Page 102 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Modern Thinking 75

cord between them or their balancing out or whatever one may
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call it. This “way,” which Jung certainly correctly qualifies as
“narrow as a knife- edge,” has not been described and obviously
is not suitable to description. The question about it leads to the
question about the positive function of evil.
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Jung speaks somewhat more clearly in another place of the
condition necessary for “the birth of the ‘pneumatic man.’ ” It is
“liberation from those desires, ambitions and passions, which
imprison us in the visible world,” through “intelligent fulfil-
ment of instinctive demands”; for “he who lives his instincts
can also separate himself from them.” The Taoist book that
Jung interprets in this way does not contain this teaching; it is
well known to us from certain Gnostic circles. 58
The “process of development proper to the psyche” which
Jung calls individuation leads through the integration in the
consciousness of the personal and above all the collective, or
archetypal, contents of the unconscious to the realization of
a “new complete form” which, as has been said, he calls the
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self. Here a pause for clarification is necessary. Jung wishes
to see the self understood as “both that or those others and
the I” and individuation as a process which “does not exclude,
but rather includes the world.” It is necessary to grasp exactly
in what sense this holds good and in what it does not. In the
personality structure which arises out of the “relatively rare
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occurrence” of the development discussed by Jung, “the oth-
ers” are indeed included. However, they are included only as
contents of the individual soul that shall, just as an individual
soul, attain its perfection through individuation.
The actual other who meets me meets me in such a way that
my soul comes in contact with his as with something that it is
not and that it cannot become. My soul does not and cannot
include the other, and yet can nonetheless approach the other in
this most real contact. This other, what is more, is and remains