There’s a rule, either you do spiritual practices, or the unconscious will force you to act them out in pseudo-ritual ways. I really believe that a lot of the addictions and compulsive behaviors are unconscious rituals.~ Robert Moore

The first modality of the shadow is it remains unconscious, and therefore maybe our children have to carry it, maybe our partner does, or maybe our society does. Jung repeatedly noted that the greatest burden any child faces is the unlived life of the parent.~James Hollis

'Nirvana is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that.'~Joseph Campbell

The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer & he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.~Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

But when we grow wiser we learn that the disasters of life are often the genius of the unconscious, forcing our egos into a new experience of the self.~Robert A. Johnson, We

To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself & which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage. But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one’s back.~M-Louise von Franz, Shadow & Evil in Fairy Tales

From Jung I took courage to tell my patients not to put their faith in abstract concepts. Put your faith in your own unconscious, your own dreams.~Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work

Creativeness presupposes a tremendous capacity for being genuine, for letting go, for being spontaneous—for if one cannot be spontaneous one cannot really be creative—therefore most artists and other creative people have a normal and genuine tendency to playfulness.~ML von Franz

The beginning of wisdom occurs the day we recognize the obvious—that the only person present in every scene of our still-unfolding psychodramas is ourselves. ~James Hollis, Living Between Worlds

To [Freud] the unconscious was a product of consciousness. But to me, the unconscious was already a matrix; a sort of basis of consciousness, of a creative nature, namely, capable of autonomous acts-autonomous intrusions into consciousness.~CG Jung [interview in Matter of Heart]

We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance.~Robert A. Johnson, Owning your Own Shadow

Neurosis is in a way a positive symptom. It shows that something wants to grow; it shows that that person is not right in his or her present state & if growth is not accepted then it grows against you & produces what might be called a negative individuation~Marie-Louise von Franz

Jung said that 'the Gods have become diseases, not because they are diseases,' but because in our materialist culture they have no way to express themselves other than as agents of pathology and as 'irritants' of change. ~David Tacey

No matter how old you are, you are not an adult until you have slain that unconscious identification with the grandiose presence within. That is what human initiation is all about. Initiation is death.~Robert Moore, Facing the Dragon

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. ~CG Jung, Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype

'The ultimate test of the family is not whether it provides safety and predictability, but whether or to what degree each person can leave it, freely, and return, freely, as a larger person.'~James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life