"The anima belongs to those borderline phenomena which chiefly occur in special psychic situations.
They are characterized by the more or less sudden collapse of a form or style of life which till then seemed the indispensable foundation of the individual’s whole career.
When such a catastrophe occurs, not only are all bridges back into the past broken, but there seems to be no way forward into the future."
Jung on Paracelsus
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"One is confronted with a hopeless and impenetrable darkness, an abysmal void that is now suddenly filled with an alluring vision,
the palpably real presence of a strange yet helpful being,
in the same way that, when one lives for a long time in great solitude,
the silence or the darkness becomes visibly, audibly, and tangibly alive, and the unknown in oneself steps up in an unknown guise."
"Nor is he aware that by knocking on the door of the unknown he is obeying the law of the inner, future man,
and that he is disobedient to this law whenever he seeks to secure a permanent advantage or possession from his work.
Not his ego, that fragment of a personality, is meant;
it is rather that a wholeness, of which he is a part,
wants to be transformed from a latent state of unconsciousness into an approximate consciousness of itself"
"deceptive phantasms compounded of supreme sense and the most pernicious nonsense, a veritable veil of Maya which lures and leads every mortal astray.
From these phantasms the wise man will extract the “super- monic” elements,
that is, the higher inspirations; he extracts everything meaningful and valuable as in a process of distillation,
and catches the precious drops of the liquor Sophiae in the ready beaker of his soul,
where they “open a window” for his understanding."
"Paracelsus is here alluding to a discriminative process of critical judgment
which separates the chaff from the wheat—an indispensable part of any rapprochement with the unconscious.
It requires no art to become stupid; the whole art lies in extracting wisdom from stupidity.
The “fixation” refers alchemically to the lapis but psychologically to the consolidation of feeling.
The distillate must be fixed and held fast, must become a firm conviction and a permanent content."
"alchemy is not only the mother of chemistry,
but is also the forerunner of our modern psychology of the unconscious.
Thus Paracelsus appears as a pioneer not only of chemical medicine but of empirical psychology and psychotherapy."