Carl Jung: It is the kingdom of things that are not.
Mrs. Crowley: The two symbols together would perhaps suggest the Yin and the Yang.
Dr. Jung: That is true.
The bowl would be the female and the staff the male form, which means a union of opposites; the male and female are together in this poimen.
It also means neither male nor female.
That is expressed in the so-called Gospel according to the Egyptians, in the conversation of Jesus with Salome.
Salome asked Jesus when the prophecies would be fulfilled, and Jesus said: “When ye shall tread upon the vesture of shame, and when the two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor female. ”
That is, when a thing is yea and nay, then it is neither yea nor nay, it is both and therefore beyond.
The unrecognizable and incomprehensible thing can only be expressed by a paradox; when we cannot understand a thing in its essence, when we cannot grasp it by our means of reasoning, we describe it in such a form.
For instance, the Buddhistic concept of nirvana is positive non-being, or being, non-being.
It is the kingdom of things that are not.
The beginning of the world, the creative point, the origin, is also described by a paradox: a completely empty fullness, or completely full emptiness.
And Jakob Boehme, that famous mystic and philosopher of the sixteenth century, said that the basis of the world is the nil, the Nichts, the non-being, and that it cannot be otherwise because the beginning is desire, longing, and only an absolute vacuum can have longing.
A vacuum, non-being, can by longing draw or attract into itself, while anything that is full already possesses and can desire no longer.
So this desire, and Schopenhauer’s primordial will, is something exceedingly positive because it creates the world; and yet it is nothing, for only where there is nothing can something come to pass. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 524-525
