If we wish to stay on the heights
If we wish to stay on the heights we have reached, we must struggle all the time to consolidate our consciousness and its attitude.
But we soon discover that this praiseworthy and apparently unavoidable battle with the years leads to stagnation and desiccation of soul.
Our convictions become platitudes ground out on a barrel-organ, our ideals become starchy habits, enthusiasm stiffens into automatic gestures.
The source of the water of life seeps away. We ourselves may not notice it, but everybody else does, and that is even more painful.
If we should risk a little introspection, coupled perhaps with an energetic attempt to be honest for once with ourselves, we may get a dim idea of all the wants, longings, and fears that have accumulated down there-a repulsive and sinister sight.
The mind shies away, but life wants to flow down into the depths. Fate itself seems to preserve us from this, for each of us has a tendency to become an immovable pillar of the past. ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation (1952). CW 5: P. 553
At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings.
At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings.
You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness / you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life.
If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race.
There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment.
How can you become if you never are?
Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become.
If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self.
If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being.
What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is at its strongest.
For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings.
Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low; although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266.
Being a solitary and fleeing to the desert of the soul.
[Being a solitary and fleeing to the desert of the soul is not without its own inherent dangers.]
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.
