To have vocation means in the original sense to be addressed by a voice … whereupon they are at once differentiated from the others and feel themselves confronted by a problem that the others do not know about… – C.G. Jung
What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extraordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God … But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape … He must obey his own law, as if it wee a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. – C.G. Jung
Carl G. Jung on Grace
The grace of God may step in when you don’t lose your head in a clearly desperate situation.
Nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace …
A good dream, for example, that is grace.
A true and honest introverted thinking is a grace … The right kind of thinking isolates oneself. But did you become a monk for the sake of congenial society? Or do you assume that it isolates only a theologian? It has done the same to me and will do so to everybody that is blessed with it.
Without error and sin there is no experience of grace, that is, no union of God and man. A complete life, unconditionally lived, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It leads us into all dangers and defeats, and into the light of knowledge, which is to say, into maximal consciousness.
Carl G. Jung ON FATE
The man of the past is alive in us today to a degree undreamt of before the war, and in the last analysis what is the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic changes in individuals?
..and what in the world would be the motive for the Incarnation if man’s fate didn’t affect God? Also, no one has ever heard of a bridge that leads only to the other bank of the river
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him… it is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.
It is a fundamental error to try to subject our own fate at call costs to our will. Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection.
The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.
I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being – that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal.
The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure–be it a daemon, a human being, or a process–that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. C.G. Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
‘My fate’ means a daemonic will to precisely that fate – a will not necessarily coincident with my own (the ego will). When it is opposed to the ego, it is difficult not to feel a certain ‘power’ in it, whether divine or infernal. The man who submits to his fate calls it the will of God, the man who puts up a hopeless and exhausting fight is more apt to see the devil in it.
C.G. JUNG ON COINCIDENCES
The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or ‘runs.’ What I found were ‘coincidences’ which were connected so meaningfully that their ‘chance’ concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure. – Carl Jung, Collected Works vol. 8
Couples have often remarkable coincidences of thought, so they have the same parallelism in dreams. They can even exchange dreams. – Carl Jung
Chance is an event, too, and if it didn’t exist causality would be axiomatic. Meaningful coincidences present a tremendous problem which it is impossible to overestimate. Leibniz as well as Schopenhauer had inklings of it, but they gave a false answer because they started with an axiomatic causality. – C.G. Jung
Causality as a statistical truth presupposes the existence of acausality, otherwise it cannot be a statistical truth. In other words, the exceptions to causality are real facts which I try to envisage from the standpoint of their meaningful coincidences or synchronicity. As a rule the improbability of a series of meaningful coincidences (i.e., of identical meaning) increases with the number of its individual occurrences. – C.G. Jung
In a Swiss journal recently an article appeared about an interesting case of coincidence: a man celebrating his birthday; his wife had given him a new pipe as a present. He took a walk, sitting down on a bench under a tree. Another elderly man came along and sat down beside him, smoking the same kind of pipe. Mr. A. drew Mr. B’s attention to the fact that they both smoked the same pipe, whereupon Mr. B. told him that he was celebrating his birthday on the same date and had received the pipe from his wife. He introduced himself and it turned out that both had the same christian name Fritz. – The rest is darkness! Mr. A. had the feeling that possibly a superior intelligence was at work. It would be most desirable to know a lot more about the psychology of the two fellows and what the possible reason was for this coincidence. – C.G. Jung in a letter to H.J. Barrett on 26 March 1957
C.G. Jung on
FATE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice.
We call the unconscious nothing, and yet it is a reality in potentia. The thought we shall think, the deed we shall do, even fate we shall lament tomorrow, all lie unconscious in us today.
The unconscious has a Janus-face: on one side its contents point back to a preconscious, prehistoric world of instinct, while on the other side it potentially anticipates the future-precisely because of the instinctive readiness for action of the factors that determine man’s fate. If we had complete knowledge of the ground plan lying dormant in an individual from the beginning, his fate would be in large measure predictable.
All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within. their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.
Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking. Also, it frequently happens that unconscious motives overrule our conscious decisions, especially in matters of vital importance. Indeed, the fate of the individual is largely dependent on unconscious factors.
The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.