good morning 🙏🏻✌🏽🖖
exploring Jung on Alchemy, once again from the IA:
"those who dreamed of flying and whose successors made the dream come true after all.
Nor should we underestimate the sense of satisfaction born of the enterprise, the adventure, the quaerere (seeking), and the invenire (finding).
This always lasts as long as the methods employed seem sensible. There was nothing at that time to convince the alchemist of the senselessness of his chemical operations;
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"what is more, he could look back on a long tradition which contained not a few testimonies of such as had achieved the marvellous result.?
Finally the matter was not entirely without promise, since a number of useful discoveries did occasionally emerge as by-products of his labours in the lab-oratory.
As the forerunner of chemistry alchemy had a sufficient raison d'être."
here's an image of the then current notion of the way things are meant to be.
"The demand made by the imitatio Christi
that we should follow the ideal and seek to become like it
ought logically to have the result of developing and exalting the inner man.
In actual fact, however, the ideal has been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an external object of worship
it is precisely this veneration for the object that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the soul and transforming it into a wholeness in keeping with the ideal."
"Hence it largely forfeits its own life, because prevented from exerting the formative influence on consciousness natural to it;
what is more, it remains in its original form-unchanged, for nothing changes in the unconscious."