どんな変化もどこかで始めなければならないように、それを経験し、やり遂げるのは一人の個人である。変化は一人の個人から始まらなければならない。それは私たちの誰でもよいのだ。周りを見渡したり、自分がやりたくないことを誰かがやってくれるのを待っている余裕は誰にもありません。
自分に何ができるのか誰も知らないのだから、意識的に満足のいく答えがどこにも見当たらないときに、ひょっとして自分の無意識が何か役に立つことを知っているのではないかと、思い切って自分に問いかけてみるのもいいだろう。今日の人間は、偉大な宗教も様々な哲学も、世界の現状に直面して必要な確信と安心感を与えてくれるような強力なアイデアを提供してくれないという事実を痛感しています。
仏教徒は「人々がダルマ(教義、法律)の崇高な八つの道を守り、自己への真の洞察を持ちさえすれば」、キリスト教徒は「人々が主への正しい信仰を持ちさえすれば」、合理主義者は「人々が知的で合理的でありさえすれば、すべての問題は管理可能で解決可能である」と言うでしょう。困ったことに、彼らの誰もが自分自身でこれらの問題を解決することができません。クリスチャンはよく、「なぜ神は昔のように自分に話しかけてくれないのか?このような質問を聞くと、私はいつもラビのことを思い出す。ラビは、昔は神がよく人に姿を見せていたのに、最近は人が神を見なくなったのはなぜかと尋ねられた。ラビはこう答えた。"今日では、そのように身を低くすることができる人はいません。"
[601] この答えは正鵠を射ている。私たちは主観的な意識に魅了され、神が主に夢や幻を通して語るという古くからの事実を忘れてしまったのです。仏教徒は無意識の空想の世界を「気晴らし」や無駄な幻想として捨て、キリスト教徒は教会や聖書を自分と無意識の間に置き、合理主義の知識人は自分の意識が自分の精神全体ではないことをまだ知らない。
~CG Jung CW 18, Paras 599-601.
[599] As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will undergo it and carry it through. The change must begin with one individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look around and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. As nobody knows what he could do, he might be bold enough to ask himself whether by any chance his unconscious might know something helpful, when there is no satisfactory conscious answer anywhere in sight. Man today is painfully aware of the fact that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seem to provide him with those powerful ideas that would give him the certainty and security he needs in face of the present condition of the world.
[600] I know that the Buddhists would say, as indeed they do: if only people would follow the noble eight fold path of the Dharma (doctrine, law) and had true insight into the Self; or the Christians: if only people had the right faith in the Lord; or the rationalists: if only people could be intelligent and reasonable—then all problems would be manageable and solvable. The trouble is that none of them manages to solve these problems himself. Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the Rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days but that nowadays one no longer saw him. The Rabbi replied: “Nor is there anyone nowadays who could stoop so low.”
[601] This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have simply forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as “distractions” and useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rationalist intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche, in spite of the fact that for more than seventy years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious student of psychology.
~CG Jung CW 18, Paras 599-601.