Carl Jung on the permeability of Psyche

In this quote Jung is describing his experience of the tower he constructed at Bollingen on the shore of lake Zurich. This suggests that psyche is not simply 'inside' the human, but flows through all life. Or a better way to put it might be - through all being. If we look outside we see our inner nature reflected, when we look deeply within we find connection to all that seemed to be so separate. This connection also relates to our past, which for Jung tends to mean beyond our individual lives and includes the ancestors, the neglect of which is a recurring theme in his work. "Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland."

Although he feels the way of modern humanity so often deviates from the 'natural' world in certain respects, there is always connection to our personal ancestral history, and by extension the deep past as a species.

"There is nothing to disturb the dead, neither electric light nor telephone. Moreover, my ancestors' souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house."

"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 remains."

Quotes were found in 'The Earth Has A Soul - C.G.Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life'

edited by Meredith Sabini

Carl Jung on Psyche