3 Carl Jung Quotes That Can Change Your Life

So, as many of you know, I'm a huge fan of Carl Jung. I've done an extensive amount of work researching Jungian psychology and analysis. I have read all of his books, which took a while, admittedly. And I trained with somebody years and years ago who was very well versed in Jungian psychology. And so I have found that for me, Jung's concepts and ideas are maybe more important now than ever before. Like, I think perhaps Jung, depending on how things go in the next 50 to 100 years, might be somebody that people look back on and really have a much deeper understanding of his work as time moves forward. Now, I wish that he was around today to talk about technology and things like Bitcoin and wars and the fracturing of societies and cultures and gender and trans issues and all those things. I would love to hear his thoughts. But today I'm going to be sharing with you three of the most profound quotes or ideas that he came up with. And you might be familiar with Jung, you might be very well versed in his stuff. You know, you probably know about the notion of the shadow and the unconscious and maybe the collective unconscious. But I'm going to be sharing a couple core pillars of Carl Jung that have always stuck with me. And I'm going to share why they. These somewhat simple yet profound quotes kind of embody his work and embody the importance of it in your life today. And hopefully you'll be able to implement and execute on what I am talking about here. So first is the notion of meeting oneself. So Jung said, who looks outside dreams and who looks inside awakens? Who looks outside dreams? Who looks inside awakens. And I always remember listening to Alan Watts, and Alan Watts said, you know, there's far out people and far in people. And some people like to go far out in the universe and they get lost in concepts and mathematics and ideas and quantum physics. And then there's other people who go so deep inside, you know, you've got people like Krishnamurti, who was an incredibly profound thinker and came from, you know, India and a Hindu tradition and just a very brilliant mind, but also able to break down psychological principles. And that is largely because he was able to go inside. And we kind of, at some point, in my belief, we kind of have to choose, or maybe we just happened upon it by circumstance. We have to decide what direction we're actually going to go. And the aim of the game is to go deep into either the external right to look outside and to go so profoundly deep into that as far as we can possibly go into external structures and systems and the workings of reality and time and quantum mechanics, or we choose to go internally. Now, it just doesn't mean that you can't study both realms. But for me, I have found that I am very much an internal person, that my life has benefited so greatly from beginning to go inwards and looking inside of my own psychology, my own nature, my own choices and way of being, and, and to try and map a territory or an understanding of reality and existence and specifically of other people based off of my own inner workings. Because in Carl Jung's notion and this quote, right, who looks inside awakens? There's an emphasis on the importance of introspection and self awareness. And it's not that one is better than the other. You can go externally and have very profound moments of awakening and.

Realization and understanding, but there is a. It's sort of a different path to go within. And if you look at any spiritual context or religion, that's really what they're talking about, is finding a pathway into the inner workings of your own being and your own nature. And that this is arguably one of, if not the single most important journey that you can take. And we could talk about enlightenment and we can talk about awakening and all those different types of things, but for me, the very practical aspect of looking inwards is about a deeper level of self awareness which can then translate into a more effective form of self leadership. Right? If you are a man or a woman who wants to lead themselves more effectively, AKA wants to make better decisions aligned with their values and their ethics and morals, if you are somebody that wants to make better choices, you want to grow your business, you want to develop a better relationship with your spouse or your girlfriend or your kids or whoever it is that requires a certain depth of self understanding. And what can happen for us is we can get caught in the jargon of the ego, the sort of word salad of the ego and the pretend notion of self understanding, the that can come with, oh, I know who I am and I'm totally good and I get why I am the way that I am. And when we lack that curiosity, there is no room for the awakening that Jung talks about, which is the bubbling up of the unconscious into the conscious mind, the meeting and the allowing of everything that we don't know about ourselves to start to permeate into the consciousness. And that really is part of the journey of going within. So that's a really big part. Number is one of the most simple yet profound reminders of how we can Walk through life. And this is more on personal growth. Like, if. If Jung was alive today, this would probably fall under the personal growth category. He said, I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. And so here Jung is talking about a kind of personal agency, right? That you have a certain level of authority and you have a certain level of sovereignty over the things that have happened in your life. And this is what moves us out of this victim mentality, which, in my opinion, is so rampant in today's culture. It is insidious. It is sometimes hidden. And it's so easy for us to fall into this victim mentality and this victim orientation. And it's easy to fall victim to so many different things, right? The government or whatever, the World Health Organization or the cdc or to fall victim to your parents or your girlfriend or your wife or, you know, the irs. And. And, you know, sometimes there are circumstances where you legitimately have been victimized, right? Where you have been the recipient of something that was completely unwarranted and unwelcome. And what Jung talks about, and the reason why this. This quote is so profound is that so often we can get trapped. Our mind, our ego can get trapped in. I am just the recipient of what has happened to me. I'm just an amalgamation of everything that has happened to me in my life. And I don't have any sort of agency or sovereignty or ability to choose. And what he is talking about is the potency that can come along with saying, okay, these things happened to me. They did. And maybe they happened for me. And when we make that shift, we can start to look at. And this is a perspective shift. We can start to look at these maybe abusive, traumatic experiences that happen to us and reorient our identity, our consciousness, our sense of understanding of ourselves and others in the world. We can reorient ourselves based on the perspective that we have the agency and the capacity to do something different, to see maybe that there was something in there for us. And I get that in some circumstances, it's very, very challenging. But really, what trauma is. And I'm gonna just tie this in very briefly. What trauma is, is an experience where you experienced something that was helpless, where you were helpless and you were powerless, and it was too big for you to handle, right? A car accident, seeing a friend die, experience sexual abuse, having a parent abuse you or abandon you or whatever it was. That is an experience that is too big for. For you to handle. And the outcome is that you feel helpless, powerless, and a victim of something which in that moment you legitimately are. And our work is to reorient ourselves, to grieve, to, you know, express the anger that we might need to express and to move through it in such a way where we can say, I am what I choose to become. So we can become somebody who gets sucked down into that victim orientation deeper and deeper and deeper, or we can become somebody who is able to understand that those things happened and maybe there was a benefit for us, or we are better off because of it, or we are able to be somebody who can be bigger than those things that have happened to us and we can actually expand out from them. We can practice forgiveness. And that forgiving towards those people or the circumstance or God or life or whatever it is, actually allows us to grow and expand beyond, beyond that traumatic experience. And that is a part of becoming. And the last principle, again, is about the shadow. And so I'm going to give you this quote, and there's many quotes that I could have chosen for Carl Jung. These happen to be just three that I really love and I think are integral for our own development and well being as human beings is everyone carries a shadow. Everyone carries a shadow. And the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. Now, I'm going to break this down because the concept of the shadow is the element of yourself that you don't like. Your insecurities, your inferiorities, your fears, your worries, all of those parts. But also the good parts of yourself that you've disconnected from because of abuse or embarrassment or trauma or neglect or abandonment, right? Things like your own sense of confidence or your anger, a healthy sense of it, or your ability to feel your emotions or some of your sexual desires, all of those things can be located in the shadow. And what Jung discovered in his psychoanalysis and his work over decades of working with people was that we all have this part. We all carry this. This part of unexpressed desires, unexpressed wants and needs and fears and insecurities. And the notion here is that when those aren't embodied in an individual's conscious life, AKA if we continue to pretend like those parts of us don't exist, those fears, those worries, doubts, those strengths that we hold, those dreams and desires that maybe we've subjugated ourselves from and disconnected ourselves from, the more it will make itself manifest in our life, the more blacker and denser it will become. Meaning, the more power we will actually give it. And when we give the shadow power, it's not like it just disappears from our life. It's not as though it doesn't do anything. It actually takes a stronghold over your life. And so the more blacker and denser the shadow is, the way you can think about this in a very easy way is the more power it has over your daily life. So the more it's going to show up and sabotage you in business meetings, it's going to sabotage you in your relationships and in your sex life. And it's going to continue to show up and close off all of the opportunities that would normally move you towards a freer, more liberated form of existence, a more whole and complete form of existence. Because again, all of Jung's work was moving us towards wholeness and individuation. That was the ground. Those are the grounds for everything that he did. How do we as human beings become actualized or whole or not complete? Because that kind of enters into some spiritual woo. But how do we live in a more whole and embodied way, a more sort of individuated way where we're free to express these different parts of us? And the shadow is crucial for this, for any type of wholeness. And for me, the shadow has always been one of the biggest fundamental starting blocks for anyone's personal development. And, and if you're wanting to make rapid change and transformation in your life, start with the shadow. It's why I built the shadow word program. It's why a lot of my work is very heavy on looking at the shadow and understanding where it's showing up in your life and how to integrate it into your life. Because this element of you can have a very dramatic impact on your day to day life. Right? Let's say you're somebody that, that has lacked a sense of confidence in relationships. And so you generally do not ask for what you want and need. You're not forthcoming. You try and hedge your bets. You try and maybe give the other person everything that they want in the hopes that they might mind read what you need. What that means is that in your shadow is an inferiority, that you're not good enough, that you lack value, that you lack worth. And there is a disconnect. So some of your worth, some of your value is actually stored in your shadow along with the things that you would need in order to actualize some of that worth and value. Probably things like anger or assertiveness. Those things are probably too cast away into your shadow. And so I hope that you enjoyed these three, I would love to hear which one stood out the most to you, which one landed for you that you are currently working on? And as always, hit the share button. Wherever you are listening to this, wherever you are watching this, please share this with one person. It goes a long way to getting this show into the ears and onto the phones of other people and helps to spread the message and helps them. So until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.