Soul and God ~Carl Jung
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
On the second night I called out to my soul:
“I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside of myself Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them.
For I made discoveries on In my erring through events, humanity, and the world. I found men.
And you, my soul, I found again, first in images within men and then you yourself I found you where I least expected you.
You climbed out of a dark shaft.
You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams.
They burned in my heart and drove me to all the boldest acts of daring, and forced me to rise above myself.
You let me see truths of which I had no previous inkling.
You let me undertake journeys, whose endless length would have scared me, if the knowledge of them had not been secure in you.
I wandered for many years, so long that I forgot that I possessed a soul.
Where were you all this time? Which Beyond sheltered you and gave you sanctuary?
Oh, that you must speak through me, that my speech and I are your symbol and expression! How should I decipher you?
Who are you, child?
My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery.Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard-are you God?
Is God a child, a maiden? Forgive me if I babble.
No one else hears me.
I speak to you quietly, and you know that I am neither a drunkard nor someone deranged, and that my heart twists in pain from the wound, whose darkness delivers speeches full of mockery: “You are lying to yourself! You spoke so as to deceive others and make them believe in you.
You want to be a prophet and chase after your ambition.”
The wound still bleeds, and I am far from being able to pretend that I do not hear the mockery. How strange it sounds to me to call you a child, you who still hold the all-without-end in your hand. went on the way of the day, and you went invisibly with me, putting the pieces together meaningfully, and letting me see the whole in each part.
You took away where I thought to take hold, and you gave me where I did not expect anything and time and again you brought about fate from new and unexpected quarters.
Where I sowed, you robbed me of the harvest, and where I did not sow, you give me fruit a hundredfold.
And time and again I lost the path and found it again where I would never have foreseen it.
You upheld my belief when I was alone and near despair. At every decisive moment you let me believe in myself”
[2] Like a tired wanderer who had sought nothing in the world apart from her, shall I come closer to my soul. I shall learn that my soul finally lies behind everything, and if I cross the world, I am ultimately doing this to find my soul.
Even the dearest are themselves not the goal and end of the l()ve that goes on seeking, they are symbols of their own souls.
My friends, do you guess to what solitude we ascend?
I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul.
I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.
Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration? Y
ou think that the dream is foolish and ungainly.
What is beautiful? What is ungainly? What is clever? What is foolish?
The spirit of this time is your measure, but the spirit of the depths surpasses it at both ends. Only the spirit of this time knows the difference between large and small.
But this difference is invalid, like the spirit which recognizes it.
The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams.
Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it?
Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight.
The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belong~ to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not.
But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full.
You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live or to think.
You will say: “But I cannot live or think everything that others live or think”
But you should say: “The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should thinl(.” It appears as though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now.
But you cannot flee from yourself It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment.
If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself
This way you will never reach the knowledge of the heart.
The knowledge of your heart is how your heart is.
From a cunning heart you will know cunning.
From a good heart you will know goodness.
So that your understanding becomes perfect, consider that your heart is both good and evil. You ask, “What? Should I also live evil?”
The spirit of the depths demands: “The life that you could still live, you should live. Well-being decides, not your well-being, not the well-being of the others, but only well-being.”
Well-being is between me and others, in society.
I, too, lived which I had not done before, and which I could still do. I lived into the depths, and the depths began to speak.
The depths taught me the other truth. It thus united ‘sense and nonsense in me.
I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf completely subjugated, utterly obedient.
The spirit of the depths taught me to say: “I am the servant of a child.”
Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need.
The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason.
He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts.
But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child:
This dictum Was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.
If you are boys, your God is a woman.
If you are women, your God is a boy.
If you are men, your God is a maiden.
The God is where you are not.
So: it is wise that one has a God; this servesfor your peifection.
A maiden is the pregnant future.
A boy is the engenderingfuture.
A woman is: having given birth.
A man is: having engendered.
So: if you are childlike beings now, your God will descendfrom the height
of ripeness to age and death.
But if you are developed beings, having engendered or given birth, in body
or in soul, so your God rises from the radiant cradle, to the incalculable height
of the future, to the maturity and fullness of the coming time.
He who still has his life before him is a child.
He who lives life in the present is developed.
If you thus live all that you can live, you are developed.
He who is a child in this time, his Goldies.
He who is developed in this time, his God continues to live.
The spirit of the depths teaches this mystery.
Prosperous and woeful are those whose God is developed!
Prosperous and woeful are those whose God is a child!
What is better, that man has life ahead of him, or that God does?
I know no answer. Live; the unavoidable decides.
The spirit of the depths taught me that my life is encompassed by the divine
child. 58 From his hand everything unexpected came to me, everything living.
This child is what I feel as an eternally springing youth in me.
I n childish men you feel the hopeless transience. All that you saw passing
is yet to come for him. His future is full of transience.
But the transience of the things coming toward you has never yet experi~
enced a human meaning.
Your continuing to live is a living onward. You engender and give birth
to what is to come, you are fecund, you live onward.
The childish is unfruitful, what is to come to him is what already has ‘been
engendered and already withered. It does not live onward.
My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn.
There will be no one who will laugh at me as I laughed at myself Your God should not be a man of mockery, rather you yourself will be the man of mockery.
You should mock yourself and rise above this.
If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there, drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked and tormented for the sake of our sins, so that you totally become his nature, deny his being-apart-from-you; you should be he himself not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God.
Is there anyone among you who believes he can be spared the way? Can he swindle his way past the pain of Christ?
I say: “Such a one deceives himself to his own detriment.
He beds down on thorns and fire. No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is to come.
You should all become Christs.
You do not overcome the old teaching through doing less, but through doing more.
Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers.
It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Pages 233-234.