The life of the solitary would be cold were it not for the immense sun
The life of the solitary would be cold were it not for the immense sun, which makes the air and rocks glow. The sun and its eternal splendor replace for the solitary his own life warmth.
His heart longs for the sun.
He wanders to the lands of the sun. He dreams of the flickering splendor of the sun, of the hot red stones spread out at midday, of the golden hot rays of dry sand.
The solitary seeks the sun and no one else is so ready to open his heart as he is.
Therefore he loves the desert above all, since he loves its deep stillness.
He needs little food since the sun and its glow nourish him. Consequently the solitary loves the desert above all since it is a mother to him, giving him food and invigorating warmth at regular hours.
I n the desert the solitary is relieved of care and therefore turns his whole life to the sprouting garden of his soul, which can flourish only under a hot sun. In his garden the delicious red fruit grows that bears swelling sweetness under a tight skin.
You think that the solitary is poor. You do not see that he strolls under laden fruit trees and that his hand touches grain a hundredfold. under dark leaves the overfull reddish blossoms swell toward him from abundant buds, and the fruit almost bursts with thronging juices. Fragrant resins drip from his trees and under his feet thrusting seed breaks open.
If the sun sinks onto the plane of the sea like an exhausted bird, the solitary envelops himself and holds his breath. He does not move and is pure expectancy until the miracle of the renewal of light rises in the East.
Brimful delicious expectation is in the solitary.
The horror of the desert and of withered evaporation surround him, and you do not understand how the solitary can live.
But his eye rests on the garden, and his ears listen to the source, and his hand touches velvet leaves and fruit, and his breath draws in sweet perfumes from blossom rich trees.
He cannot tell you, since the splendor of his garden is so abundant. He stammers when he speaks of it, and he appears to you to be poor in spirit and in life. But his hand does not know where it should reach, in all this indescribable fullness.
He gives you a small insignificant fruit, which has just fallen at his feet.
It appears worthless to you, but if you consider it, you will see that this fruit tastes like a sun which you could not have dreamt of It gives off a perfume which confuses your senses and makes you dream of rose gardens and sweet wine and whispering palm trees.
And you hold this one fruit in your hands dreaming, and you would like the tree in which it grows, the garden in which this tree stands, and the sun which brought forth this garden.
And you yourself want to be that solitary who strolls with the sun in his garden, his gaze resting on pendant flowers and his hand brushing a hundredfold of grain and his breath drinking the perfume from a thousand roses.
Dull from the sun and drunk from fermenting wines, you lie down in ancient graves, whose walls resound with many voices and many colors of a thousand solar years.
When you grow, then you see everything living again as it was. And when you sleep, you rest, like everything that was, and your dreams echo softly again from distant temple chants.
You sleep down through the thousand solar years, and you wake up through the thousand solar years, and your dreams full of ancient lore adorn the walls of your bedchamber.
You also see yourself in the totality. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 269-270
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.
