The language and the “people” of the unconscious are symbols, and the means of communications dreams. Thus an examination of Man and his Symbols is in effect an examination of man’s relation to his own unconscious. And since in Jung’s view the unconscious is the great guide, friend, and adviser of the conscious, this book is related in the most direct terms to the study of human beings and their spiritual problems.
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There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.
The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.
We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols.
What’s lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses – a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols.
However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.
Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.
Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making fly-traps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is there for – the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
