This progressive assimilation of unconscious contents gradually builds up the personality, thus creating an enlarged psychic system which forms the basis of man's inner spiritual history as this makes itself increasingly independent of the collective history going on all around him.  This process, initiated in the first instance by philosophy, has today reached what is chronologically its latest stage in psychology, still of course only in its infancy.  Hand in hand with this there goes a 'psychization' of the world.  Gods, demons, heaven and hell are, as psychic forces, withdrawn from the objective world and incorporated in the human sphere, which thereupon undergoes a very considerable expansion.  When we give the name of 'sexuality' to what was once experienced as a chthonic divinity, or speaking of 'hallucination' instead of revelation, and when the gods of heaven and the underworld are recognized as dominants of man's unconscious, it means that an immense tract of external world has dropped into the human psyche.  Introjection and psychization are on the other side of the process by which a world of physical objects becomes visible, and this world can no longer be modified by projections to the degree that it could before.

• assimilation
• conscious development
• projection
• unconscious content
• sexuality
• heaven and hell
• philosophy
• heaven
• personality
• unconscious
• psychology
• history
• collective
• hell
• gods
• psyche
• other

Once upon a time there was a wicked wicked woman, who died, and left behind her not one single good deed.  The devils seized her and threw her into the fiery lake, but her guardian angel stood, and thought: 'What good deed of hers might I remember, in order to tell God?'  He remembered, and told God: 'She pulled up an onion in the kitchen garden,' he said, 'and gave it to a beggarwoman.' and God replied to him: 'Very well, take that very same onion and offer it to her in the lake, let her reach for it and hold on to it, and if you can pull her out of the lake, then let her go to heaven, but if the onion breaks, then let the woman remain where she is now.' the angel ran over to the woman and offered her the onion: 'Here you are, woman,' he said, 'reach for it, and hold on!' and then carefully he began to pull her, and soon she was nearly right out; but then the other sinners in the lake, when they saw that she was being pulled out, all began to catch hold of her, so that they should be pulled out together with her.  But the woman was a wicked wicked woman, and she began to kick them with her feet: 'I'm the one who's being pulled out, not you. The onion's mine, not yours!' and no sooner had she said that than the onion broke and the woman fell back into the lake and burns there to this very day.  As for the angel, he began to weep and left the spot.' 

• heaven and hell
• morality
• god
• time
• thought
• heaven
• other