"As a rule the motives [the young man] acts from are largely unconscious. [...] The greater the area of unconsciousness, the less is marriage a matter of free choice, as is shown subjectively in the fatal compulsion one feels so acutely when one is in love. [...] His Eros is passive like a child's; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him. [...] The imperfections of real life, with its laborious adaptations and manifold disappointments, naturally cannot compete with such a state of indescribable fulfilment. [...] [E]very beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. [...] [This] projection-making factor is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. [...] The effect of anima [...] on the ego [...] is extremely difficult to eliminate because, in the first place, it is uncommonly strong and immediately fills the ego-personality with an unshakable feeling of rightness and righteousness. In the second place, the cause of the effect is projected and appears to lie in objects and objective situations. Both these characteristics can, I believe, be traced back to the peculiarities of the archetype. For the archetype, of course, exists a priori. This may possibly explain the often totally irrational yet undisputed and indisputable existence of certain moods [...]. Perhaps these are so notoriously difficult to influence because of the powerfully suggestive effect emanating from the archetype. Consciousness is fascinated by it, held captive, as if hypnotized. Very often the ego experiences a vague feeling of moral defeat and then behaves all the more defensively, defiantly, and self-righteously, thus setting up a vicious circle which only increases its feeling of inferiority. The bottom is then knocked out of the human relationship, for, like megalomania, a feeling of inferiority makes mutual recognition impossible, and without this there is no relationship."
-Excerpts from "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" and "Aion: Phenomenology of the Self" by Carl Jung (edited to limit Jung's discussion to the male phenomenology, i.e. to remove discussion of female phenomenology and the animus)
Excerpt from "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell
"The second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its annihilation of the distinction between life and release-from-life--which is symbolized (as we have observed) in the Bodhisattva's renunciation of nirvāna. Briefly, nirvāna means "the Extinguishing of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion." As the reader will recall: in the legend of the Temptation under the Bo Tree [...] the antagonist of the Future Buddha was Kāma-Māra, literally "Desire-Hostility," or "Love and Death," the magician of Delusion. He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to nirvāna.
Belief and Resolve
Belief is but an immature form of resolve, and he that believes cannot resolve but can only be resolved by that which is dictated to him. In this sense, belief is an act of escapism and a process of succumbing, for he that believes absolves himself of the responsibility necessary to attain resolve, specifically, the responsibility of engaging in the process of individuation as manifested symbolically in the monomyth.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
