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Carl Gustav Jung’s book Memories, Dreams and Reflections

 'Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years can be counted in centuries’

‘We can well think all our lives long that we are following our own noses and may never discover that we are, for the most part, supernumeraries on the stage of the world theatre.  There are factors which, although we do not know them, nevertheless influence our lives, the more so if they are unconscious.  Thus at least a part of our being lies in the centuries’

 ‘I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.  It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children.  It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers and which had not  yet been answered, or as if I had to complete or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished’

‘inner peace and contentment depend on large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonised with the ephemeral conditions of the present ‘ …. [we need to find out ] ‘whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled’