Thursday, September 25, 2025

Carl Jung and Zen

 50 some-odd years ago I was reading anything I could find by the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung (d.1961). His doctrine of "Individuation" spoke to the need to open up to the latent contents of the Unconscious Mind, and to assimilate what was found there into the realm of the Self. With this accomplished the person involved had become an "In-dividual": no longer driven by psychic forces beneath the horizon of awareness.

It strikes me that this process of "Individuation" is very close to the change of being that is sought in the "Enlightenment" of Zen, with the singular difference that the Zen view incorporates all of life into the fellowship of Awareness, 


Saturday, September 13, 2025

A Quote From C. G. Jung

 "Nature is not only aristocratic, she is also esoteric. Yet no man of understanding will thereby be induced to make a secret of what he knows, for he realizes only too well that the secret of psychic development can never be betrayed, simply because that development is a question of individual capacity."