After the illness a fruitful period of work began for me.
A good man of my principal works were written only then.
The insight I had had, or the vision of the end of all things, gave me the courage to undertake new formulations
I no longer attempted to put across my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts.
Thus one problem after the other revealed itself to me and took shape.
That the self is understood to be an old sage is also an Eastern idea.
There is a Chinese text for example, handed down in philosophical literature, which says, “If though thinketh thou art alone and canst do what one pleases, thou art forgetting the old sage that dwelleth in thy heart and knoweth of all thou dost.”
That is the self that dwells in the anahata chakra, the heart center, and it would of course be the archetype of the wise old man.
The years when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life.
Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore.
My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.
That was the stuff and material for more than one life.
Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life.
But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.
It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone.
You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous.
But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.
The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum.
In theological language, this fear is due to the in-compatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.
In 1937, Jung wrote of the numinosum as “a dynamic agency or affect not caused by an arbitrary act of will.
On the contrary, it seizes control of the human subject, who is always rather is victim than its creator.
The numinosum – whatever its cause may be—is an experience of the subject independent of its will….
The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a particular alteration of consciousness.
