"The images of God and Christ which man's religious fantasy projects cannot avoid being anthropomorphic and are admitted to be so;
hence they are capable of psychological elucidation like any other symbols.
Just as the ancients believed that they had said something important about Christ with their fish symbol,
so it seemed to the alchemists that their parallel with the stone served to illuminate and deepen the meaning of the Christ image."
"there are plenty of statements to be found which show it in a special light —views and ideas which attach such importance to the stone that one begins to wonder
whether it was Christ who was taken as a symbol of the stone rather than the other way round.
includes Christ in the realm of immediate inner experience and makes him appear as the figure of the total man."
"The Christ is the perfect man who is crucified. One could hardly think of a truer picture of the goal of ethical endeavour.
Like the related ideas of atman and tao in the East, the idea of the self is at least in part a product of cognition, grounded
neither on faith nor on metaphysical speculation
but on the experience that under certain conditions the unconscious spontaneously brings forth an archetypal symbol of wholeness."
"Only the "complete" person knows how unbearable man is to himself.
So far as I can see, no relevant objection could be raised from the Christian point of view against anyone accepting the task of individuation imposed on us by nature, and the recognition of our wholeness as a binding personal commitment.
If done consciously and intentionally, one avoids all the unhappy consequences of repressed individuation.
one need not find it "happening" to one against one's will.".
"The irreconcilable nature of the opposites in Christian psychology is due to their moral accentuation, which seems natural to us, although it is a legacy from the OT with its emphasis on righteousness in the eyes of the law.
humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
That is, the world must act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."
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@holon42 There are no paradoxes.
apparent.
"Paradox is a characteristic of all transcendental situations
because it alone gives adequate expression to their indescribable nature.
Whenever the archetype of the self predominates, the inevitable psychological consequence is a state of conflict vividly exemplified by the Christian symbol of crucifixion—
that acute state of unredeemedness which comes to an end only with the words consummatum est."