As I’ve written in other posts, learning about Jungian concepts has greatly enriched my life. Becoming a more conscious person as a result of paying attention to and learning from my dreams, noting synchronicities, and acting on promptings from my intuition have all added meaning and purpose to my life.
Our western culture focuses on using reasoning and cognitive skills and places little, if any, value on what is happening at an unconscious level. And yet much is going on each day of which we are not consciously aware but which is very significant. Jung expresses this when he writes in the book Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “Day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge the life of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.”
It’s the integration that Jung refers to that adds to our becoming more whole persons. If you’re not already familiar with it, the book I referred to above, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is a biography of Carl Jung and includes some autobiographical sections that Jung wrote. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so.