Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life and Teachings

“Two souls, alas, dwell within my breast,”

an asocial monster.”

Jung is responsible for the widespread resurgence of a more inner-oriented spirituality in the modern world,

“Do you know who reads my books? It’s the ordinary people, often quite poor people.”

“becoming who you are”—a

So while there is “nothing mystical about the collective unconscious,” there certainly seems something archetypal about mystical experience, at least according to Jung.

And as Jung himself had “a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious,” he would, by his own definition, be a mystic.

Jung often lamented that he “knew things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not even want to know.”

Jung seemed to have two minds about the supernatural: a public one that wanted to understand it “scientifically,” and a private one that acknowledged ghosts, visions, and premonitions as part of the essential mystery of life.