red book, the - out of the trap

The Red Book

Preface

“I knew no technique of getting at the bottom of this activity; all I could do was just wait, keep on living, and watch the fantasies.” 39

He (Staudenmaier) argues that the key to understanding magic lay in the concepts of hallucinations and the “under consciousness”, and gave particular importance to the role of personifications.

From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering into it as into a drama.

“He had fallen into art in a manner of speaking.”

“Much of your material you said has come to you as runes & the explanation of those runes sounds like the veriest nonsense, but that does not matter if the end product is sense.

Everyone, he claimed, had this ability to hold dialogues with him- or herself.

What was most essential was not interpreting or understanding the fantasies, but experiencing them.

His understanding of [alchemy] was based on two main theses: first, that in meditating on the texts and materials in their laboratories, the alchemists were actually practicing a form of active imagination. Second, that the symbolism in the alchemical texts corresponded to that of the individuation process with which Jung and his patients had been engaged.

Jung had remarked in 1957 to Aniela Jaffe that so much rubbish had been said about him that any more rubbish didn’t disturb him.

LIBER PRIMUS

Prologue. The Way of What Is to Come

[The spirit of the depths] forced me down to the last and simplest things.

The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical.

Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.

Spirit of the depths: “But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?”

Spirit of the depths: “No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come.”

Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.

Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it.

Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way.

The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty.

Refinding the Soul

Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness.

He will run after all things, and will seize hold of them, but he will not find his soul, since he would find her only in himself.

He could find his soul in desire itself, but not in the objects of desire… his desire is the image and expression of his soul.

If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing.

My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.

Soul and God

Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery.

I went on the way of the day, and you went invisibly with me, putting the pieces together meaningfully, and letting me see the whole in each part.

At every decisive moment you let me believe in myself.

You took away where I thought to take hold, and you gave me where I did not expect anything and time and time again you brought about fate from new and unexpected quarters. Where I sowed, you robbed me of the harvest, and where I did not sow, you give me fruit of a hundredfold. And time and again I lost the path and found it again where I would never have foreseen it.

I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.

The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.

Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight.

But you cannot flee from yourself. It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment.

But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.

There will be no one who will laugh at me as I laughed at myself.

Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning.

III. On the Service of the Soul

Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.

Christ taught: God is love. But you should know that love is also terrible.

I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must even love what horrifies me.

The Desert

I also had to detach myself from my thoughts through turning my desire away from them. And at once, I noticed that my self became a desert, where only the sun of unquiet desire burned.

No culture of the mind is enough to make a garden out of your soul.

The soul has its own peculiar world. Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in thoughts.

Think diligently about the images that the ancients have left behind. They show the way of what is to come.

Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert.

When you say that the place of the soul is not, then it is not. But if you say that it is, then it is. Notice what the ancients said in images: the world is a creative act.

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.

Experiences in the Desert

Thirst torments me, I dare not think how unendingly long my way is, and above all, I see nothing in front of me.

Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?

How little we still commit ourselves to living. We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.

The cleverer you are, the more foolish your simplemindedness.

145, Many will laugh at my foolishness. But no one will laugh more than I laughed at myself.

Cleverness couples itself with intention. Simplemindedness knows no intention… So take on the vow of poverty of spirit in order to partake of the soul.

Descent into Hell in the Future

Heal the wounds that doubt inflict on me, my soul.

My spirit is a spirit of torment, it tears asunder my contemplation, it would dismantle everything and rip it apart. I am still a victim of my thinking. When can I order my thinking to be quiet, so that my thoughts, those unruly hounds, will crawl to my feet? How can I ever hope to hear your voice louder, to see your face clearer, when all my thoughts howl?

Help me so that I do not choke on my own knowledge. The fullness of my knowledge threatens to fall in on me.

Let me persist in divine astonishment, so that I am ready to behold your wonders.

Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine.

The frightfulness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts.

Depths and surface should mix so that new life can develop.

Life does not come from events, but from us. Everything that happens outside has already been.

Therefore whoever considers the event from outside always sees only that it already was, and that it is always the same. But whoever looks from inside, knows that everything is new. The events that happen are always the same. But the creative depths of man are not always the same. Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.

Because of this we seek in ourselves the meaning of events, so that the way of what is to come becomes apparent and our life can flow again.

I would not have been able to see what was to come if I could not have seen it in myself.

Frightful things must happen until men grow ripe.

As the fate of the peoples is represented to you in events, so will it happen in your heart.

Your shock and doubt will be great, but from such torment the new life will be born.

Suffer it yourself through your own hand, and know that it is your own heinous and devilish hand that inflicts the suffering on you, but not your brother, who wrestles his own devils.

Incapacity prevents further ascent. Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it. We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life. For how else shall it develop into ability?

Yet it is no loss but a gain, not or outer trappings, however, but for inner capability.

Splitting of the Spirit

My soul appeared to me hollow, tasteless and meaningless. But in reality what I thought of her was valid for my ideal.

It was a vision of the desert, I struggled with mirror images of myself. It was civil war in me. I myself was the murderer and the murdered.

VII. Murder of the Hero

Spirit of the depths: “The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd.”

The greatest truth becomes the greatest lie, the brightest day becomes darkest night.

So meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning.

Gods are unavoidable. The more you flee from the God, the more surely you fall into his hand.

VIII. The Conception of the God

In pain you will conceive and joyful is your birth.

Fear is your herald, doubt stands to your right, disappointment to your left.

The constellation of your birth is an ill and changing star.

Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell.

But ambiguity is the way of life.

But what is more ambiguous than love?

Let fall what wants to fall; if you stop it, it will sweep you away. There is a true love that does not concern itself with neighbors.

The one arose from the melting together of the two.

And thus the image of the ancients is fulfilled: I pursued by soul to kill the child in it. For I am also the worst enemy of my god.

The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself.

If we enter into this solitude then the life of the God begins.

Selfish desire ultimately desires itself. You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain.

If you are in yourself, you become aware of your incapacity. You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself. So you will no longer force others to become heroes. Like you, they suffer from incapacity. Incapacity, too, wants to live, but it will overthrow your Gods.

Mysterium. Encounter

Doubt tears me apart. It is all so unreal and yet a part of my longing remains behind.

He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone. He must embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love.

The mystery air is soft like thin smoke, and you are raw matter that is disturbingly heavy. But let your hope, which is your highest good and highest ability, lead the way and serve you as a guide in the world of darkness, since it is of like substance with the forms of that world.

He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts.

All pleasure, when left alone, flows into the deep sea and ends in the deathly stillness of dispersal into unending space.

Those who think base the world on thought, those who feel, on feeling. You find truth and error in both.

The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life.

The crystal is the formed thought that reflects what is to come in what has gone before.

So the serpent lies between the thinker and the one who feels. They are each other’s poison and healing.

You begin to have a presentiment of the whole when you embrace your opposite principle, since the whole belongs to both principles, which grow from one root.

And thus they were each other’s poison and death. May the thinking person accept his pleasure, and the feeling person accept his own thought. Such leads one along the way.

Instruction

I am here perchance, not knowing what I want. A longing that stayed behind in your house yesterday has brought me here. You see, prophet, I am tired, my head is as heavy as lead. I am lost in my ignorance. I have toyed with myself enough.

“I sank into this place when unknowingly I tried resisting the not-known. So here I am, astonished and confused, an ignorant fool.”

“The thought went too far for me, and I shun far-fetched ideas. They are dangerous, since I am a man, and you know how much men are accustomed to seeing thoughts as their very own, so that they eventually confuse them with themselves.”

E: “But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body.”

It is no small matter to acknowledge one’s yearning. For this many need to make a particular effort at honesty.

If you give up your self, you live it in others; thereby you become selfish to others, and thus you deceive others.

Do you know why you cannot abandon apishness? For dear of loneliness and defeat.

To live oneself means: to be one’s own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but the worst and the deepest.

It doesn’t take place according to the way of my will but in the way of unavoidable effect. I am not master over you, but the being of the God in me. I lock the past with one key, with the other I open the future. This takes place through my transformation. The miracle of transformation commands.

In the moment of your bewilderment, follow your forethinking and not your blind desire, since forethinking leads you to the difficulties that should always come first. They come nevertheless… It is exhausting to reach this goal that seems to be no goal. And so it is good: I am paralyzed and therefore ready to accept. My forethinking rests on the lion, my power.

Your thought has this meaning and that, not just one, but many meanings. No one knows how many.

Just as I am not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too I am not damaged if I live in my partly chaotic thought world. Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize. Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals.

Yet first I look carefully at their nature, otherwise I cannot change it. I proceed in the same way with certain thoughts.

Forethinking is the procreative, love is the receptive. Both are beyond this world. Here are understanding and pleasure, we only suspect the other.

I won the power back again from the depths, and it went before me like a lion.

Resolution

The struggle between doubt and desire was great in me.

“He sees badly who wants to see”

“Your work is fulfilled here. Other things will come. Seek untiringly, and above all write exactly what you see.”

Before I ascend to love, a condition must be fulfilled, which represents itself as the fight between two serpents.

But the spirit of the depths wants this struggle to be understood as a conflict in every man’s own nature. Forethinking is singleness, love is togetherness. Both need one another, and yet they kill one another. Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, and one lays the blame on the other.

But he does not see the conflict in his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster.

You need your wholeness to live onward.

If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love. The serpent lurks behind the pure principle.

Great is he who is in love, since love is the present act of the great creator, the present moment of the becoming and lapsing of the world. Mighty is he who loves. But whoever distances himself from love, feels himself powerful.

In your forethinking you recognize the nullity of your current being as a smallest point between the infinity of what has passed and of what is to come. The thinker is small, he feels great if he distances himself from thinking.

Whoever is in love is a full and overflowing vessel, and awaits the giving. Whoever is in forethinking is deep and hollow and awaits fulfillment.

Man is always too much in one or the other. This comes with human nature.

Whoever wants to see will see badly. It was my will that deceived me.

In the end I found that I wanted myself in everything, but without looking for myself.

But with your wanting you make the evil great.

The symbol of the crystal signifies the unalterable law of events that comes of itself. In this seed you grasp what is to come.

May the frightfulness become so great that it can turn men’s eyes inward, so that their will no longer seeks the self in others but in themselves.

Will yourself, that leads the way.

In the mystery man himself becomes the two principles, the lion and the serpent.

–Notes—

Desire without forethinking gains much but keeps nothing, therefore his desire is the source of constant disappointment… To succeed in something, you first need to deal with the resistance and difficulty, otherwise joy leaves behind pain and disappointment… My desire is pure if I first overcome the difficulty and resistance.

You should always ask yourself what you desire, since all too many do not know what they want. I did not know what I wanted. You should confess your longing and what you long for to yourself.

The flowing together of the forethinking with pleasure produces the God.

I cannot pull the stars down to myself, but only watch them. Therefore my impetuous desire feels that the world is nightly and cold.

Pleasure always wants what is closest, and feels through the multiplicity, going from one to another, without a goal, just seeking and never fulfilled. Love wants what is furthest, the best and the fulfilling.

LIBER SECUNDUS

The Images of the Erring

The Red One

I know nothing about a way. I can therefore neither want this nor that, since nothing indicates to me whether I want this or that. I wait, without knowing what I’m waiting for.

R.: Life doesn’t require any seriousness. On the contrary, it’s better to dance through life.

I: “Perhaps too there is a joy before God that one can call dancing. But I haven’t yet found this joy. I look our for things that are yet to come. Things came, but joy was not among them.”

R.: “Don’t you recognize me, brother, I am joy!”

I: “Could you be joy? I see you as through a cloud. Your image fades. Let me take your hand, beloved, who are you, who are you?”

Joy? Was he joy?

Whoever tastes this joy forgets himself. And there is nothing sweeter than forgetting oneself.

If ever you have the rare opportunity to speak with the devil, then do not forget to confront him in all seriousness. He is your devil after all…

Taking the devil seriously does not mean going over to his side, or one becomes the devil. Rather it means coming to an understanding. Thereby you accept your other standpoint. With that the devil fundamentally loses ground, and so do you. And that may be well and good.

Or your joy tears your neighbor away and throws him off course, since life is like a great fire that torches everything in its vicinity.

But you can make no pact with joy, because it immediately disappears.

It is always a risky thing to accept joy, but it leads us to life and its disappointment, from which the wholeness of our life becomes.

The Castle in the Forest

I suppose I must allow these thoughts to come. What good would it do to push them away—they will come again—better to swallow this stale drink than keep it in the mouth… why the devil must I plague myself with such empty fantasies?

It’s terrible, what sleeplessness can drive a man to—even the most absurd and superstitious theories.

If no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner adventure happens to you either. The part that you take over from the devil—joy, that is—leads you into adventure. In this way you will find your lower as well as your upper limits. It is necessary for you to know your limits. If you do not know them, you tun into the artificial barriers of your imagination and the expectations of your fellow men.

Therefore try to find your real limits. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them. And this happens to you only if you have balance… You achieve balance, however, only if you nurture your opposite.

My spirit reflected on everything rare and uncommon, it pried its way into unfound possibilities, toward paths that lead into the hidden, towards lights that shine in the night… I was smitten by the romantic. The romantic is a step backward. To reach the way, one must sometimes also take a few steps backward.

Following the romantic way I reached the awkwardness and ordinariness of life, where I run out of thoughts and almost forget myself. What I formerly loved I must now experience as feeble and wasted, and what I formerly derided I had to envy as towering and helplessly crave. I accepted the absurdity of this adventure. No sooner had this happened than I also saw how the maiden transformed herself and signified an autonomous meaning. One inquires into the desire of the ridiculous, and that is enough for it to change.

The mystery draws near to you, and things happen around you like miracles.

There in the whirl of chaos dwells eternal wonder.

The soul demands your folly, not your wisdom.

Your Hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with a curse and a kick of the foot… Thus if you go through Hell, you should not forget to give due attention to whatever crosses your path. Quietly look into everything that excites your contempt or rage

You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels.

One of the Lowly

Death? Does it not uncover the terrible deceit of life? Therefore it is probably all the same to the moon, whether and how one passes away. Only we kick up a fuss about it—with what right? #death

If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me.

Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone.

What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is at its strongest.

Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is.

The Anchorite

You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning.

We rioted terribly among words and names, our own miserable creatures, and accorded divine potency to them. Yes, we even believed in their reality, and believed that we possessed the divine and had committed it to words.

But words should not become Gods.

I’ve spent many years alone with the process of unlearning. Have you ever unlearned anything?—Well, then you should know how long it takes.

You stretch out your hand, but it remains hanging in invisible webs.

What are years? What is hurrying time to him that sits under a tree? Your time passes like a breath of air and you wait for the next light, the next fruit.

Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness… Through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple.

Dies II.

These little animals stick to things, quite unlike us—no doubt, no change of mind, no hesitation. Is this so because they live their myth?

I don’t want to intrude on your mysteries, but I feel that you come from a strange world that has nothing to do with mine.

Be astonished at nothing, and in no case condemn or regret it.

It’s erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it’s always one and the same religion.

He who comprehends the darkness in himself, to him the light is near.

No sooner do you touch the earth than your inner life is over; it flees from you into things.

A leaf dancing in the wind dances with you; the irrational animal guesses your thought and represents you. The whole earth sucks its light from you and everything reflects you again.

Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner; for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things, no matter how remote, how precious, how secret it is.

Death.

The sun still glowed in me, but I could feel myself stepping into the great shadow.

Life and death must strike a balance in your existence.

Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live.

VII. The Remains of Earlier Temples

How much my ideals have come down, and how freshly my tree greens!

I no longer have a duty towards you, and you no longer have duties toward me, since I vanish and you vanish from me. I no longer hear requests and no longer make requests of you. I no longer fight and reconcile myself with you, but place silence between you and me.

Not that I know anything about what my distant goal might be. I see blue horizons before me: they suffice as a goal. I hurry toward the East and my rising—I will my rising.

VIII. First Day

“There is no one left for you to conquer. Smash yourself, what it’s worth!”

I went to the East like a child. I did not ask, I simply waited.

The outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition. #mirror

From afar wanderers walk along solitary roads, looking here and there.

Hurrying becomes impossible, patience grows.

Second Day

It is not always necessary to act; sometimes thinking is better.

Thus my God found salvation. He was saved precisely by what one would actually consider fatal, namely by declaring him a figment of the imagination.

But if we turn the God into fantasy, he is in us and is easy to bear. The God outside us increases the weight of everything heavy, while the God within us lightens everything heavy. Hence all Christophers have stooped backs and short breath, since the world is heavy.

You will not conquer anything for any length of time. Your power will turn into dust tomorrow

Set the egg before you, the God in his beginning.

And behold it.

And incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze.

The Incantations

An I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me

I made small everything that was great and made everything great that was small.

I exchanged my furthest goal for the nearest, and I am so ready.

Nothing stands firm: you touch yourself and you turn to dust… You notice: you are not true, it is not true above, it is not true below, left and right are deceptions. Wherever you grasp is air, air, air.

The Opening of the Egg

Embracing and rejecting myself in a boundless game—

Where was I? I was completely sun.

Cruelly and unthinkably the sunbird spread its winds and flew up into infinite space. I was left with the broken shells and the miserable casing of his beginning; the emptiness of the depths opened beneath me.

The God suffers when man does not accept his darkness.

Man stands between emptiness and fullness. If his strength combines with fullness, it becomes fully formative. There is always something good about such formation. If his strength combines with emptiness, it has a dissolving and destructive effect, since emptiness can never be formed, but only strives to satisfy itself at the cost of fullness.

In this moment, you need evil. When you notice that your strength is coming to an end and desire sets in, you must withdraw it from what has been formed into your emptiness; through this association with the emptiness you will succeed in dissolving the formation in you You will thus regain your freedom, in that you have saved your strength from oppressive association with the object.

The better one is and the more attached one is to one’s formation, the more one will lose one’s force.

You suffer from evil because you love it secretly and are unaware of your love.

Like a terrible suffering or an inescapable devilish persecution, the misery and neediness of our matter creeps up on us.

Nature is playful and terrible. Some see the playful side and dally with it and let it sparkle. Others see the horror and cover their heads and are more dead than alive. The way does not lead between both, but embraces both. It is both cheerful play and cold horror.

XII. Hell

“The evil one cannot make a sacrifice, he cannot sacrifice his eye, victory is with the one who can sacrifice.”

He who wants to create an eternal fulness will also create eternal emptiness.

And the luster of his beauty will also have me taste the very bottom of Hell.

There is nothing the emptiness can sacrifice, since it always suffers lack. Only fullness can sacrifice, since it has fullness.

XIII. The Sacrificial Murder

XIV. Divine Folly

The divine wants to live with me.

What I could not conjoin in my mind probably lends itself to living one after the other.

And so I decided to cross over into lower and everyday life, my life, and to begin down there, where I stood.

When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to simple life. What thinking cannot solve, life solves, and what action never decides is reserved for thinking.

But acceptance of the other means a descent into the opposite, from seriousness into the laughable, from suffering into the cheerful, from the beautiful into the ugly, from the pure into the impure.

Nox Secunda

“What drives you to this?”

“I don’t know. But it seems that we still have no peace, although we died in true belief.”

“Why do you have no peace if you died in true belief?”

“It always seems to me as if we had not come to a proper end with life.”

“Remarkable—how so?”

“It seems to me that we forgot something important that should have also been lived.”

I enjoy perfect silence. The problem of madness is profound. Divine madness—a higher form of the irrationality of life streaming through us—at any rate a madness that cannot be integrated into present-day society—but how?

But this new direction of growth is completely opposed to the previous one. And yet the plant nevertheless grows regularly this way, without overstraining or disturbing its balance.

I can no longer say that this or that goal should be reached, or that this or that reason should apply because it is good; instead I grope through mist and night. No line emerges, no law appears; instead everything is thoroughly and convincingly accidental, as a matter of fact even terribly accidental.

Chaos is not single, but an unending multiplicity.

What you excluded from your life, what you renounced and damned, everything that was and could have gone wrong, awaits you behind that wall before which you sit quietly.

They forgot only one thing: they did not live their animal.

The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it.

And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.

When the time has come and you open the door to the dead, your horrors will also afflict your brother, for your countenance proclaims the disaster. Hence withdraw and enter solitude, since no one can give you counsel if you wrestle with the dead.

Please consider that it is the suffering of the creative that they carry something evil in them, a leprosy of the soul that separates them from its danger.

Fulfill that which comes to you.

But anyone who makes destruction their goal will perish through self-destruction. Much rather respect what has become, since reverence is a blessing.

Your poverty in what has become you will thus deliver into the wealth of the future.

In your sacred practice that which earlier laws condemned will once again be included.

For no good is so complete that it could not do injustice and break what should not be broken.

There is one necessary but hidden and strange work—a major work—which you must do in secret, for the sake of the dead… And until he has fulfilled this, he cannot get to his outer work, since the dead do not let him. He shall have to search his soul and act in stillness at their behest and complete the mystery, so that the dead will not let him. Do not look forward so much, but back and into yourself, so that you will not fail to hear the dead.

I suffer my agony between two madmen. I enter the truth if I descend. Become accustomed to being alone with the dead. It is difficult, but this is precisely how you will discover the worth of your living companions.

In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection.

I accepted the chaos, and in the following night, my soul approached me.

XVI. Nox Tertia

My soul spoke to me in a whisper, urgently and alarmingly: “Words, words, do not make too many words. Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundstions are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life.”

“Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives towards reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”

Everything inside me I sin utter disarray. Matters are becoming serious, and chaos is approaching. Is this the ultimate bottom? Is chaos also a foundation?

I: “I couldn’t find the way.”

He says: “You don’t need to find a way now.”

He speaks the truth. The way, or whatever it might be, on which people go, is our way, the right way. There are no paved ways into the future. We say that it is this way, and it is. We build roads by going on. Our life is the truth that we seek. Only my life is the truth, the truth above all. We create the truth by living it.

There are hellish webs of words, only words, but what are words? Be tentative with words, value them well, take safe words, words without catches, do not spin them with one another so that no webs arise, for you are the first who is ensnared in them. For words have meanings. With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of God. The word is the greatest and the smallest than man created, just as what is created through man is the greatest and the smallest.

He who strives against waves is exposed to the arbitrary. The work of men is steady but it swims upon chaos.

What is done to this God you do to the lowest in yourself, under the law of love according to which nothing is cast out. For how else should your lowest be saved from depravity? Who should accept the lowest in you, if you do not?

If you accept the lowest in you, suffering is unavoidable, since you do the base thing and build up what lay in ruin. There are many graves and corpses in us, an evil stench of decomposition.

Just as Christ was crucified between the two thieves, our lowest lies on either side of our way.

But it will take a long time until you see what is destined for death and what is destined for life, since the lowest in you is still unseparated and one, and in a deep sleep.

The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grows your life. You hang between these two poles.

We thus fear our lowest, since that which one does not possess is forever united with the chaos and takes part in its mysterious ebb and flow. Insofar as I accept the lowest in me—precisely that red flowing sun of the depths—and thus fall victim to the confusion of chaos, the upper shining sun also rises. Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest.

But he who accepts what approaches him because it is also in him, quarrels and wrangles no more, but looks into himself and keeps silent.

Your life needs the dark.

But you grow if you stand still in the greatest doubt, and therefore steadfastness in great doubt is a veritable flower of life.

He who cannot bear doubt does not bear himself. Such a one is doubtful; he does not grow and hence he does not live. Doubt is a sign of the strongest and the weakest. The strong have doubt, but doubt has the weak… But no one can say yes to his doubt, unless he endures wide-open chaos. Because there are so many among us who can talk about anything, pay heed to what they live. What someone says can be very much or very little. Thus examine his life.

My speech is neither light nor dark, since it is the speech of someone who is growing.

XVII. Nox Quarta

The night is overcome, when all my life was subject to eternal confusion and stretched out between the poles of fire.

“Life should proceed, from birth to death, from death to birth, unbroken like the path of the sun. Everything should proceed on this path.”

He who wants to accept himself must also really accept his other. But in the yes not every no is true, and in the no every yes is a lie. But since I can be in the yes today and in the no tomorrow, yes and no are both true and untrue. Whereas yes and no cannot yield because they exist, our concepts of truth and error can.

One cannot be enough for us since the other is in us. And if we were content with one, the other would suffer great need and afflict us with its hunger. But we misunderstand this hunger and still believe that we are hungry for the one and strive for it even more adamantly.

Through this we cause the other in us to assert its demands on us even more strongly. If we are then ready to recognize the claim of the other in us, we can cross over into the other to satisfy it. But we can thus reach across, since the other has become conscious to us.

For man is afforded the freedom to overcome the cause, for he is creative and of himself. If you have reached that freedom through the suffering of your spirit to accept the other despite your highest belief in the one, since you are it too, then your growth begins.

But he who cannot mock himself will be mocked by others.

For the sake of the other in you, set off your admired role which you previously performed for your own self and become who you are.

He who has the luck and misfortune of a particular talent falls prey to believing that he is the gift. Hence he is also often its fool.

Who is it that tore apart his own heart to unite what has been separated?

I have even become smaller and poorer, but precisely because of my smallness I can be conscious of the nearness of the great.

Miracles and terrible mysteries are close at hand. I feel the things that were and that will be. Behind the ordinary the eternal abyss yawns. The earth gives me back what it hid.

XVIII. The Three Prophecies

Wondrous things came nearer. I called my soul and asked her to dive down into the floods, whose distant roaring I could hear. This happened on 22 January of the year 1914, as recorded in my black book. And thus she plunged into the darkness like a shot, and from the depths she called out: “Will you accept what I bring?”

I: “I will accept what you give. I do not have the right to judge or do reject.”

S: “But you wanted to accept everything? You do not know your limits. Can you not limit yourself?”

I: “I must limit myself. Who could ever grasp such wealth?”

S: “Be content and cultivate your garden with modesty.”

From the flooding darkness the son of the earth had brought, my soul gave me ancient things that pointed to the future. She gave me three things: The misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion.

If you are clever, you will understand that these three things belong together. These three mean the unleashing of chaos and its power, just as they also mean the binding of chaos. War is obvious and everybody sees it. Magic is dark and no one sees it. Religion is still to come, but it will become evident.

But my spirit could not grasp the monstrous, and could not conceive the extent of what was to come. The force of my longing languished, and powerless sank the harvesting hands.

Little good will come to you from outside. What will come to you lies within yourself. But what lies there! I would like to avert my eyes, close my ears and deny all my senses; I would like to be someone among you, who knows nothing and who never saw anything. It is too much and too unexpected. But I saw it and my memory will not leave me alone. Yet I curtail my longing, which would like to stretch out into the future, and I return to my small garden that presently blooms, and whose extent I can measure. It shall be well-tended.

The future should be left to those of the future. I return to the small and the real, for this is the great way, the way of what is to come. I return to my simple reality, to my undeniable and most miniscule being.

The depth are inexhaustible, they give everything. Everything is as good as nothing. Keep a little and you have something. To recognize and know your ambition and your greed, to gather your craving, to cultivate it, grasp it, make it serviceable, influence it, master it, order it, to give it interpretations and meanings, is extravagant.

Remember that you can know yourself, and with that you know enough. But you cannot know others and everything else.

With a painful slice I cut off what I pretended to know about what lies beyond me. I excise myself from the cunning interpretive loops that I gave to what lies beyond me. And my knife cuts even deeper and separates me from the meanings that I conferred upon myself. I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am without knowing what I am.

I want to be poor and bare, and I want to stand naked before the inexorable. I want to be my body and its poverty.

Thus I discard everything that was laden with meaning, everything divine and devilish with which chaos burdened me.

You should be able to cast everything from you, otherwise you are a slave, even if you are the slave of a God. Life is free and chooses its way. It is limited enough, so do not pile up more limitation. Hence I cut away everything confining. I stood here, and there lay the riddlesome multifariousness of the world.

XIX. The Gift of Magic

S: “Magic will do a lot for you.”

S: “Magic is not easy, and it demands sacrifice.”

S: “The sacrifice that magic demands is solace.” … “You must sacrifice solace for the sake of the black rod, the solace you give and the solace you receive.”

“I’m happy with the warmth of life. Should I miss it? For the sake of magic? What is magic?”

S: “You don’t know magic. So don’t judge. What are you bristling at?” …

“Cast aside your blind judgment and critical gesture, otherwise you’ll never understand. Do you still mean to waste years waiting?”

“I wanted to laugh, because so much alters in laughter, and resolves itself only there. The magic of this rod is as solid as iron and as cold as death. Forgive me, my soul, I don’t want to be impatient, but it seems to me that something has got to happen to break through this unbearable tension that came with the rod.”

S: “Wait, keep your eyes and ears open.”

I: “I’m shuddering, and I don’t know why.”

S: “Sometimes one must shudder before—the greatest.”

Leave Him without name and form. What should form the formless? Name the nameless? Step onto the great way and grasp what is nearest. Do not look out, do not want, but lift up your hands. The gifts of darkness are full of riddles. The way is open to whomever can continue in spite of riddles. Submit to the riddles and the thoroughly incomprehensible. There are dizzying bridges over the eternally deep abyss. But follow the riddles.

Protect the riddles, bear them in your heart, warm them, be pregnant with them. Thus you carry the future.

The tension of the future is unbearable in us. It must break through narrow cracks, it must force new ways.

What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

Magic is the working of men on men, but your magic action does not affect your neighbor; it affects you first, and only if you withstand it does an invisible effect pass from you to your neighbor. There is more of it in the air than I ever thought. However, it cannot be grasped.

The Way of the Cross

But the white bird that sat on my shoulder spoke to me: “Let it rain, let the wind blow, let the waters flow and the fire burn. Let each thing have its development, let becoming have its day.”

He did not simply teach what was knowable and worth knowing, he lived it. It is unclear how great one’s humility must be to take it upon oneself to live ones own life.

Therefore I cling to everything that obstructs my way to myself.

No one rises above himself who has not turned his most dangerous weapon against himself.

Your craving satisfies itself in you… May your greed consume you, for this wearies and calms it, and you will sleep well and consider the sun of each day as a gift.

You may ask others provided that you need help and advice. But you should make demands on no one, neither desiring nor expecting anything from anyone except yourself.

Yet the flame in which you consumed yourself has illuminated many.

If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything.

If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know.

The symbol can be neither thought up nor found: it becomes.

Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, namely my daily law, my daily wisdom. The God renews himself each night.

The point of origin is where the mind and the will stand till; it is a state of suspension that evokes my outrage, my defiance and eventually my greatest fear. For I can see nothing anymore and can no longer want anything. Or at least that is how it seems to me. The way is a highly peculiar standstill of everything that was previously movement, it is a blind waiting, a doubtful listening and groping. One is convinced that one will burst. But the resolution is born from precisely this tension, and it almost always appears where one did not expect it.

But what is the resolution? It is always something ancient and precisely because of this something new, for when something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation. This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me. Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time. The soul of humanity is like the great wheel of the zodiac that rolls along the way. Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the height was already there. There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again… Yet the meaning does not lie in the eternal recurrence of the same, but in the manner of its recurring creation at any given time.

I can guide myself only with will and intention. But will and intention are simply part of myself. Consequently they are insufficient to express my wholeness. Intention is what I can foresee, and willing is to want a foreseen goal. But where do I find the goal? It is taken from what is presently known to me. Thus I set the present in place of the future. In this manner, though I cannot reach the future, I artificially produce a constant present… Thus I close off the progress of life. But how can I be my own charioteer without will and intention? Therefore a wise man does not want to be a charioteer, for he knows that will and intention certainly attain foals but disturb the becoming of the future.

Futurity grows out of me; I do not create it, and yet I do, though not deliberately and willfully, but rather against will and intention. If I want to create the future, then I work against my future.

The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive. For a long time I considered what type of magic this would have to be. And in the end I found nothing. Whoever cannot find it within himself should become an apprentice, and so I took myself off to a far country where a great magician lived, of whose reputation I had heard.

XXI. The Magician

It would be better if everything were buried with me. It can always be rediscovered later. It will never be lost to humanity, since magic is reborn with each and every one of us.

Above all, you must know that magic is the negative of what one can know…

That is the third point that you must note as essential: namely, that there is nothing for you to understand.

…Magic happens to be precisely everything that eludes comprehension…

Magic is neither to be taught nor learned. It’s foolish that you want to learn magic.

I: “It’s difficult to exist without reason.”

P: “And that is exactly how difficult magic is.”

“If he gives up his reason before [old age], he can already experience something useful sooner.”

But stupidity would perhaps be progress on the way to magic.

I: “What kind of advantage doesn’t meet the eye?”

P: “I call that magic.”

And because I remain silent, they are even more convinced that I have received the black art from Philimon.

It is an error to believe that there are magical practices that one can learn. One cannot understand magic.

Magical understanding is what one calls noncomprehension.

We need magic to be able to receive or invoke the messenger and the communication of the incomprehensible.

One can be certain that the greater part of the world eludes or understanding.

The magical way arises by itself. If one opens up chaos, magic also arises.

Magic is a way of living. If one has done one’s best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place.

Thus a certain solitude and isolation are inescapable conditions of life for the well-being of oneself and of the other, otherwise one cannot sufficiently be oneself. A certain slowness of life, which is like a standstill, will be unavoidable.

If the power of growth begins to cease, then the united falls into its opposites.

That which we can no longer prevent or hide is our fruit.

Truly, it is the lover who survives.

Your wisdom is the wisdom of serpents, cold, with a grain of poison, yet healing in small doses.

Your words gave me nothing. Your words left me to myself and doubt. And so I ate myself.

You leave me in a salutary darkness, where there is nothing for me to either see or look for. You are no light that shines in the darkness, no savior who establishes an eternal truth and thus extinguishes the nocturnal light of human understanding. You leave room for the stupidity and jokes of others. You do not want, Oh blessed one, anything from the other, but instead you tend the flowers in your own garden.

Giving is as childish as power. He who gives presumes himself powerful. You are wise… you do not give. You want your garden to bloom, and for everything to grow from within itself.

But the true one always disowns himself, since he know nothing higher than to be a man.

If the mouth of the Gods remains silent, then each can listen to his own speech. He who loves the people remains silent… Only after the darkest night will it be day. So cover the lights and remain silent so that the night will become dark and noiseless. The sun rises without our help.

Madness and reason want to be married, the lamb and the wolf graze peacefully side by side. It is all yes and no. The opposites embrace each other, see eye to eye, and intermingle. They recognize their oneness in agonizing pleasure. My heart is filled with wild battle.

since the excessive tension seems to indicate the ultimate and highest possibility of feeling.

The beginning is always the smallest, it begins in nothing. If I begin there, I see the little drop of “something” that falls into the sea of nothingness.

He: “I believe that there is no time with us, so there is none to spend. Nothing at all happens.”

For a great cold comes over whoever in the excess of his personal striving has recognized the demands of the dead and seeks to satisfy them.

Be your own master and your own slave, do not belong to me but to yourself. Do not bear my burden, but your own. Thus you leave me my human freedom, a thing that’s worth more to me than the right of ownership over another person.

I long for the joy of men, for their fullness and freedom and not their neediness.

Do not cry, Salome, fortune is only what you yourself create

and not what comes to you.

Salome, for the sake of our love, do not forget to dance.

Hang until you understand.

Se: “Don’t be stupid, weakness too is a way, magic makes good the error.”

Bird: “You see, Salome is what you are. Fly, and she will grow wings.”

Words are poor, and beauty does not attend them.

Happy is he who can be a hermit in his own desert. He survives.

Love seeks to have and to hold, but life wants more.

“Do not ask after the morrow, sufficient unto you is the day. You need not worry about the means. Let everything grow, let everything sprout; the son grows out of himself.”

He broke me in two, he cut me up. He yokes the separated. Without him I would fall apart, but my life went on with him. My love remained with me.

No one besides you has your God.

Let me go. I shall return to you in renewed form.

Why lament? It is fate. Let me go, my wings grow and the longing toward eternal light swells up powerfully in me.

The touchstone is being alone with oneself.

This is the way.

SCRUTINIES

I resist, I cannot accept this hollow nothing that I am.

You find it difficult—well, all beginnings are difficult. Soon you will be able to do it better.

You, you of all people wanted to tell other people what to do?

But you will learn silence. For this I will pull out your tongue

For I want to get along with you—I must—damn you—you are my I, which I must carry around with me to the grave. Do you think that I want to have such foolishness around me all my life? If you were not my I, I would have torn you to pieces long ago.

But I am damned to haul you through a purgatory so that you too will become somewhat acceptable.

Do not pretend there is a difference between thinking and doing.

Your grounds are webs of lies covering a dirty corner. You judge others and charge them with what they should do. You do this because you have no order within yourself, because you are unclean.

I will burn out of you the contents of which you were proud, so that you will become empty like a poured-out vessel. #confidence

Understand yourself, and you will be sufficiently understood.

S: “The uncertain way is the good way. Upon it lie possibilities. Be unwavering and create.”

S: “…The way of life is sown with fallen ones.”

“You need not be afraid of madness.”

“Science is too superficial, mere language, mere tools.”

“The greatest comes to the smallest.”

Gold H

Must gold prove its necessity? It is proven through the longing of men… Gold does not stir. It sleeps and shines. Its brilliance confuses the senses.

“The best truth is also such a skillful deception that I also entangle myself in it as long as I do not realize the worth of a single ruse.”

478 Redemption H

What we neglect in ourselves blends itself secretly into our actions towards others.

My life wants itself whole.

“you are fortunate,” she said, “if you can say what you do not understand.”

You are a shell. Empty shells do not spill, they catch.

The history of humanity is older and wiser than you.

A child, an old man, an evil woman, a spirit of the dead, and a devil are all beings who need to be humored. #archetypes

therefore remain silent, mind your business, and behold your inadequacy every day.

Why do you look to the other? What you see in him lies neglected in yourself.

Torment yourself, so that you come to find it.

“Be quiet,” she replied, “or else you’ll disturb the work.” #silence

Nothingness is the same as fullness.

It is nothingness that is whole and continuous throughout.

Every so-called fixed and certain thing is only relative. That alone is fixed and certain that is subject to change.

Creation… is quality itself. #pirsig

Thus we are the victims of the pairs of opposites.

Therefore you must not strive for what you conceive as distinctiveness, but for your own essence.

That is what love demands, since they wanted to hear, even if they grumble.

If I knew better, I would teach better.

“There are no mistakes in these things,” Philemon replied, “there are only different levels of knowledge… therefore there are only mistakes in your world.”

Those whom love does not unite, fear compels.

Posted

11.29.19

books

carl jung