Actually you shouldn’t want to have visions
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
Anonymous
Dear Frau N., 10 December 1932
Best thanks for kindly sending me your book of visions!
I shall read it as soon as my time allows and then tell you something of my impressions.
Wanting to know the truth is also a striving for power and pleasure.
Actually you shouldn’t want to have visions, they should just come to “”May it be good, happy, favorable, and propitious.”
My patients, for instance, have to seek visions as a punishment, and not in order to discover some kind of truth but rather to see their own errors.
The secrets of the world’s depths reveal themselves when they want and not when we want.
I hope to find in your book something of the eternal images if it is the genuine article.
Hang it, that affair of the madwoman-why did it have to happen to you?
Excuse the interjectory character of my thought!
Meanwhile with best regards and sincere thanks,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 111.
Image: Illumination from Liber Scivias, showing Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision, dictating to her scribe and sketching on a wax tablet.