sudden inner silence, as though a soundproof door had beeen closed on a noisy room.
I knew what I wanted and went after it. I also became noticeably more accessible and more communicative.
My father pressed a ticket into my hand and said, "You can ride up to the peak alone. I'll stay here, it's too expensive for the two of us. Be careful not to fall down anywhere."
(융이 정신적으로 경멸했던 아버지는 너무 인간적이지 않은가? 최선을 다해 자식에게 기회를 쥐어주고, 위험을 걱정하는 모습, 그러나, 기차를 타고 올라가는 동안 융은 그 기회를 마음껏 향유한다. 그에게 같이 가지 못한 아버지에 대한 안타까운 마음 등은 찾아볼 수 없는 것이...)
I finally decided on medicine, it was with the rather disagreeable feeling that it was not a good thing to start life with such a compromise.
In the role of No. 1, I had to go forward - into study, moneymaking, responsibilities, entanglements, confusions, errors, submissions, defeats. The storm pushing agaisnt me was time, ceaselessly flowing into the past, which just as ceaselessly dogs our heels. It exerts a mighty suction which greedily draws evertyhing living into itself; we can only escape from it - for a while - by pressing forward.
No one, not even I myself, had ever imagined I could become interested in this obscure bypath. (skip) thinking of me a fool for throwing up the enviable chance of a sensible career in internal medicine, which dangled so temptingly before my nose, in favor of this psychiatric nonsensce. (skip)
But I knew - and nothing and nobody could have deflected me from my purpose - that my decision stood, and that it was fate.
Encounters with people of so many different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities. The finest and most significant conversations of my life were anonymous.
I really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling about in the winds of the spirit, like Nietzsche. Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he posessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts
(이 부분에 대해서는 나는 다른 생각, 니체는 선택을 한 것이지 현실을 잃은 것은 아니다. 이상과 현실은 다르다. 이상을 위해 그는 산꼭대기에 올라가는 삶을 택한 것이다. 아무도 없더라도 그는 올라간다. 그에게는 '고귀한 정신'에 대한 갈망이 있었기에 그의 저작이 나올 수 있었을 것이라 생각한다. 그가 현실과 타협하는 삶을 살았더라면 교수로서 '정신의 양말/학문적 세공품'을 짜는데 한 생을 마감했을 것이며, 그의 Zarathustra는 존재하지도 않았을 것이다.)
It would be unfair to continue teaching young students when my own intellectual situation was nothing but a mass of doubts.
I therefore felt that I was confronted with the choice of either continuing my academic career, whose road lay smooth before me, or following the laws of my inner personality, of a higher reason, and forging ahear with this curious tak of mine, this experiment in controntation with the uncounscious. But until it was completed I could not appear before the public.
Words and paper, however, did not seem real enough to me; something more was needed. I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Or, to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone.
In my retiring room I am by myself. I keep the key with me all the time; no one else is allowed in there except with my permission. In the course of the years I have done paintings on the walls, and so have expressed all those thingswihch have carried me out of time into seclusion, out of the present into timelessness. Thus the second tower became for me a place of spiritual concentration.
(skip) I needed a larger space that would stand open to the sky and to nature.
Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before.
Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est - all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.
(컴퓨터나 휴대폰 같은 기기가 없는 그 시절에 벌써 이런 생각을 했다는 것이 놀랍다. 현대에 와서 이 말은 더 정곡을 찌른다.)
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interst upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for waht is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy.
Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination - that is, ultimately limited - we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!
In an era which has concentrated exclusively upon extension of living space and increase of rational knowledge at all costs, it is a supreme challenge to ask man to become conscious of his uniqueness and his limitation. Uniqueness and limitation are synonymous. Without them, no perception of the unlimited is possible - and consequently, no coming to consciousness either - merely a delusory identity with it which takes the form of intoxication with large numbers and an avidity for political power.
Our age has shfted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. (skip)
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
In practical terms, this means that good an devil are no longer so self-evident. We have to realize that each represents a
judgment. In veiw of the fallibility of all human judgment, we cannot believe that we will be always judge rightly.
As a rule, however, the individual is so unconscious that he altogether fails to see his own potentialities for decision. Instead he is constantly and anxiously looking around for external reles and regulations which cna guide him in his perplexity. (skip)
Therefore the individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremeost, of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness. (skip) should he wish - as he ought - to live without self-deception or self-delusion.
The biological and political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the same thing. But the history of the mind offers a different picture.
If insight does not come by itself, speculation is pointless. It makes sense only when we have objective data comparable to our material on the aeon of Aquarius.
Meanginglessness inhinits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything.
I am at the stream, but I do nothing. (skip) I stant and behold, admiring what nature can do.
One must stoop a little in order fetch water from the stream.
an inner certainty.
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which other find inadmissible.
I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.
- 많은 말들에 공감하고, 또한, 많은 말들에 고개를 갸우뚱하며 읽었던 책.
정신분석학의 대가로 꼽히는 융의 솔직한 자서전에 담긴 그의 모습은 특별했던 어린시절에도 불구하고, 매우 통합적인 인간상을 보여준다. 그의 일생을 자신이 중요하다고 생각되는 일에 바쳤고, 자기 성찰과 발견에 바친 융. 나로서는 그의 무의식보다는 그의 의식에서 써나간 부분에 더 동의했다. 이 책을 읽는 동안 가장 큰 발견은 현재의 나 자신이 아니라, 과거와 미래의 연장선 상에서 나, 인간 존재에 대한 인식이었다. 오직 현재와 지금만을 중요시하다보면 잊게되는 역사적 존재로서의, 혹은 더 멀리 인류적 존재로서의 인간에 대한 의무와 가치, 그 부분을 간과하게 되는 실수를 범하게 되는 것 같다. 종교로 현실의 눈을 가려서도 안 되지만, 현재에 너무 치중해 시간선상에 서 있는 사람의 모습을 잊어서도 안 되는 것으로 느껴진다.
그가 말한대로 인간존재의 단 하나의 목적이 단순한 존재의 불을 밝히는 것이라 할 지라도, 우리는 그 연결선상에 있고, 자신을 의식하는 인간이 있는 한 그 불은 영원히 꺼지지 않을 것이다.
'다름'이라는 고독, '이해받지 못함'이라는 고독, '이해시킬 수 없음'이라는 고독들은 누구에게나 있는 것인지, 아니면 유독 나와 같은 사람들에게 더 심하게 느껴지는 것인지 모르겠지만, 이제 나에게 이런 것들은 시간을 초월한 사람들과 공감함으로서 이미 극복되어진 것 같다.
어디에서, 어디로. 모르겠지만, 나는 가고 있고 의식의 등불을 보다 환하게 가지고 한발씩 딛고 가리라는 것은 분명한 듯 하다.
그에게 '돌'이 있었다면, 나에게는 '물'이...
