Book: Earth has a Soul - C.G.Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life

I finished the Anthill and started reading a new one which is a collection of writings from C.G. Jung. The book discusses the relationship of human and Nature and has been edited by Meredith Sabini.

Jung is one of my favorite authors and most likely one of the most realized persons who's writings I have read so far. In my opinion Jung is a misunderstood, or I would say not-understood, and he has been left into the shadow of Freud. In my understanding the reason for this is that what Jung taught was, and still is, too difficult for most to grasp. But the ideas of Freud are more straightforward and sometimes even over simplifications. Thus the ideas of Freud have become better known, at least in more popular culture.

However, I don't see that Jung's ideas are always conflicting with the ideas of Freud. Jung actually was Freud's pupil but Jung just continued a bit further. Basically Freud saw that everything in human life was driven by libido or similar crude life force with an aim only to reproduce. Jung's major contribution was the introduction of unconscious mind and its functioning. Jung found that in addition to more crude libido there are parts in our unconscious mind which some are collectively shared and some are more personal. Jung called these collective parts of our unconscious as archetypes.

One reason why Jung has been less understood is that he taught things which came from his own experiences but which are are less common among "normal people". Jung's experiences originate from his self-experiments, when he intentionally let him to be drifted away by his own unconscious mind. This is when he said he had conversations with his unconscious and met his Soul. These self-experiments are described in the Red Book which was published only after his death. Jung himself said that after these self-experiments he spent rest of his career translating his experiences into scientific language. Jung clearly made a journey into his own mind which very few people have done.

Jung's findings are, in my opinion, key to many important things in life. As he saw it, our actions are very much driven by the contents of our unconscious mind and therefore we should be increasingly aware of our own minds. This is very true especially in these times when the human culture is increasingly getting disconnected from Nature and its life giving powers.