It is difficult to remain true to love
I gathered from DIAHMON’s words that I must remain true to love to cancel out the commingling that arises through unlived love. I understood that the commingling is a bondage that takes the place of voluntary devotion. Scattering or dismembering arises, as DIAHMON had taught me, from voluntary devotion. It cancels out the commingling. Through voluntary devotion I removed binding ties.
Therefore I had to remain true to love, and, devoted to it voluntarily, I suffer the dismembering and thus attain bonding with the great mother, that is, the stellar nature, liberation from bondage to men and things. If I am bound to men and things, I can neither go on with my life to its destination nor can I arrive at my very own and deepest nature.
Nor can death begin in me as a new life, since I can only fear death. I must therefore remain true to love since how else can I arrive at the scattering and dissolution of bondage? How else could I experience death other than through remaining true to love and willingly accepting the pain and all the suffering?
As long as I do not voluntarily devote myself to the dismembering, a part of my self secretly remains with men and things and binds me to them; and thus I must, whether I want to or not, be a part of them, mixed in with them and bound to them. Only fidelity to l0ve and voluntary devotion to l0ve enable this binding and mixing to be dissolved and lead back to me that part of my self that secretly lay with men and things. Only thus does the light of the star grow, only thus do I arrive at my stellar nature, at my truest and innermost self that simply and singly is.
It is difficult to remain true to l0ve since love stands above all sins. He who wants to remain true to love must also overcome sin. Nothing occurs more readily than failing to recognize that one is committing a sin. Overcoming sin for the sake of remaining true to l0ve is difficult, so difficult that my feet hesitated to advance. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 356.
Symbolic Love
Dear Fraulein Kaufmann, 30 April 1936
I cannot possibly answer your question in a letter.
I think you would do best to take the whole problem of love as a miracu lum per gratiam Dei which nobody really understands.
It is always fate, whose ultimate roots we shall never dig out.
One shouldn’t let oneself be upset by God’s doings. The sublime nonsense or nonsensical sublimity of love may invite us to philosophic wonder.
The symbolic form of love (animus-anima) shrinks from nothing, least of all from sexual union.
There is a “real” partner only if you make him real.
Reality is an anthropomorphism.
You really ought to have asked this question when you were here.
Volumes could be written about it, which I shall on no account do, however.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 213-214.
The Mystery of Love
I]f we possess a grain of wisdom, we will completely surrender to this unknowable who embraces in love all the opposites. Whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence “God is l0ve,” the words affirm the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead. In my medical experience as well as in my own life, I have again and again been faced with the mystery of l0ve and have never been able to explain what it is. Like Job, I had to “lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once and I will not answer” (Job 40:4f). – C.G. Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 364
This is the Mother Love
From Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious:
The over-development of the maternal instinct is identical with that well-known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages and all tongues. This is the mother-love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends.
Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead. Mother is mother-love, my experience and my secret.
Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are?
The attempt to say these things has always been made, and probably always will be; but a sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being-so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness-who was our mother.
He knows that the mother carries for us that inborn image of the mater nature and mater spiritualis, of the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part.
“Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (1939) ~Carl Jung, In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172
