Can you say anything about how the problem of evil might have constellated itself? I guess we're circling around that a little bit in personal experience in the Jungian community as the years went on - I mean doesn't it constellate itself right in your own backyard?
Naturally, obviously, Jung's awareness of the problem of evil did not spring from there. He took very much part in what was happening in the world and he was very, very worried over the first world war, as you can take out his memories, and the second and he was very terrified of a third one: of a Holocaust of our whole culture, he seriously reckoned with that and via that the problem of evil has come into being a major preoccupation, while the constant mischief and jealousies and the Animus and Anima nonsense that he took more on his strait. He didn't take that very tragically, he just did: "Ahh, are you so infantile and all of those pupils I have trained y'all so long and they are still just kindergarten", he just curse it, but he didn't upset him. But what you would call the personal shadow of people didn't upset him he couldn't grumbled and curse a bit, but that's not the problem of evil, it's that major evil complete destruction which worried him.
And his real approach to that was the inner work that he did?
Yes, the only thing you can do is to confront yourself with it, where you are. All the rest all benevolent - if benevolent preaching would help, then we would be out of the trouble long ago, because we get a lot of benevolent and reasonable preaching, but it doesn't help. So the only place where you can really put the hand on it and deal with it body-to-body the problem of evil is in yourself. And there you have the hope to change something, but the hope to change the world is a childish illusion. Go and tell Khomeini that is possessed, he can cut your head off.
Seems almost impossible that enough people in our time would be wise enough or courageous enough to choose the inner way with the problem of evil it's so tempting to try to be heroic and outwardly: for example all over the world that the nuclear weapons and the nuclear power that's developing it makes me want to jump up and run out and spend all my time and money to try to stop that?
Well, you will soon run up against some obscure lobbies where all your efforts get block. I think one should say it aloud, one should not be a coward, one should make demonstrations, one should go against it and one should not waste all one's energy into it because it doesn't help. One should say one's the opinion and that's all and the furtherest fight inwardly, because you see finally it's not we who will decide that question it is the collective unconscious which will decide off - in religious language God. And if you work on your own problem, then you might get into analysis of a politician who has influence and then you have done more than if you had gone in the street with a transparent every day ... and that that you get an influential politician into your analysis or suddenly interested in Jungian psychology, you can't meet, you can only work on yourself and that is the unconscious and therefore you see, if God wants to save the world, he will put certain call up certain people to know certain things. We can't do it, it happens always as a miracle unexpectedly, but you can go to meet that miracle by working on yourself.
