[Being a solitary and fleeing to the desert of the soul is not without its own inherent dangers.]
The solitary fled the world; he closed his eyes, plugged his ears and buried himself in a cave within himself but it was no use.
The desert sucked him dry, the stones spoke his thoughts, the cave echoed his feelings, and so he himself became desert, stone, and cave.
And it was all emptiness and desert, and helplessness and barrenness, since he did not shine and remained a son of the earth who sucked a book dry and was sucked empty by the desert.
He was desire and not splendor, completely earth and not sun.
The solitary went into the desert to find himself. But he did not want to find himself but rather the manifold meaning of holy scripture.
You can suck the immensity of the small and the great into yourself and you will become emptier and emptier, since immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same.
He wanted to find what he needed in the outer.
But you find manifold meaning only in yourself not in things, since the manifoldness of meaning is not something that is given at the same time, but is a succession of meanings.
The meanings that follow one another do not lie in things, but lie in you, who are subject to many changes, insofar as you take part in life.
Things also change, but you do not notice this if you do not change.
But if you change, the countenance of the world alters.
The manifold sense of things is your manifold sense. It is useless to fathom it in things.
And this probably explains why the solitary went into the desert, and fathomed the thing but not himself.
And therefore what happened to every desirous solitary also happened to him: the devil came to him with smooth tongue and clear reasoning and knew the right word at the right moment.
He lured him to his desire. I had to appear to him as the devil, since I had accepted my darkness.
I ate the earth and I drank the sun, and I became a greening tree that stands alone and grows. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 273.