Memories Dreams Reflections: Prologue

MY LIFE is a story of the self-realization of the uncon-
scious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward
manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve
out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a
whole. I cannot employ the language of science to trace this
process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a
scientific problem.

What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to
be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth.
Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than
does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are
far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an indi-
vidual life.

Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third
year, to tell my personal myth, I can only make direct state-
ments, only "tell stories/' Whether or not the stories are "true" is
not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my
fable, my truth.

An autobiography is so difficult to write because we possess no
standards, no objective foundation, from which to judge our-
selves. There are really no proper bases for comparison. I know

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what
I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other
creature; he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man.
But what is it to be that? Like every other being, I am a splinter
of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any ani-
mal, any plant or any stone. Only a mythical being has a range
greater than man's. How then can a man form any definite opin-
ions about himself?

We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only
partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment
about ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know every-
thing but at most that is only a pretense. At bottom we never
know how it has all come about. The story of a life begins some-
where, at some particular point we happen to remember; and
even then it was already highly complex. We do not know how
life is going to turn out. Therefore the story has no beginning,
and the end can only be vaguely hinted at.

The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous
phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleet-
ing, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can
exist and develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago,
as a young medical student, and it seemed to me miraculous that
I should not have been prematurely annihilated.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its
rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part
that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it
withers away an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the
unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot
escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a
sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal
flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome re-
mains.

In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those
when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one.
That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which
I include my dreams and visions. These form the prima materia
of my scientific work. They were the fiery magma out of which
the stone that had to be worked was crystallized.

4

Prologue

All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings
have paled beside these interior happenings. Many people have
participated in the story of our times and written about it; if the
reader wants an account of that, let him turn to them or get
somebody to tell it to him. Recollection of the outward events of
my life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters
with the "other" reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are in-
delibly engraved upon my memory. In that realm there has al-
ways been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost im-
portance by comparison.

Similarly, other people are established inalienably in my
memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my
destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at
the same time a kind of recollection.

Inner experiences also set their seal on the outward events that
came my way and assumed importance for me in youth or later
on. I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes
from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ulti-
mately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substi-
tute for inner experience. Therefore my life has been singularly
poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them, for
it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand
myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that
make up the singularity of my life, and with these my auto-
biography deals.