p.

15 synchronicity: the contamination of air, water and oil on the planed, for example, is
paralleled by similar diseases of blood and tissue in people. The current extinction
processes that involves plant, animal and tribal life is paralleled by an atrophying of
phylogenetic or survival instincts in Homo sapiens… “Atrophy of instinct” is how Jung
diagnosed the mailaise that affets those of us living in modern civilization… “Civilized man…
is in danger of losing all contact with the world of instinct - a danger that is still further
increased by his living an urban existence in what seems to be purely manmade
environment”.

—
From dreams, reflections… p. 20
“plants interested me, too, but not in the scientific sense. I was attracted to them for a reason
I could not understand, and with a strong feeling that they ought not to be pulled up and
dried. They were living beings which had meaning only so long as they were growing and
flowering - a hidden, secret meaning, one of God’s thoughts… They obviously partook of the
divine state of innocence which it was better not to disturb.

—
35 [in the city] people looked down upon the ground or up into the trees in order to see what
could be put to use, and for what purpose; like the animals, they herded, paired and fought,
but did not see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God’s world, in an eternity where
everything is already born and everything has already died.
—
37 life has always seemed to me like a plan that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible,
hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then
it withers away - an ephemeral apparition. When we think of unending growth and decay of
life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never
lost a sense of smething that lives and endures underneath the eterna flux. What we see is
the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
—
42 He was a chief of the Taos pueblos… his name was Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake)....
“see”, Ochwiay Biano said, “how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp,
their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are
always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they
are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand
them. We think that they are mad.”
I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.
“They say that they think with their heads,” he replied.
“Why of course. What do you think with?” I asked him in surprise
“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.
—
45 I then realized on what the “dignity,” the tranquil composure of the individual Indian, was
founded. It springs from his being a son of the sun; his life is cosmologically meaningful, for
he helps the father and preserver of all life in his daily rise and descent… Knowledge does
not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at
home by right of birth.
—
73 As long as we are still submerged in nature we are unconscious, and we live in the
security of instinct which knows no problems. Everything in us that still belongs to nature
shrinks away from a problem, for its name is doubt, and wherever doubt holds sway there is
uncertainty and divergent ways. And where several ways seem possible, there we have
turned way from the certain guidance of instinct and are handed over to fear. For
consciousness is now called upon to do that which nature has always done for her children -
namely, to give a certain, unquestionable, and unequivocal decision. And here we are beset
by an all-too-human fear that consciousness - our Promethean conquest - may in the end
not be able to serve us as well as nature.
—
83. My personal experience… not to mention statements of al l the great religions, including
shamanism, confirm the existence of a compensatory ordering factor which is independent
of the ego and is no more miraculous, in itself, than the orderliness of radium decay, or the
attunement of a virus to the anatomy and physiology of human beings, or the symbiosis of
plants and animals. What is miraculous in the extreme is that man can have conscious
reflective knowledge of these hidden processes.
—
98
People speak of belief when they have lost knowledge. Belief and disbelief in God are mere
surrogates. The naive primitive doesn’t believe, he knows, because the inner experience
rightly means as much to him as the outer…
Man has always lived with a myth, and we think we are able to be born today and to live in
no myth, without history. That is a disease. That is absolutely abnormal, because man is not
born every day. He is born once in a specific historical setting, with specific historical
qualities, and therefore he is only complete when he has a relation to these things…
Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, the age-old forgotten
wisdom stored up in us.
—
106
It is the regularity of ordinary occurrences that gives primitive man a sense of security in his
world. Every exception seems to him a threatening act of an arbitrary power that must
somehow be propitiated… A calf is born with wo heads and five legs. In the next village a
cock has laid and eff. An old woman has had a dream, a comet appears in the sky, there is a
great fire in the nearest town, and the following year a war breaks out… This concatenation
of events… is significant and convincing to primitive man. And, contrary to all expectation, he
is right to find it so. His powers of observation can be trusted. From age-old experience he
knows that such concatenations actually exist. What seems to us a wholly senseless
heaping-up of single, haphazard occurrences - because we pay attention only to single
events and their particular causes - is for the primitive a completely logical sequence of
omens and of happenings indicated by them. It is a fatal outbreak of demonic power showing
itself in a thoroughly consistent way…
Thanks to his close attention to the unusual, he discovered long before us that chance
events arrange themselves in groups or series. The law of duplication of cases is known to
all doctors engaged in clinical work… “Gentlemen, this case is absolutely unique - tomorrow
we shall have another just like it.”...
Chance events occur most often in larger or smaller series or groups. An old and well-tried
rule for foretelling the weather is this, that when it has rained for several days it will also rain
tomorrow. A proverb says, “Misfortunes never come singly.” Another has it that “It never rains
but it pours.” This proverbial wisdom is primitive science… the educated man smiles at it -
until something unusual happens to him…
Primitive man’s belief in an arbitrary power does not arise out of thin aire, as was always
supposed, but is grounded in experience. The grouping of chance occurrences justifies what
we call his superstition, for there is a real measure of probability that unusual events will
coincide in time and place. We must not forget that our experience is apt to leave us in the
lurch here. Our obsrvation is inadequate because our point of view leads us to overlook
these matters.