desert | Carl Jung: This was my twenty-fifth night in the desert.

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Carl Jung: This was my twenty-fifth night in the desert.

This was my twenty-fifth night in the desert.

This is how long it took my soul to awaken from a shadowy being to her own life, until she could approach me as a free-standing being separate from me.

And I received hard but salutary words from her.

I needed that taking in hand, since I could not overcome the scorn within me.

The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit of the time. But wisdom is simpleminded, not just simple.

Because of this, the clever person mocks wisdom, since mockery is his weapon.

He uses the pointed, poisonous weapon, because he is struck by naive wisdom.

If he were not struck, he would not need the weapon.

Only in the desert do we become aware of our terrible simplemindedness, but we are afraid of admitting it.

{(That is why we are scornful. But mockery / does not attain simple-mindedness.

The mockery falls on the mocker, and in the desert where no one hears and answers, he suffocates from his own scorn.

The cleverer you are, the more foolish your simplemindedness.

The totally clever are total fools in their simplemindedness.

We cannot save ourselves from the cleverness of the spirit of this time through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most, namely simple-mindedness.

Yet we also do not want to be artificial fools because we have fallen into simplemindedness, rather we will be clever fools.

That leads to the supreme meaning. Cleverness couples itself with intention.

Simplemindedness knows no intention. Cleverness conquers the world, but simplemindedness, the soul.

So take on the vow of poverty of spirit in order to partake of the soul.

In the following night, the air was filled with many voices.

A loud voice called, “I am falling.” Others cried out confused and excited during this: “Where to? What do you want?”

Should I entrust myself to this confusion? I shuddered. It is a dreadful deep.

Do you want me to leave myself to chance, to the madness of my own darkness? Wither? Wither? You fall,

and I want to fall with you, whoever you are.

The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 237.

If a man is lost in the desert or quite alone on a glacier.

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Symbolic Life CW 18

In the case of psychological suffering, which always isolates the individual from the herd of so-called normal people, it is also of the greatest importance to understand that the conflict is not a personal failure only, but at the same time a suffering common to all and a problem with which the whole epoch is burdened. This general point of view lifts the individual out of himself and connects him with humanity.

The suffering does not even have to be a neurosis; we have the same feeling in very ordinary circumstances.

If for instance you live in a well-to-do community, and you suddenly lose all your money, your natural reaction will be to think that it is terrible and shameful and that you are the only one who is such an ass as to lose his money.

But if everybody loses his money it is quite another matter and you feel reconciled to it.

When other people are in the same hole as I am I feel much better.

If a man is lost in the desert or quite alone on a glacier, or if he is the responsible leader of a group of men in a precarious situation, he will feel terrible.

But when he is a soldier in a whole battalion that is lost, he will join the rest in cheering and making jokes, and will not realize the danger.

The danger is not less, but the individual feels quite differently about it in a group than when he has to face it alone. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 232

Carl Jung Depth Psychology