Carl Jung's Genius Philosophy

What makes humans distinct from other  animals? Biologically we have similar hardware to other animals like chimps and  gorillas. Arms, legs, eyes, ears, brain etc.

We also have the same operating system  of basic instincts as other animals that tells us what to do. We instinctively search for  food, find a mate to procreate with and seek the company of others. So if the hardware and  operating system are the same or very similar with our closest relatives like apes and monkeys  and even mammals, then what makes us human?

The answer lies in the software or our psychology but  more specifically in our ability to tell stories. Carl Jung, the Swiss genius psychoanalyst looked  at humans from different cultures and continents and discovered something extraordinary. We  all have very similar myths and stories, religious and non-religious.

Now how is  it possible that humans with little or no contact with other humans produced the same  myths, stories and characters? He realised that we share the same hidden software, our collective  unconscious. In the early days of human evolution, our software or psychology was shaped by our  ancestors and therefore our psychology resonates with certain stories and characters.

These  collective memories are sewn into our human DNA, which makes us different from other species.  Not only that, we have produced a sophisticated language to communicate these myths and stories  to others specially the future generations. So today, I will talk about Jung’s life, core  philosophical and psychological ideas and finally 10 philosophical secrets we can learn from  him.

So get yourself some Swiss cheese and let’s psychoanalyse how bacteria turns sour milk into a  delicious food. Joking aside, let’s talk how Jung poked hole into the human psyche to understand  our deeper layers of our past hidden memories stored in our capacity for storytelling we  have inherited from our early ancestors. Life Carl Jung was born in 1875 in Switzerland.

Just  like Friedrich Nietzsche’s father, Jung’s father was a church pastor and his mother also came from  a family of religious clergymen. While his father was a dignified, academically-inclined,  and stern man symbolising stability, his mother suffered from depression, she saw  ghosts, and spent time away in hospitals due to mysterious illnesses, therefore she represented  chaos and unreliability during his childhood. As a result, the little Carl spent long  hours alone and became deeply introverted and solitary.

Although he would observe  the marital conflict between his parents, he would also spend long hours in his own  imagination, developing vivid, clearly-organised worlds that contrasted the outside chaos. This is  very a common characteristic among great novelists whose imaginations see things ordinary people  either don’t see or don’t have the time to see. In fact he later articulated his main idea of  individuation in which each individual’s task is to develop consciousness from the chaos of the  unconscious.

A good analogy would be a volcano that looks beautifully symmetrical on the surface  but at the same time it rises from the depth of chaos down below. So individuation is a similar  process in which a person develops his or her idea of the self from the chaos of the unconscious  memories we have inherited from our ancestors. As a young boy, he witnessed religious rituals and  ceremonies due to his own family being involved.

On his maternal side, the family was involved in  religious occult activities. He drew a parallel between a child making crafts and these religion  or occult activities. For example he crafted a figure at the end of his pencil that resembled  a religious totem, a symbol of calm and comfort.

Children get attached to certain objects, for  example a security blanket, a toy, or something else, which they bring with them everywhere they  go and even hug the item while asleep. He realised this was similar to religious ceremonies and  rituals that humans do without really asking the question why. We just do it.

This became the  basis of his theory of the collective unconscious, meaning we are born with certain memories  passed down from our deep ancestral past. When he was 12, he was pushed by another  boy, knocking him unconscious. As a result, Jung was unable to go to school, because  he fainted every time he remembered it.

He spent 6 months at home. His  parents thought he had epilepsy, a very common illness among many novelists such  as Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe and many more. But at some point in his life,  the fainting went away. 

Almost miraculously. This opened up possibilities for the young  Jung that he couldn’t explain scientifically. During his teenage years, he started reading  philosophy, particularly the German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer,  and Friedrich Nietzsche.

His family wanted him to become a pastor just like his father.  But Jung was interested in archaeology, because he was interested in our deeper past.  This was partly because his parents’ domestic conflict made his present time unappealing and  made him lonely, so he took refuge in the past, but partly due to an interesting family legend. 

Growing up he would hear a family legend that his grandfather was an illegitimate son of the German  literary giant Goethe. So he read Goethe’s Faust when he was 15, which had a profound influence on  him throughout his life. For those who don’t know, Goethe's Faust is the story of a scholar who  sells his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and pleasures.

The story has a  deep Christian undertone that one has to resist the temptation of eating from the tree  of knowledge because in Adam and Eve story, Eve took a bite from the apple in the Garden of  Eden and as a result humanity was exiled to earth, so seeking knowledge is not always a good idea  from a religious perspective. Now Jung could see that same religious tale not only from a  religious perspective, but also from a literary perspective that had traveled through England in  the work by Christopher Marlowe and in Germany in the work of Goethe. So he wanted to understand  humanity’s past through the science of archeology.

However due to his family’s financial situation  he couldn’t relocate to another city to study archaeology and Basel University didn’t teach  it. So he turned to his other interest which was philosophy but at the same time he was also  interested in something more scientifically concrete. So he finally settled on psychiatry  and medicine which combined biology and the human mind.

While his family on both sides  had strong religious ties and were even involved in occult activities, they were also  involved in academic and scientific studies, so Jung grew up to harbour both ends  of the spectrum, highly idealistic, or you could term belief-based disciplines such  as the occult, alchemy, astrology and religious studies but also empirical and evidence-based  science of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Today, Jung is known to bridge the two supposedly  irreconcilable traditions of beliefs and sciences, the rational and the irrational,  the material with the spiritual. In 1896 he enrolled in Basil University to study  medicine, graduating in 1900.

He then moved to Zurich University but also started to work  at a psychiatry hospital with Eugen Bleuler, a renowned psychiatrist who was in close  contact with Sigmund Freud. From then Jung and Freud corresponded and later collaborated.  Jung also worked with a French psychiatrist, Pierre Janet whose theory of  the subconscious might have predated Freud’s theory of the unconscious,  resulting in a feud between Freud and Janet.

In 1903, Jung published his thesis titled,  On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, arguing that epilepsy,  hysteria and neurasthenia are different states of consciousness akin to occult phenomena  experienced by a medium. His career as a doctor progressed rapidly, which allowed him to  get married in 1903 to Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a wealthy watch merchant who  died two years later leaving a huge fortune to the couple. But despite the wealth that his  wife brought him, Jung continued to work hard, even opening his own clinic in 1909.

It has been  alleged that Jung was sexually unfaithful. But despite his infidelity, the couple worked  together, not only inside which produced 5 kids but also outside as the wife also  became an important psychoanalyst. In 1907 Jung met Freud and for the next 5 years  they would worked closely with each other, often travelling together, and reading  each other’s works before publication.

They became so close that Freud called Jung his  adopted son, his true heir. But in 1912, when Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, their  friendship was over. Freud believed that libido, the psychic energy associated primarily with sex  was the basis of a person’s development.

Jung, however, while believing libido to be the psychic  energy associated with an unchecked bodily desires such as sex, hunger, thirst, sleep and emotional  needs, it was the collective unconscious, the past ancestral memories to be vital in a person’s  development. So while Freud emphasised sex, Jung on the other hand, emphasised past  ancestral memories to be vital in how a person develops personality. For Freud, the  unconscious was like a storage where all the repressed emotions and desires are kept like a  closet where you throw unwanted items in your house.

Jung called it the personal unconscious,  but there was this whole other storage which he called the collective unconscious which Freud  failed to realise or take into consideration. Also Freud failed to see the unconscious as  a dynamic repository as the personal memories collide with the collective memories. In other  words, Freud focused on the individual while Jung also emphasised the collective-historical  baggage we all carry inside us.

Jung analysed the unconscious itself and broke it down to two,  the personal and the collective, while Freud saw it as just one static realm. As a result, Jung’s  analytical psychology focuses on the collective memory of distant past and your present situation  while Freud’s psychoanalysis is primarily focused on your own individual past memories, urges  and emotions that were suppressed by you. The result of their break-up was tough for Jung  as everyone else too broke up with him due to the influence Freud as the father of psychoanalysis  had at the time.

In 1913 he experienced psychosis. It’s important to note that he was 38 at the  time, a crucial period in a man’s life when what is considered a mid-life crisis that a lot of men  experience. Being a practical and scientific man, he wrote down his experiences of hallucinations  which he called ‘active imagination’ in his Black Books, a series of notebooks which  became the basis of his famous Red Book.

In 1914 with the outbreak of WW1 forced  Jung to be drafted as an army doctor, but it also came as a good distraction  from his isolation after being ostracised by Freud and his friends. While  Switzerland was a neutral country, it had to deal with soldiers from either side  entering its territory. So Jung was working with interned soldiers who were either lost  or fled the enemy and even their own army.

In 1921, he published Psychological Types, in  which he discussed introversion and extroversion as personality types. For the next 4 decades  he continued to write and publish books while also travelling to many parts of the world,  including Africa and Asia which solidified his theory of the collective unconsciousness.  He also gave lectures in Europe and America.

As a result he gained widespread recognition from  universities, including those in the UK and US. He died in 1961, aged 85. Today he is considered  one of the greatest psychologists of all time.

He’s only second to Freud in terms of  importance in the field of psychoanalysis, but his contribution is far wider than Freud,  specifically in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology  and religion. His theory of the collective unconscious has been immensely relevant to  literature and storytelling. Writers such as Hermann Hesse were influenced by Jung, especially  in his novels Steppenwolf, which I will discuss in a future video.

He has also influenced great  artists and musicians, among whom, David Bowie, The Beatles and even the Korean band BTS,  not to mention movies, video games etc. Apart from being a great psychoanalyst, he was also an artist producing many great  paintings as well as being a craftsman, and a builder. For example, in the 1920s he  built The Bollingen Tower, a small castle, where he would live for a few months every year,  as a kind of retreat similar to Heidegger’s cabin inside the Black Forest to isolate  himself in order to connect with nature.

Jung also had some experiences in life  that appeared random and coincidental but turned out to be highly meaningful. This also  influenced Wolfgang Pauli, the quantum physicist. Jung was interested in alchemy.

His 1944 book  Psychology and Alchemy saw a connection between the two. Just as alchemists were trying to turn  lead to gold, psychoanalysts also help people to turn the unconscious into a higher level of  consciousness through the process of individuation or fulfilment in life. Just as there are several  stages of alchemical process, an individual also goes through a process of development to  find their true purpose or fulfilment in life.

Now I will discuss Jung’s core ideas. Core ideas Collective Unconscious  One of the most fundamental Jungian ideas is the collective unconscious, which refers  to our collective memories passed down to us from our early evolution, only unique to humans, which  other animals don’t exhibit. While biologists and scientists argue that we all have universal  instincts among all animal species, such as our survival instincts like hunger and security as  well as reproductive instinct of sexual urge, Jung argues the collective unconscious is very specific  to humans.

By collective unconscious, Jung meant, our universal cultural memories such as myths  and characters that we can easily resonate with and understand. For example, no matter where you  are born, you can recognise characters within a story such as the hero or the villain or even more  specific archetypes which I will discuss later. This idea of collective unconscious probably  goes back to Plato who argued whoever or whatever exists in the real world are the many  manifestations or mere shadows of an ideal form.

In other words the world in essence is not just  a material world but also a world of ideas or spirit or form as he called it. We have a body  as hardware which is different for different people due to size, age and height, but we are  all equipped with a certain level of software that makes us respond to myths and legends in  almost the same way. Perhaps a crude analogy would be like this.

Our biological makeup is  our hardware. And our instincts for food and sex are like a mother-board sewn into our  biology just like an operating system. And our psychology is our software which according  to psychoanalysis is divided into two sections, the conscious which is the tip of the iceberg  and the unconscious which is hidden from us.

While Freud was interested  in the individual psychology, what went on inside their subconscious,  their childhood and their inner struggles, Jung looked outside. He was interested  in the commonalities that we all have, despite our cultural or religious differences.  In other words, there are certain similar myths and symbols that all humans share  irrespective of their cultural backgrounds.

While your own childhood experiences are stored in  your own individual memory, the common myths and symbols are stored in what he termed as the  ‘collective memory’ as part of a collective consciousness. These collective memories are not  the result of our own individual experiences, but inherited from our distant ancestors that are  passed down from generation to generation. Despite slight variation, these myths and symbols are more  or less the same in all cultures.

In other words, a large part of our psyche or conscious mind is  filled by the memories of our ancient ancestors. Just as Freud provided dreams as an evidence  for the existence of the unconscious, Jung, too, used dreams as evidence  of the collective unconscious. In other words, our dreams are like  windows into our past collective memories, be it the early humans or even apes who lived  in trees or even farther in the past.

Drams are like bridges between the conscious mind and  the unconscious mind. For example, the dream of falling down from a high place might even take us  back to ape-like ancestors who lived in trees. To really understand Jung’s theory, we can  look at it through philosophy.

The Greek giant, Plato thought everything that exists in  the physical world are mere shadows of the form that only exists in the mind. In other  words, the mind is primary and the outside world is a mere shadow of that mind. Later  in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe, rationalists believed that humans have an innate  knowledge of the world.

As babies grow up, this innate knowledge simply unfolds itself  so that we make sense of the world. Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious  is somewhat similar. We have inherited most of our unconscious memories and archetypes from our  ancestors.

In other words, most of our conscious mind is preassembled or pre-installed. A good  analogy is an Ikea table. It’s all ready but we only have to put things together.

Connect  the joints. It’s the same with our myths and stories. As we read a novel or watch a movie,  we keep connecting the dots.

As we grow up, we simply unfold those memories to make sense of  our personal experiences and build a persona of our own in the world. In other words, most of our  psychology is given to us at birth. As we grow up, that psychology merely unravels itself in our  unconscious to guide us through life.

For better or worse, the inherited psyche, or the collective  unconscious, determines a lot of our beliefs, experiences, emotions and motivations. The only  way out of this prison is to know it. Jung said: “By understanding the unconscious we free  ourselves from its domination.

”—Carl Jung So to sum up, while Freud argued that the  unconscious, which includes collected memories, traumas, suppressed emotions from our childhood,  determines most of our behaviour and experiences in life, Jung went a step further saying that  it is not just our own unconscious memories, but also the collective unconscious  memories we inherit from our ancestors. So the unconscious is not just your  own, but also those who came before us. Archetypes In our collective unconscious there are symbols and myths present in all cultures. 

Jung called these symbols and myths as archetypes that are moulded inside us prior to our birth.  Archetype, derived from archeology, refers to a cultural artefact, archaic remnants, or primordial  images fossilised in our unconscious mind found among people from all cultures, passed down from  our earliest common ancestors, perhaps the early homo sapiens, is therefore universal among humans.  These archetypes are repeated characters present in all religions, mythologies, art, literature  such as fairy tales as well as epics and stories.

In other words, archetypes are like templates for  us to understand our own experiences in life. For example we hear a story, we subconsciously compare  ourselves to these characters and archetypes. But interestingly, we are not aware that they are  given to us.

In other words, we are not conscious of these archetypes. We often think of them as  somewhat naturally our own. Just as your genes are passed down to you through your ancestors as your  hardware, so are these memories as your software.

If your DNA is the memory of your genes, the  archetypes are your collective cultural memories. If we go back to philosophy, Kant argued that  our knowledge of the world comes through our experiences. But not only that, we have an  innate mechanism of rationality that puts a structure onto the world.

In other words,  we are not passive receivers of knowledge from the the outside world, we impose our  own mental structure on the world as well. Jung’s archetypes are somewhat similar in that,  through these archetypes in collective memory, we make better sense of our experiences in the  world. Archetypes sit in our unconscious mind to give us patterns so our experiences  and emotions appear meaningful to us.

Jung characterised the human psyche into three  parts: the ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The ego is the  rational or conscious side of our psyche that regulates our lives. It’s like a control  mechanism that tells what to do in society, things not to do and things that  are acceptable to do.

The personal unconscious, which Freud mainly focused  on, includes our own individual memories, including repressed memories and suppressed  emotions. The collective unconscious, which Jung mainly focused, is where the archetypes  we have inherited from our ancestors are stored. What are the examples of these archetypes?

Jung  looked at one activity that we all humans share. Storytelling. From a very early age, children  are mesmerised by stories and even in adulthood, we love stories.

Why? Because stories not only  teach us, they have a deep emotional impact on us. In other words, stories teach us about the world  but also emotionally bond us with others.

In fact, you could argue that most religions established  themselves through stories. Most tribes, communities, societies and even empires were built  upon stories and myths. Without a common myth, it is hard to unite an empire  or a community.

Jung found that storytelling is where archetypes live. Some  examples Jung gives are The Wise Old Man, the Wise Old Woman, The Hero, The Father,  The Mother, the Devil and so forth. If you look at myths and stories, you can find many  of these archetypes throughout the world.

Now you might ask why these archetypes  came about? The simple answer is in our evolutionary biology. As a living organism  or animal we face predators and prey.

We face survival challenges. How we behave when  we are faced with survival challenges define our archetypes. So archetypes were sewn into  our genes because they allowed us to survive and pass on those genes to others.

Archetypes  are our survival instincts written in stories. That makes stories extremely powerful in  our evolutionary history because a person may survive through his or her own ingenuity or  resourcefulness but a community needs a glue to bond all its members. How do you glue people  together?

Through stories. Stories and myths that raise the hair on your back. Stories  that excite you.

Stories that motivate you. Psychological Types Jung’s psychological types of extrovert and introvert refer to personality traits to the  degree of openness among individuals. To explain the two types, just like Nietzsche, Jung took  us back to ancient Greece where the two opposing gods, Apollo the god of reason and Dionysus the  god of wine and passion balanced one another.

According to Nietzsche western philosophy and  civilization suppressed the Dionysus or human passion in favour of rationality. But for Jung,  these two gods represent two psychological types. Apollo symbolises introversion, a reflective,  dreamer and thoughtful type who tries to gain insight and understand things, is therefore  often solitary.

Dionysus, on the other hand, symbolises extroversion who thrives among other  people, prioritising the outside world, sensory and sensual experiences and actions. Dionysus was  the god of wine so the extroverts are lively and passionate people who pursue fun activities  with others. A great comparison is between Shakespeare’s character of Hamlet and Miguel de  Cervantes’s character of Don Quixote.

Hamlet is reflective and a thinker, while Don Quixote is a  doer. We all see bits of ourselves in both Hamlet and Don Quixote. Although in today’s world, we  are to some extent curtailed from the freedom to be like Don Quixote so we have all become  a bit reflective or introverts like Hamlet.

Persona vs Shadow Amid all the collective memories we inherit from  birth as well as our own personal unconscious, there seems to be a lot of chaos and confusion  within us. Jung presents his idea of persona, which can mean personality as well as mask, to  tell us that we are not passive with the memories in our personal and collective unconscious. In  fact we try to carve ourselves a neat little persona by which we want others to know us.

A  good analogy would be a career. We spend years in schools and universities to carve a career path  for us and finally we became a teacher, doctor, engineer or Youtuber. Persona is a similar  process in which the individual consciously as well as unconsciously displays a persona to  the world, guided partly through the archetypes, but partly due to our own personal memories  within the culture we live and partly due to our own conscious mind.

This persona is like a  mask behind which we hide our collective psyche but also display our own perceived individuality.  You could say, persona is a role we play on stage in the theatre we call society. It’s our role, our  identity.

A good analogy would be a shop window. They only show the best items on sale. Not the  half-rotten apples that are kept in the back.

When we present ourselves to others, we are  careful to show some bits and hide other bits. Not only that, we are also selective about  what to show depending on where we are. We might take a different persona in the presence of a  beautiful woman we are romantically interested in.

But in the presence of our family  members or friends, we put out a different persona altogether. The same when we go to a job  interview. The Japanese have a concept called, honne and tatemae.

Hone means your true self or  the one you show inside your own home. Tatemae, literally means outside the house, is  a persona you show to others. They are vastly different.

So for Jung this public self  is our own individual archetype, which he terms the Persona. Of course, the persona is not  totally conscious, it is mostly unconscious. But there is also the part we don’t want the  world to know.

Jung calls it the Shadow which is the opposite of the Persona. For  example our weaknesses, shortcomings, urges and instincts that sit in the dark and we do  everything to hide them from others. These are our secrets and suppressed urges or thoughts that  are unacceptable within our social environment due to religious or social values and norms but  also these traits come into conflict with our own personal values and norms.

A good example of  the shadow in storytelling would be the villain and in religions it is usually represented as  the devil. We tend to associate the Shadow with others and rarely with ourselves. The bad guys  are always someone else and rarely ourselves.

In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, without  us wanting it, we symphyses with Raskolnikov, a cold-blood murderer, not because we like him,  but because we have that dark shadow within us. Given the right time and place, it might come  out.  So Dostoevsky understood the darkness we all have inside us.

No matter how saintly you  think you are, you also have the devil within you. Amid all these archetypes, Jung argued that our  life’s ultimate goal is to realise the True Self, which is the most important archetype.  Martin Heidegger called it authenticity, which he argued can be achieved if we truly  understand and accept death as a necessary condition of life.

For Jung, finding the True  Self needs a lot of work, just like in Hinduism, it can only be achieved through consciously  seeking it. This journey he called individuation, the process of as well as the ultimate purpose  of a personal development in which an individual reconciles the conscious with the unconscious.  It’s somewhat similar to a hero’s journey in which the hero has to sacrifice smaller things  in life in order to become greater than himself or herself.

Although for most people, it comes  through experience in life as we grow mature and gain wisdom, it can also happen through  our own intervention and self-reflection. To do that, we have to look into our unconscious  self, deeper inside us, and understand our deeper urges, emotions and ancestral memories. In other  words, the goal is for us to balance the persona with the shadow, in which neither has full  control over us.

The attempt to recognise and accept the unconscious and conscious.  This is very similar to the Taoist idea of yin and yang balancing one another, which  incidentally influenced Jung quite a lot. Feminine vs Masculine Two of the most important archetypes according to Jung are anima, the  feminine part of a man's psychology and animus, the masculine aspect of women's psychology. 

According to him, on an unconscious level, men have the feminine and women have  the masculine archetypes within them. In other words, we all have two personalities,  the conscious gender role and the unconscious archetype. Why?

The simple answer is to help  us understand and deal with the opposite sex. For example the unconscious feminine archetype  allows men to be soft and understand emotions and sympathise with others while the unconscious  masculine archetype helps women to be strong and more goal-oriented or outcome-driven. For Jung,  recognising our inner unconscious archetype, doesn’t mean we have to confuse our gender roles,  but to enhance our ability to deal with the other gender.

A man should recognise the sympathetic,  soft anima within but remain a masculine figure, while a woman should recognise the goal-oriented,  strong animus within, but also stay feminine. Now I will discuss ten lessons we can  draw from Carl Jung’s life and writings. 10 Lessons Lesson 1: Don’t restrict yourself  to one discipline or belief.

“Intuition does not denote  something contrary to reason, but something outside of the  province of reason. ”—Carl Jung While Jung was educated or trained in the  area of psychoanalysis, he looked beyond the discipline and in particular he studied  literature and mythology. As we all know the power of storytelling in our psychology is very  strong.

From a very early age we are hooked on stories. Now why is that? The simple answer is  that stories must have had a great utility for our past ancestors.

To put simply, stories are  simply about other people’s mistakes that we can learn from. Of course, the power of stories  goes beyond the teaching aspect of it but also it entertains us and keeps us focused and hooked  on an idea or goal. So the genius of Carl Jung was to combine literature and storytelling on the  one hand with psychoanalysis that was developing at the time in the German speaking world. 

Since our DNA holds information on how our body develops certain characteristics like hair  and eye colour, or height or build and so forth, our DNA also holds certain proclivities in us  towards certain archetypes and stories. As I said in my video on Marcel Proust, creativity  occurs when two different ideas or disciplines collide or are combined. In the case of  Proust, he combined evolutionary biology, intuitive philosophy with art to come to  some beautiful insights.

In the case of Jung, he combined storytelling and psychoanalysis to  come up with the collective unconscious memories of certain archetypes. So to be creative is to  look beyond your discipline. Just like an artist who walks back and forth while painting, it is  creative to look outside your own discipline.

Lesson 2: Think, not judge.  “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge. ” —Carl Jung When you look at Carl Jung’s interests, one  might be puzzled or even confused.

He was a serious psychologist, a scientist you  could say and of course a therapist. But he was deeply interested in areas that you might  consider pseudoscience. His interest in alchemy, and paranormal psychology might sound unscientific  and even irrational, but Jung didn’t judge those disciplines for how other scientists saw them. 

He instead asked himself this question. Let’s say they are pseudosciences, but why have they  persisted in the human imagination for such a long time? As an open-minded and curious man,  he wanted to find answers rather than dismissing things at face value.

This same can be said about  myths and legends. One can easily dismiss them as nothing but fiction or figments of imagination,  but then Jung asked himself, how come we are drawn to myths and legends and how come we invented  such myths and legends in the first place. So the lesson is do not dismiss something without really  getting to the bottom of it.

Instead of judging something as irrational or pseudoscientific, it  is better to explain them and find answers as to why we have had alchemy or why parapsychology  has existed in the first place. In other words, sometimes your prejudice can be our worst enemy  in getting an insight or pushing things forward. We’re superstitious.

The most rational people  still believe in some form of superstition. Be it their sports team winning a game if they  did certain things or while betting money on something. We also have phobias, irrational fears. 

For instance fear of snakes is like some deposited memories of past traumas in places where there  is no snake at all. So think, before you judge. Lesson 3: Learn from others.

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there  is any reaction, both are transformed. ” —Carl Jung In the German-speaking world, the practice  of apprenticeship is very strong. Even today, most young Germans go through a period of  apprenticeship in order to learn the craft from someone hands-on.

Of course the education system  has made it easy for everyone to learn things in schools, therefore the need to learn a trade on  the job has become less popular but there is no substitute for learning from someone on the job.  So Jung spent years becoming a disciple of other psychoanalysts such as the Swiss psychiatrist  Eugen Bleuler, the French psychologist Pierre Janet and of course, Sigmund Freud, the father of  psychoanalysis. It’s very important that one has a few close mentors to learn from.

Today a lot of  people dismiss the past and those who came before. If there is one thing we can learn from history  is that we should learn from and appreciate those who came before us and try to make use of most of  their knowledge and wisdom. Friedrich Nietzsche, the most individualistic philosopher, makes  his ubermensch heroes go through a camel stage, during which they toil like a camel to  learn their craft and only then can they become the lion that roars.

So learn from  your teachers, mentors and parents and then you’re able to find what they lack. “The  true leader is always led. ” —Carl Jung Lesson 4: Take notes. 

Jung left behind a ton of pages of notes, journals and diaries. He wrote down his memories,  dreams and even his experiences of hallucinations. Our memory is pretty unreliable.

If you  think about philosophy, we only know the philosophies or stories of those who wrote them  down. Human thoughts and philosophical insights prior to writing is quite unknown. Not because  they didn’t have a philosophy or stories, it is because they left no written words behind.

So  writing has power and when you write things down, not only do you feel unburdened, but they also  give you great ideas and insights into your own personality and mind. So one way to understand  oneself, one has to take notes and write down memories and experiences. Self-knowledge  is perhaps far more difficult than we might think.

So keeping a journal is a good way to find  cues as to what makes you really tick beyond the daily grind or social media. So take notes,  because it takes you deeper into yourself. Lesson 5: Tell your story.

“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able  to tell their stories. ” —Carl Jung Psychoanalysis as a discipline is also  sometimes called the talking cure. But it is more than just talking.

It’s telling  stories. Telling your stories. If journaling is a good way of unburdening yourself from some  deep and difficult thoughts and experiences, telling your story for others to read is  perhaps a step further.

Now you are writing for an audience. You’re formulating  your thoughts into a coherent tale. Jung understood the power myths and storytelling  in our collective evolutionary past.

But the same thing applies to the individual. Your story  can shed light on your own past. For a lot of novelists and storytellers, or even artists,  writing or telling a story or creating a piece of art is a process of discovery.

As you tell your  story, you go on a journey of self-discovery. Lesson 6: Art is therapy. “Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and  makes him its instrument.

To perform this difficult office it is sometimes  necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living  for the ordinary human being. ” —Carl Jung Not only in psychotherapy art is often used to  treat patients, but philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and of  course Carl Jung saw art as an antidote to suffering. Schopenhauer argued that music was the  only escape from our human condition of perpetual suffering.

Nietzsche put art as an antidote to  nihilism as it gives us the ultimate purpose in life. Jung observed how art was healing for  his trauma patients in alleviating their anxiety and fear. Today, not only dance and music, but  also storytelling and creative writing are used to cure many patients of mental illnesses. 

Just as civilisations survive and thrive on myths and stories, on a personal level, we also  survive and thrive on stories, arts and crafts. We all know the best storyteller in our family.  You feel close to them.

They stay within the collective memories of those who heard them  tell stories. Our persona is our story we tell the world consciously but also unconsciously.  The shadow however is the story we never tell anyone.

Only great novelists are able to tap  into their shadow worlds to connect with the collective unconscious and tell insightful and  psychological tales. Dostoevsky was such a great novelist whose psychological tales terrify  but also reveal something deeper inside us. Lesson 7: Discipline leads to enlightenment “I have observed that a life directed to an aim is in general better, richer, and  healthier than an aimless one, and that it is better to go forwards with the stream of  time than backwards against it.

”  —Carl Jung There is sometimes a misconception that  those who are enlightened or have achieved a fulfilling life are often passive, peaceful,  tranquil and inactive people. Life at its core is a struggle. Everything is achieved through  struggle.

The same can be said about meaning and enlightenment. It’s through individual strive  and hard work that one can achieve a meaningful life for himself or herself. Jung says: “Why are  you looking around for help?

Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come  is created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself.

Do not compare, do not measure. No  other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you.

You must fulfil the way that is in  you. ”—Carl Jung.  So in order to become someone one must suffer through trials and tribulations  of his or her own actions.

Quote: “We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of  life. .

. If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every  life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. ”—Carl Jung.  

We are only liberated if  we go through the arduous journey of life. No guru or leader can liberate you, it is only you  who can carve a unique path for yourself. That means one has to act and be disciplined at it. 

Nobody can become a great artist overnight and the same is true about fulfilment in life. Quote:  “Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only  from experiencing them to the full. ” —Carl Jung Lesson 8: Embrace your darkness too.

“What you resist, persists. ” We often escape our dark thoughts and experiences.  This is at the heart of psychoanalysis that we suppress unsavoury emotions and experiences  from our consciousness and push them down into the subconscious realm.

Jung says, one must  understand his dark side before he can deal with other people. Quote: “Knowing your own darkness is  the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. ” When you read Dostoevsky’s Crime  and Punishment, the common reaction is to side with a murderer.

We get terrified when Raskolnikov  is about to confess. We want him to get away with the murder. Why?

Because we understand him. We  understand him in us. He was a poor student in need of money.

Not just that, he is very good  at justifying his actions. Not just that, he is also clumsy like an average Joe and also  he’s extremely tormented on the inside. All these emotions make us side with a murderer.

Jung  says, that’s what humans are. We are neither saint nor evil. We are a bit of both.

Unless  we fully understand and embrace our dark side, we cannot become good. Understanding and embracing  our darker side makes us strong and it’s through sheer strength we can be enlightened. Weak  people cannot be enlightened.

So escaping from our darker thoughts and emotions is not the  answer. It’s time we embrace the fact that we are dark and light in one. Quote: “I don't aspire  to be a good man.

I aspire to be a whole man. ” Lesson 9: We’re all connected. Accepting humans as animals has been extremely difficult for the religious people for  the past few centuries since Charles Darwin.

The Europeans developed sophisticated science that  challenged the religious dogma that God created humans and then kicked them out of the Garden  of Eden, but because of centuries of religious indoctrination of human exceptionalism had  seeped so deep in the culture and psyche that it was difficult for many Europeans to  accept that they were the same as other races, let alone descended from apes. So Jung’s attempt  to find a missing link between all humans, not on a biological level because biologists had already  accepted, but also on a mythological level.  So his collective unconscious theory that we all  share the same stories and myths irrespective our culture proved that humans come from a  common ancestors.

So this connected all humans on a psychological level. Now we couldn’t say one  race was better than the other or god favoured one race than the other. In other words, the  term human connection is real and deeply psychological.

Lesson 10: Productivity as  important as creativity One of the major criticisms against Carl Jung is  that he focused too much on the internal human problems and less on the external struggles like  how to survive in the real world. In other words, Jung focused on the creative types, the  artists, novelists, musicians etc. while ignoring the productive types.

In society we need  both. Creative people come up with great ideas, inventions and solutions to problems but  ultimately it is the productive type of people who make things happen or achieve something  and do the work. So this also applies within an individual.

If we solely focus on being a  creative mind and not having done something with that creativity it is a waste of time. So the  trick is not just be a creative genius but also someone who turns that creativity into something.  Carl Jung spent years and years writing down his ideas and theories.

I’m sure there were people who  may have had similar insights but we only know of those ideas if someone took the trouble of writing  books, publishing papers and conducting research. The same with you. If you want to become a writer,  you must write.

If you want to be a YouTuber, you must make videos. So a good balance between  creativity and productivity leads to success. I will leave you with this quote.

“The fact is  that each person has to do something different, something that is uniquely his own. ” Thank you very much.