evil, and to cut the Gordian knot instead of untying it. Nevertheless, the account has to be settled sooner or later. In the end one has to admit that there are problems which he simply cannot solve on his own resources. Such an admission has the advantage of being honest and truthful”. [1; 111]. What Jung means is that even a strong person fails to grasp the contents of his unconscious sphere due to a peculiar mechanism of its functioning.
But what’s the use of knowing the archetypes of one’s personal unconscious?
Jung’s answer to this is as follows: “It’s a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no yours, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where all life floats above all”. [1; 111].
The author of analytical psychology accurately describes “the way to himself”: “One must descend to the water to cause the miracle of waters’ survival” (Water is the commonest symbol of the unconscious. Jung defined water not as a metaphor but as a life symbol existing in the dark of the soul). “The breath of a spirit sliding over the dark water is terrifying like everything whose cause we do not know, since it is not ourselves. It hints at an unseen presence, the numen” [1; 108]. [Jung borrows the term “numinous” (lat. numen – the active power of the divine) from Rudolf Otto the author of “The Holy” (Otto, Das Heilige, Munchen, 1917), which describes the phenomenon of the divine
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