Carl Jung on the & Golden Thread
Dr. Jung talked about the various forms of relationship, about sexuality, about friendship (which is mitigated desire, with its obligations to write frequently and so on.).
There is a third kind of relationship, the only lasting one in which it is as though there were an invisible telegraph wire between two humans.
He said, “I call it, to myself, the Golden Thread.”
This may be masked by other forms of relationship.
And other forms may be present without any such thread in them.
It is only when the veil of maya, of illusion, is rent for us that we can begin to recognize the Golden Thread.
He went on to speak of the three realities that make up the individuated state; God; the Self; and Relatedness.
Or in Christian terms: God, Father, and Son; the Spirit, or Self; and the Kingdom of Heaven.
And just as it is impossible to individuate without relatedness, so it is impossible to have real relationships without individuation.
For otherwise illusion comes in continually, and you don’t know where you are. ~E. Harding, Conversations with Jung, Pages 10-11.
Elijah: The image that I saw was crimson, fiery colored, a gleaming gold.
I have already uttered the words.
The image that I saw was crimson, fiery colored, a gleaming gold.
The voice that I heard was like distant thunder, like the wind roaring in the forest, like an earthquake.
It was not the voice of my old God.
It was a thunderous pagan roar, a call my ancestors knew but which I have never heard.
It sounded prehistoric, as if from a forest on a distant coast;
it rang with all the voices of the wilderness. It was full of horror yet harmonic. ~Elijah, The Black Books, Vol. VI, Page238
I want to emboss you like a coin
Soon after this on an autumn night I heard the voice of an old man (and this time I knew that it was Diahmon). He said: I want to turn you around. I want to master you. I want to emboss you like a coin. I want to do business with you. One should buy and sell you. You should pass from hand to hand. Self-willing is not for you. You are the will of the whole. Gold is no master out of its own will and yet it rules the whole, despised and greedily demanded, an inexorable ruler: it lies and waits. He who sees it longs for it.
It does not follow one around, but lies silently, with a brightly gleaming countenance, self-sufficient, a king that needs no proof of its power. Everyone seeks after it, few find it, but even the smallest piece is highly esteemed. It neither gives nor squanders itself E
veryone takes it where he finds it, and anxiously ensures that he doesn’t lose the smallest part of it. Everyone denies that he depends on it, and yet he secretly stretches out his hand longingly toward it. Must gold prove its necessity? It is proven through the longing of men. Ask it: who takes me?
He who takes it, has it. Gold does not stir. It sleeps and shines. Its brilliance confuses the senses. Without a word, it promises everything that men deem desirable. It ruins those to be ruined and helps those on the rise to ascend.
A blazing hoard is piled up, it awaits the taker. What tribulations do men not take upon themselves for the sake of gold? It waits and does not shorten their tribulations-the greater the tribulations, the greater the trouble, the more esteemed it is. It grows from underground, from the molten lava. It slowly exudes, hidden in veins and rocks. Man exerts all cunning to dig it out, to raise it.” ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
Dr. Jung Green Christ Vision.
In 1939 1 gave a seminar on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola.
At the same time I was occupied on the studies for Psychology and Alchemy.
One night I awoke and saw, bathed in bright light at the foot of my bed, the figure of Christ on the Cross. It was not quite life-size, but extremely distinct; and I saw that his body was made of greenish gold.
The vision was marvelously beautiful, and yet I was profoundly shaken by it.
A vision as such is nothing unusual for me, for I frequently see extremely vivid hypnagogic images.
I had been thinking a great deal about the Anima Christi, one of the meditations from the Spiritual Exercises.
The vision came to me as if to point out that I had overlooked something in my reflections: the analogy of Christ with the aurum non vulgi and the viriditas of the alchemists.
When I realized that the vision pointed to this central alchemical symbol, and that I had had an essentially alchemical vision of Christ, I felt comforted.
The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not only in man but also in inorganic nature.
It is an expression of the life-spirit, the anima mundi or films macrocosmi, the Anthropos who animates the whole cosmos.
This spirit has poured himself out into everything, even into inorganic matter; he is present in metal and stone. My vision was thus a union of the Christ-image with his analogue in matter, the filius macrocosmi.
If I had not been so struck by the greenish-gold, I would have been tempted to assume that something essential was missing from my “Christian” view in other words, that my traditional Christ-image was somehow inadequate and that I still had to catch up with part of the Christian development.
The emphasis on the metal, however, showed me the undisguised alchemical conception of Christ as a union of spiritually alive and physically dead matter.” Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Pages 210-211.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog