(Excerpts from "Man and His Symbols" by Karl G. Jung) "...Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend... Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely... No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.
There are , moreover, unconscious aspects of our perception of reality. The first is the fact that even when our senses react to real phenomena, sights, and sounds, they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the mind. Within the mind they become psychic events, whose ultimate nature is unknowable (for the psyche cannot know its own psychical substance). Thus every experience contains an indefinite number of unknown factors, not to speak of the fact that every concrete object is always unknown in certain respects, because we cannot know the ultimate nature of matter itself...

Inmaculada, 60"x40"

...Anthropologist have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting there institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present... We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer...
Today, for instance, we talk of "matter". We describe its physical properties. We conduct laboratory experiments to demonstrate some of its aspects. But the word "matter" remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept, without any psychic significance for us. How different was the former image of matter- the Great Mother- that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of Mother Earth. In the same way, what was the spirit is now identified with intellect and thus ceases to be the Father of All. It has degenerated to the limited ego-thoughts of man; the immense emotional energy expressed in the image of "our Father" vanishes into the sand of intellectual desert..."

All the Art-work in this page is the intellectual property of Charles Stierlen

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