Reflections on fire It is a wonderful alchemical pleasure to sit inside the cabin with a fire in the woodstove, and look to the outside world and see a fire on the stone altar. The dual fires reminds me of the alchemical axiom from the Emerald Tablet, “As above, so below.” The…
It has a been a bit of a puzzle to me why I have been so consistently drawn to working on the Stone Sanctuary for the last three years. In the next few weeks, I hope to explore the symbolism of stones and the psychological process of working with stones. The work above is the…
My mother took me to the Thurgau to visit friends, who had a castle on Lake Constance. I could not be dragged away from the water, the waves from the steamer washed up on the shore, the sun glistened on the water, and the sand under the water had been curled into little ridges…
Carl Jung, on finding the images behind the emotions: To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images– that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions– I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn…
Carl Jung, on Drawing his First Mandala It was only towards the end of the First World War that I gradually began to emerge from the darkness. Two events contributed to this. The first was that I broke with the woman who was determined to convince me that my fantasies had artistic value; the second…
Carl Jung speaks of the Mystery of Love: If we possess a grain of wisdom, we will completely surrender to this unknowable who embraces in love all the opposites. Whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence “God is love,” the words affirm the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead. In my medical experience…
Carl Jung on the Central Position of the Mandala “I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego…. I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point — namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain…
Jung Describes His Process of Drawing Mandalas I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time. With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day to day. . .. Only gradually did I discover…
from the Red Book It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive….