“People have a genuine fear of themselves: they do not want to know anything about the unconscious because they are afraid that something might occur that cannot be controlled; something that, in effect, is very poorly controlled; or that is very hard to even conceptualize. It makes us work unbelievably hard and one then naturally wonders, “What is this thing made of?” And naturally one begins to think, as if thinking of a human being, and to wonder: “How is it? What qualities does it possess, that is to say, what are his values?”
One then asks the very same questions about the Self, and then discovers it to spread far up and down – and one will worry even more, because, through the Self, not only the Good within is revealed, but also the Evil. If it were a human being, one would say: “Well, he keeps contradicting himself, he is completely confused!”
(…)
Contrariwise, Asian cultures are able to do this; they are able to realize that the gods show both a benevolent and a malevolent facet. For example, when the gracious Kuan-Yin feeds the evil spirits of the underworld their daily sustenance, she takes the shape of an evil spirit because she is so good that she does not even want to scare away evil spirits. Imagine the Virgin Mary in hell, feeding evil spirits, dressed in fur, tail included. [Laughs] Yes, that’s it, isn’t it?”
CG Jung, Entretiens