“Your perspective will only become clear when you can look into your heart. He who looks around him, dreams; he that looketh within himself, awakeneth.”
Carl Gustav Jung
People inspired by any field come to the same fundamental truths.
Fanaticism doesn’t make sense; if the fruits of a tree are good, then the tree, for those fruits, is good.
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Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is one of the most important figures of transpersonal psychology, as well as one of the synologies (synology = science that deals with the study of the history, language, literature and culture of the Chinese people) the most considerable of this century (both in the sphere of mythology and in terms of interpreting dreams) and a great connoisseur of esoteric currents such as Christian Gnosticism, Tantra, Taoism, I-Ching and Alchemy.
C.G. Jung began his studies on human motivation at the beginning of the XXth century, creating the school of psychoanalysis also known as the School of Analytical Psychology. He was a contemporary of the Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud and at first collaborated with him. Later, however, he began to develop his own theories, including the exploration of personality types. According to Jung, there are two basic types of personality that alternate in a balanced way in normal individuals: extroverted and introverted. Jung also believed that the unconscious is made up of the personal unconscious (repressed ideas and feelings that manifest throughout the individual’s life) and the collective unconscious (those feelings, ideas and memories inherited and shared by all humanity).
Carl Gustav Jung walked away from his master and headed to the source of the old esoteric traditions to quench his thirst. Jung said that through dreams the Human Being can know his True Personality, and also in dreams there is the possibility to receive messages from the future. In his book “Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections” he recounts how he once dreamed of an Arctic wind, frosty, which desolated the plains of Europe and covered them with iron; the whole region becoming uninhabited and without vegetation. This happened in June 1914, just two months before the start of the First World War.
Carl Gustav Jung at his office
Between 1912 and 1919, after his separation from Freud, Jung was the subject -passive rather than active, it seems- of an almost uncontrollable eruption of images coming from what he called the Unconscious Collective. These were –in the opinion of his personal secretary, Aniela Jaffe- “the raw material that made possible the intellectual creation to which he dedicated the rest of his life”.
Looking for a historical history of what he was living at the time and the “psychological” intuitions he reached, Jung entered between 1918 and 1926, in the symbolic -seemingly chaotic- world of Christian Gnosticism. Later he would find his foundations of historical support in Alchemy, to the point where he was convinced that his Analytical Psychology was directly related to alchemy and that his “psychotherapeutic” and revitalizing method of symbols, called “Active Imagination”, was an improved form of the alchemical method “Imaginatio vera et no phantastica”.
Carl Gustav Jung as The Alchemist
In 1928 he came into possession of a volume of Chinese alchemy that served him to associate his inner quest with that of alchemists. This book is called “The Mystery of the Golden Blossom,” whose oral tradition goes up to the eighth century our era.