The lectures and articles presented here were written over a period of
some twenty years. They form a part of my painstaking attempt to connect
the problems facing humanity today with the pictorial, intuitive wisdom
of the inner world of the psyche. My purpose is to illustrate in as
comprehensive and plausible a manner as possible the significance of the
inner world in dealing with collective issues. [...] The hypothesis I
formulated in 1977 in the course of working on my Ph.D. thesis at the
ETH in Zurich has been confirmed many times over: dreams that deal with
some transpersonal problem contain essential information that would
contribute to our better understanding of such collective problems. But,
[...] these inner images, after having been given our meticulous
attention and cautious interpretation, must then be incorporated into
our everyday reality. Only when the hints from the symbolic world of
dreams become linked with the clarity of consciousness do they turn into
the water that bestows life. In view of the enormous problems of our
time, we can no longer afford to lose these treasures by continuing to
think and behave in a purely extraverted manner.
