In the prologue to Jung's (1965) book, Memories, dreams, reflections, he states that life, to him, is like a plant that lives on its rhizome. The real life of the plant is not seen but hidden, rather, in the rhizome.
The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away -- an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
Jung (1965) goes on to explain that his book about his life has been based on the rhizome of his life -- the interior happenings as opposed to the exciting events of his life -- like traveling -- because it is the rhizome of his life that has inspired all of his work. These interior happenings, it could be posited, is where man and God meet:
…the point where transpersonal energies flow into personal life, eternity as opposed to the temporal flux, incorruptibility, the inorganic united paradoxically with the organic, protective structures capable of bringing order out of chaos, the transformation of energy, the elixir of life -- all refer to the Self, the central source of life energy, the fountain of our being which is most simply described as God (Edinger 1992).
Jung believed that certain events in an individual's life, events that could be called mystical, are often of transformative...
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