“Real improvement can be hoped for only if there is a radical change of consciousness. I fear all other measures will remain unreliable palliative since they do not penetrate to the depths where the evil is rooted and constantly renewed.”
—Carl Jung
By way of compensating for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath, we have developed an enthusiasm for facts—mountains of facts, far beyond any single individual’s power to survey.
We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will for a meaningful whole, but nobody is quite sure, because no human brain can possibly comprehend the gigantic sum total of this mass-produced knowledge. The facts bury us.
No one has yet become a good surgeon by learning the textbooks by heart. Yet the danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature…
All time-saving devices, amongst which we must count easier means of communication and other conveniences, do not, paradoxically enough, save us time but merely cram our time so full that we have no time for anything. Hence the breathless haste, superficiality, and nervous exhaustion with all the concomitant symptoms—craving for stimulation, impatience, irritability, vacillation, etc. Such a state may lead to all sorts of other things, but never to any increased culture of the mind and heart.
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