ideas

Watching a Jordan Peterson lecture recently when he said something very intriguing; “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” When he began to explain it was pretty mind-blowing stuff.

He attributed the quote to Carl Jung. I wasn’t able to find where ol’ Carl said that exactly, but I think ol’ Jordan was just simplifying a larger concept for us unwashed masses.

What Carl did say, in his book Red Book, when he was having a conversation with Elijah, was the following:

Jung: “The thought went too far for me, and I shun far-fetched ideas. They are dangerous, since I am a man, and you know how much men are accustomed to seeing thoughts as their very own, so that they eventually confuse them with themselves.”

Elijah: “Will you therefore confuse yourself with a tree or animal, because you look at them and because you exist with them in one and the same world? Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside yourself as trees and animals are outside your body.”

The next page Jung added:

“My thoughts are not myself, but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead. . . . Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize.”

Much later on in the book, in a conversation with Philemon, who is a higher version of the personified embodiment of supernatural forces represented by Elijah, Jung is told:

“Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things you possess and encompass. Rather, they possess and encompass you, since they are powerful daimons, manifestations of the Gods, and hence reach beyond you, existing in themselves.”

Is there anything I could write that would be more interesting than that?

Nope.