the earth has a soul
Most of us know Carl Jung as a famous psychologist who probed the human mind and developed powerful ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious.
But Jung was an astute observer of the human condition and in particular, our modern relationship with the planet. In this landmark book, The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life, editor Meredith Sabini collects some of Jung's most powerful and prescient insights about our modern human relationship with the planet and life at large. If you've ever been curious about the origins of today's ecological crisis, this is an ideal place to begin:
“We are awakening a little to the feeling that something is wrong in the world, that our modern prejudice of overestimating the importance of the intellect and the conscious mind might be false. We want simplicity. We are suffering, in our cities, from a need of simple things. We would like to see our great…terminals deserted, the streets deserted, a great peace descend upon us.”
“Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.”
“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.”
“This rupture of the link with the unconscious and our submission to the tyranny of words have one great disadvantage: the conscious mind becomes more and more the victim of its own discriminating activity, the picture we have of the world gets broken down into countless particulars, and the original feeling of unity, which we integrally connected with the unity of the unconscious psyche, is lost.”
“Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events.”
“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’s 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.”
“Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.”
“Body and soul have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.”
“America does not see that it is in any danger. It does not understand that it is facing its most tragic moment: a moment in which it must make a choice to master its machines or to be devoured by them.”
“What is needed is to call a halt to the fatal dissociation that exists between man’s higher and lower being; instead, we must unite conscious man with primitive man.”
“I am fully committed to the idea that human existence should be rooted in the earth.”
“…the world hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.”
