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

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.

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

“No one who has undergone the process of assimilating the unconscious,” Jung wrote, “will deny that it gripped his very vitals and changed him.”

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

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

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.

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

Jung to the mystical bull’s-eye is his claim to special, secret knowledge, knowledge not obtained through the normal methods of cognition,

“becoming who you are”—a