Carl Jung: If you marry the ordered to the chaos
The Red Book
How hard is fate! If you take a step toward your soul, you will at first miss the meaning.
You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right!
Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.
Your God is a child, so long as you are not childlike. Is the child order, meaning or disorder, caprice?
Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning. Order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming.
You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning.
If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.
You are afraid to open the door. I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible.
Christ taught: God is love. But you should know that love is also terrible.
I spoke to a loving soul and as I drew nearer to her, I was overcome by horror, and I heaped up a wall of doubt, and did not anticipate that I thus wanted to protect myself from my faithful soul.
You dread the depths; it should horrify you, since the way of what is to come leads through it.
You must endure the temptation of fear and doubt, and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your fear is justified and your doubt is reasonable.
How otherwise could it be a true temptation and a true overcoming.
Christ totally overcomes the temptation of the devil, but not the temptation of God to good and reason. Christ thus succumbs to cursing.
You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do everything of your own will; then you will be free and beyond Christianity.
I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must even love what horrifies me.
We must learn such from that saint who was disgusted by the plague infections; she drank the pus of plague boils and became aware that it smelled like roses.
The acts of the saint were not in vain.
In everything regarding your salvation and the attainment of mercy, you are dependent on your soul.
Thus no sacrifice can be too( great for you. If your virtues hinder you from salvation, discard them, since they have become evil to you.
The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices.
If you believe that you are the master of your soul, then become her servant.
If you were her servant, make master, since she needs to be ruled. These should be your first steps. ~Carl Jung; Red Book, Page 235
The struggle with the unformed, with the chaos of Tiamat, is in truth a primordial experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 286
He [Jung] replied, “Yes. God spoke and created from the chaos-and here we are all gods for ourselves. ~E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 8
He cannot overcome the conflict on his own resources; after all, he didn’t invent it. He has to rely on divine comfort and mediation, that is to say on the spontaneous revelation of the spirit, which does not obey man’s will but comes and goes as it wills. This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darknesses of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. The Holy Ghost is a comforter like the Father, a mute, eternal, unfathomable One in whom God’s love and God’s terribleness come together in wordless union. And through this union the original meaning of the still-unconscious Father-world is restored and brought within the scope of human experience and reflection.
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 66
The conscious mind must have reason, firstly to discover some order in the chaos of disorderly individual events occurring in the world, and secondly to create order, at least in human affairs. We are moved by the laudable and useful ambition to extirpate the chaos of the irrational both within and without to the best of our ability. Apparently the process has gone pretty far. As a mental patient once told me: “Doctor, last night I disinfected the whole heavens with bichloride of mercury, but I found no God.” Something of the sort has happened to us as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104A
The intellect may be the devil, but the devil is the “strange son of chaos” who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother. The Dionysian experience will give this devil plenty to do should he be looking for work, since the resultant settlement with the unconscious far outweighs the labours of Hercules. In my opinion it presents a whole world of problems which the intellect could not settle even in a hundred years—the very reason why it has so often gone off on a holiday to recuperate on lighter tasks. And this is also the reason why the psyche is forgotten so often and so long, and why the intellect makes such frequent use of magical, apotropaic words like “occult” and “mystic,” in the hope that even intelligent people will think these mutterings really mean something. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para119
The love-episode is a real experience really suffered, and so is the vision. It is not for us to say whether its content is of a physical, psychic, or metaphysical nature. In itself it had psychic reality, and this is no less real than physical reality. Human passion falls within the sphere of conscious experience, while the object of the vision lives beyond it. Through our senses we experience the known, but our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden, that by their very nature are secret. If ever they become conscious, they are intentionally kept secret and concealed, for which reason they have been regarded from earliest times as mysterious, uncanny, and deceptive. They are hidden from man, and he hides himself from them out of religious awe, protecting himself with the shield of science and reason. The ordered cosmos he believes in by day is meant to protect him from the fear of chaos that besets him by night —his enlightenment is born of night-fears! ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148
Nowhere and never has man controlled matter without closely observing its behaviour and paying heed to its laws, and only to the extent that he did so could he control it. The same is true of that objective spirit which today we call the unconscious it is refractory like matter, mysterious and elusive, and obeys laws which are so non-human or suprahuman that they seem to us like a crimen laesae majestatis hiimanae. If a man puts his hand to the opus, he repeats, as the alchemists say, God’s work of creation. The struggle with the unformed, with the chaos of Tiamat, is in truth a primordial experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 286
The old idea of chaos was that it held everything in potentia including man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939
In the center is the individual where the opposites are united, the one peaceful spot in man, the space where nothing moves embedded in a world of chaos. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263
We have no way of knowing whether the world is Cosmos or Chaos, for, as we know the world, all the order is put into it by ourselves. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 134
Without his emphasis on the dark side of man and the chaos of his chthonic desires, I could not have found access to the “Mysterium Coniunctionis.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 469-471
In this chaos of chance, synchronistic phenomena were probably at work, operating both with and against the known laws of nature to produce, in archetypal moments, syntheses which appear to us miraculous. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 493-496
Too strong a dependence on the outside and too dynamic a view of the inside stem essentially from your desire, intention, and will, which you should push into the background a little for the sake of what really concerns you: holding your own in the chaos of this world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.
We may think of the Irish monk as a man who still has one foot in the animistic world of nature-demons with its intense passions, and the other in the new Christian order symbolized by the Cross, which condenses the primordial chaos into the unity of the personality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-388
In Buddhist art, as in the Celtic illuminated manuscripts and sculptures, the complicated designs and intricate rhythms of the border pattern serve to coax the frightening, pullulating chaos of a disorganized psyche into harmonious forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-388
Concentration is necessary whenever there is the possibility or threat of psychic chaos, i.e., when there is no central control by a strong ego or dominant idea. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-388
So you see, in a moment during a patient’s treatment when there is a great disorder and chaos in a man’s mind, the symbol can appear, as in the form of a mandala in a dream, or when he makes imaginary and fantastical drawings, or something of the sort. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.
Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew. This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.
In the East the Void represents a psychic emptying of all conscious contents through the practice of Yoga. In the western series the chaos, or nigredo, is not thought of as a psychic condition but as a condition of the materia. This is the great difference between the East and the West. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 175.
The elements are of an earthly nature, the physical and chemical constituents of our bodies. These are the earth in us, so to speak, and the stars represent the beginning of psychical life, the influence of the stars in the condition of the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 229.
We think of a chaos as complete confusion, but to the alchemists it was a confusion of definite qualities and of special factors. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 201-202.
The “art of gold making” is a sort of creating of the world, or it is based on the pattern of the creation of the world, and, as in Genesis, a cosmos is fashioned from the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.
With a disordered consciousness order can come out of the unconscious, just as conversely unconscious chaos can break into the too narrow cosmos of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.
[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as ‘chaos’ or ‘nigredo’). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 II, §304.
This primary substance [the chaos] is round (massa globosa, rotundum), like the world and the world-soul; it is in fact the world-soul and the world-substance in one. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 II: §376
[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as ‘chaos’ or ‘nigredo’). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 II, §304.
The intellect may be the devil , but the devil is the “strange son of chaos” who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 90.
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Para 260.
In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg — symbolized by the round cooking vessel — will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Page 202.
The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 231.
But for him who has seen the chaos, there.is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means. He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws. He knows the sea and can never forget it. The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.
If you marry the ordered to the chaos, you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235
Chaos is approaching. Is this the ultimate bottom? I thought that death would be the ultimate bottom.30 Or is chaos also a foundation? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. IV, Page 211
My soul, speak and let me hear of what is going on in the depths.
Proclaim the tidings of things to come. I feel as if a chaos were hidden deep inside me.
[Soul] “That’s it. Chaos is the right word.” The Black Books, Vol. IV, Page 273
The chaos inside me is horrible.
[Soul] “He who is pregnant with chaos is fortunate.” The Black Books, Vol. V, Page 206
How should you be powerful? We are children of chaos, inextricably intertwined with it. Our deepest nature is disorder. That is the beginning of all things. ~Jung’s Soul, Vol. V, Page 207
In his Theogony, Hesiod wrote: “First came Chaos, and then wide-bosomed Earth” ~The Black Books, Vol. V, Page 207, fn 7.
(I] Do you then see no hope?
- Hope, yes- but beyond the chaos. It’s not me sitting on you, but stark actuality.
I can’t bring salvation, but you can. You must make order patiently.
Actuality against actuality. You must defend your life. Go to your work, step by step, and do not let yourself
be disturbed.
You will find the strength. Don’t let off.
Take up the next book, do your duty. Close your eyes and ears. look at your image.
There is unconcern in agony.
Agony, that is your actuality. The primordial man lived and died.
He has given you everything that the past could give you.
Now you must create the present and build the future. The future will be created.
The past lived. It outlived itself What evidence is still needed? Your complaint changes nothing. ~The Black Books, Vol. VII, Page 221
In Plato’s Timaeus, the Demiurge was the creator of the universe and imposed order on chaos. The term was used in Gnosticism to designate the lesser deity who created and ruled the material world. . ~The Black Books, Vol. VII, Page 221, fn 207
