The mouth utters the word, the sign, and the symbol.
When the flame of your greed consumes you, and nothing remains of you but ash, so nothing of you was steadfast.
Yet the flame in which you consumed yourself has illuminated many
But if you flee from your fire full of fear, you scorch your fellow men, and the burning torment of your greed cannot die out, so long as you do not desire yourself
The mouth utters the word, the sign, and the symbol.
If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything.
When the way enters death and we are surrounded by rot and horror, the way rises in the darkness and leaves the mouth as the saving symbol, the word.
It leads the sun on high, for in the symbol there is the release of the bound human force struggling with darkness.
Our freedom does not lie outside us, but within us.
One can be bound outside, and yet one will still feel free since one has burst inner bonds.
One can certainly gain outer freedom through powerful actions, but one creates inner freedom only through the symbol.
The symbol is the word that goes out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue.
It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognizes it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind.
If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know.
But if one does not accept the symbol, it is as if one carelessly went past this door; and since this was the only door leading to the inner chambers, one must pass outside into the streets again, exposed to everything external.
But the soul suffers great need, since outer freedom is of no use to it.
Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates.
These gates are symbols.
Each new gate is at first invisible; indeed, it seems at first that / it must be created, for it exists only if one has dug up the spring’s root, the symbol.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 310-311
