experience as something both awesome and appealing, both fearful and attractive (1; 289)]. This passage clearly shows the traditional approach of psychoanalysis, i.e. submerging into the depth of one’s unconscious in search of one’s soul.
When touching upon the subject of the numinous many seek after a spirit in religion and mystics. In his work “Archetypes of the collective unconscious” Jung emphasizes that the spirit comes to whoever he chooses and man is powerless to either find or take possession of him. “Neither human expectations nor the machinations of the will have given him life. It lives of itself, and a shudder runs through the man who thought that “spirit” was merely what he believes, what he makes himself, what is said in books, or what people talk about. But when it happens spontaneously it is a spookish thing, and primitive fear seizes the naive mind” [1; 108]. Jung says that the elders of the Elgony tribe in Kenya gave him exactly the same description of the nocturnal god: “He comes to you,” they said, “like a cold gust of wind, and you shudder, or he goes whistling round in the tall grass…We must surely go the way of the waters, which always tend downward, if we would raise up the treasure. When our natural inheritance has been dissipated, then the spirit too, as Heraclitus says, has descended from its fiery heights”.[1; 108].
We have arrived at a conclusion that the way to get to know yourself, hard and long as it is, clearly leads to a spirit through learning one’s soul and one’s unconscious i.e. through one’s individual archetypes. It leads to the “dark mirror that reposes at its bottom” [1; 108].
But there’s an alternative way, and to use an allegory, it’s “walking along the sunlit path
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