Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates.
The symbol is the word that goes out of the mouth, that one that does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue.
It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognizes it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind.
If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know.
But if one does not accept the symbol, it is as if one carelessly went past this door; and since this was the only door leading to the inner chambers, one must pass outside into the streets again, exposed to everything external.
But the soul suffers great need, since outer freedom is of no use to it. Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates.
These gates are symbols.
Each new gate is at first invisible; indeed it seems at first that it must be created, for it exists only if one has dug up the spring’s root, the symbol. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.
