Man, you have even forgotten that you too are an animal.
No one rises above himself who has not turned his most dangerous weapon against himself.
One who wants to rise above himself shall climb down and hoist himself onto himself and lug himself to the place of sacrifice.
But what must happen to a man until he realizes that outer visible success, that he can grasp with his hands, leads him astray.
What suffering must be brought upon humanity; until man gives up satisfying his longing for power over his fellow man and forever wanting others to be the same.
How much blood must go on flowing until man opens his eyes and sees the way to his own path and himself as the enemy; and becomes aware of his real success.
You ought to be able to live with yourself but not at your neighbor’s expense.
The herd animal is not his brother’s parasite and pest.
Man, you have even forgotten that you too are an animal.
And thus you compel your desire to take your own way.
You may ask others provided that you need help and advice.
But you should make demands on no one, neither desiring nor expecting anything from anyone except from yourself
for your craving satisfies itself only within you.
You are afraid of burning in your own fire.
May nothing prevent you from doing so, neither anyone else’s sympathy nor your more dangerous sympathy with yourself.
Since you should live and die with yourself. Carl Jung, Red Book, The Way of the Cross, Paragraph 5.
Abase yourself and live your Animal
If you read the books of history, you will find men who sought the strange and incredible, who ensnared themselves and who were held captive by others in wolves lairs; men who sought the highest and the lowest, and who were wiped by fate, incomplete, from the tablets of the living. Few of the living know of them, and these few appreciate nothing about them, but shake their heads at such delusion.
While you mock them, one of them stands behind you, panting from rage and despair at the fact that your stupor does not attend to him. He besieges you in sleepless nights, sometimes he takes hold of you in an illness, sometimes he crosses your intentions.
He makes you overbearing and greedy, he pricks your longing for everything, which avails you nothing, he devours your success in discord. He accompanies you as your evil spirit, to whom you can grant no release.
Have you heard of those dark ones who roamed incognito alongside those who ruled the day, conspiratorially causing unrest? Who devised cunning things and did not shrink from any crime to honor their God?
Beside them place Christ, who was the greatest among them. It was too little for him to break the world, so he broke himself And therefore he was the greatest of them all, and the powers of this world did not reach him. But I speak of the dead who fell prey to power, broken by force and not by themselves. Their hordes people the land of the soul.
If you accept / them, they fill you with delusion and rebellion against what rules the world. From the deepest and from the highest they devised the most dangerous things. They were not of a common nature, but fine blades of the hardest steel. They would have nothing to do with the small lives of men. They lived on the heights and accomplished the lowest. They forgot only one thing: they did not live their animal.
The animal does not rebel against its own kind. Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring.
There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it.
He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power. ~Carl Jung; Red Book, Page 296
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
