At Bollingen C. G. Jung

I pump the wa­ter from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These sim­ple acts make man sim­ple; and how dif­fi­cult it is to be sim­ple!

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the land­scape and in­side things, and am my­self liv­ing in ev­ery tree, in the plash­ing of the waves, in the clouds and the an­i­mals that come and go, in the pro­ces­sion of the sea­sons. There is noth­ing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, noth­ing with which I am not linked. Here ev­ery­thing has its his­tory, and mine; here is space for the space­less king­dom of the world’s and the psy­che’s hin­ter­land.
 I have done with­out elec­tric­ity, and tend the fire­place and stove my­self. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no run­ning wa­ter, and I pump the wa­ter from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These sim­ple acts make man sim­ple; and how dif­fi­cult it is to be sim­ple!

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In­ner peace and con­tent­ment de­pend in large mea­sure upon whether or not the his­tor­i­cal fam­ily which is in­her­ent in the in­di­vid­ual can be har­mo­nized with the ephemeral con­di­tions of the present.

Our souls as well as our bod­ies are com­posed of in­di­vid­ual el­e­ments which were all al­ready present in the ranks of our an­ces­tors. The “new­ness” in the in­di­vid­ual psy­che is an end­lessly var­ied re­com­bi­na­tion of age-old com­po­nents. Body and soul there­fore have an in­tensely his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ter and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into be­ing. That is to say, our an­ces­tral com­po­nents are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from hav­ing fin­ished com­pletely with the Mid­dle Ages, clas­si­cal an­tiq­uity, and prim­i­tiv­ity, as our mod­ern psy­ches pre­tend. Nev­er­the­less, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the fu­ture with ever wilder vi­o­lence the far­ther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usu­ally an­ni­hi­lated, and there is no stop­ping the for­ward mo­tion. But it is pre­cisely the loss of con­nec­tion with the past, our up­root­ed­ness, which has given rise to the “dis­con­tents” of civ­i­liza­tion and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the fu­ture and its chimeri­cal prom­ises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evo­lu­tion­ary back­ground has not yet caught up. We rush im­petu­ously into nov­elty, driven by a mount­ing sense of in­suf­fi­ciency, dis­sat­is­fac­tion, and rest­less­ness. We no longer live on what we have, but on prom­ises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the dark­ness of the fu­ture, which, we ex­pect, will at last bring the proper sun­rise. We refuse to rec­og­nize that ev­ery­thing bet­ter is pur­chased at the price of some­thing worse; that, for ex­am­ple, the hope of greater free­dom is can­celed out by in­creased en­slave­ment to the state, not to speak of the ter­ri­ble per­ils to which the most bril­liant dis­cov­er­ies of sci­ence ex­pose us. The less we un­der­stand of what our fa­thers and fore­fa­thers sought, the less we un­der­stand our­selves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the in­di­vid­ual of his roots and his guid­ing in­stincts, so that he be­comes a par­ti­cle in the mass, ruled only by what Ni­et­zsche called the spirit of grav­ity.

Om­nis fes­ti­na­tio ex parte di­a­boli est — all haste is of the devil

Re­forms by ad­vances, that is, by new meth­ods or gad­gets, are of course im­pres­sive at first, but in the long run they are du­bi­ous and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means in­crease the con­tent­ment or hap­pi­ness of peo­ple on the whole. Mostly, they are de­cep­tive sweet­en­ings of ex­is­tence, like speed­ier com­mu­ni­ca­tions which un­pleas­antly ac­cel­er­ate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever be­fore. Om­nis fes­ti­na­tio ex parte di­a­boli est — all haste is of the devil, as the old mas­ters used to say.
 Re­forms by ret­ro­gres­sions, on the other hand, are as a rule less ex­pen­sive and in ad­di­tion more last­ing, for they re­turn to the sim­pler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the spars­est use of news­pa­pers, ra­dio, tele­vi­sion, and all sup­pos­edly time­sav­ing in­no­va­tions…
C. G. Jung from “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”

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