Carl Jung on Life Experience

Carl Jung writes: 

“These processes are steeped in mystery; they pose riddles with which the human mind will long wrestle for a solution, and perhaps in vain. For in the last analysis, it is exceedingly doubtful whether human reason is a suitable instrument for this purpose. Not for nothing did alchemy style itself an “art,” feeling – and rightly so –that it was concerned with creative processes that can be truly grasped only by experience, though intellect may give them a name.. . Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding … The forms which the experience takes in each individual may be infinite in their variations, but. . . they are all variants of certain central types, and these occur universally. They are the primordial images, from which the religions each draw their absolute truth.”

“Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life..we take the step into the afternoon of life; worst still, we take this step with the false assumptions that our truths and ideals will serve us as before. But we cannot live the afternoons of life according to the programme of life’s morning for what was great in the morning will be little in the evening, and what in the morning was true will in the evening have become a lie.” 

“In the last analysis every life is a realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason, this realization can also be called  “individuation.” All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them.  But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life.” P. 222 Psychology and Alchemy

P. 482 “ A scientific term such as “individuation” does not mean that we are dealing with something known and finally cleared up, on which there is no more to be said. It merely indicates an as yet very obscure field of research much in need of exploration: the centralizing processes in the unconscious that go to form the personality. We are dealing with life processes which, on account of their numinous character, have from time immemorial - provided the strongest incentive for the formation of symbols.”

In reflecting on this last quote by Jung, I observe our culture's lack of language for symbolic ways of knowing. The symbolic nature of the numinous psyche expresses itself with symbolic language.  These symbols appear in dreams as well as art and religion. They also may appear in the “gibberish “ of pre-verbal children and I would expect, in the “gibberish” of the very old and dying.  A few points need to be made about this. If a person has not got a vehicle for expression of symbolic content, - music, art, dialogue with an attuned person, the process becomes aborted, twisted, and then, from an observer’s point of view seems like nothing more than garbled, nonsensical gibberish. Perhaps this manifests in what our culture terms dementia - a pathological view of the psyche's attempt to enter transcendent states.  When Jung writes of individuation as being a realization that makes sense of life, he also adds:

“ True, the “sense” could just as well be called “nonsense,” for there is a certain commensurability between the mystery of existence and human understanding. “Sense” and “nonsense” are merely man-made labels which serve to give us a reasonably valid sense of direction.” P. 222 Psychology and Alchemy”