LOOK INWARD ANGEL, GO NATIVE

LAURENS VAN DER POST’S REFLECTIONS OF CARL JUNG FROM

JUNG AND THE STORY OF OUR TIME.

EDITED BY: JEAN LEJEUNE

….it would warm me to hear him imply that the balance between the primitive and the civilized had never been honourably struck and that a great deal of the troubles of modern man came from the fact that [modern man] had a deep, warm, caring, trusting, instinctive, primitive self from which he had not only allowed himself to be divorced but had gone on to despise and repress with a deadly ruthlessness.

Jung saw the validity and universality of an area of the human spirit shared by all, no matter how different their culture, their creeds, their races and colours…

Jung loved a quotation from the Elizabethan Sir Thomas Browne: “We carry with us wonders we seek without us: there is all of Africa and her prodigies in us.”

He confirmed his suspicions of the motive behind the growing habit of the European to travel the physical world …. An element of profound evasion… without denying the validity of travel for specific ends, travel for the sheer travel’s sake was … a substitute, an Ersatz journey for a far more difficult and urgent journey modern man was called upon to undertake into the unknown universe of himself.

The task of modern man was not to go primitive the African way but to discover and confront and live out his own first and primitive self in a truly twentieth century way.

Only an example lived truly and fully out in the life of our time could help and save. Preaching and continuation of efforts to convert others in our own confused image would only imperil both ourselves and those we presumed to serve.

It is as if there were something in all of us that demands a journey of our own before we can discover in a single,blinding, forever decisive flash, the light that we are in the innermost nature of ourselves contracted to seek.

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