Without talking back from now on, I will continue to tell you [Jung’s Soul] how I caught sight of a woman [Toni Wolff] three years ago, whose soul seemed to me more valuable than my marital anxiety.
I conquered my fear out of love for her.
But you wanted it that way and gave me a dream, which rendered a decision…: ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 155
A huge task lay before me—I saw its enormous size—and its value and meaning escaped me.
I got into the dark, and I groped along my path. That path led inward and downward. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 149
The more uncommon these highest truths are, the more inhuman must they be and the less they speak to you as something valuable or meaningful concerning human essence and being.
Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom that you seek. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 208
One must not improve others, it seems. To do things oneself in minutest detail, that is what is needful.
No longer should it be said, “you should,” but rather “I should” if I have not already thought “I will.” ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 209
What a burden and danger is vanity! There is nothing about which one could not be vain.
Nothing is more difficult than to define the limits of vanity.
One who creates should be especially wary of success, though needs it. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 209
My soul, you are terribly real.
You have set me with hard thrust on the sharp stones of misery and death.
I grow weak and miserable-my blood, my precious lifeblood trickles away between these stones. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 214
What shadows over the earth! All lights gutter out in final despondency and loneliness.
Death has entered, and there is no one left to grieve.
This is a final truth and no riddle.
The most extreme human truths are no riddles.
Why did we think they were riddles
What delusion could make us believe in riddles? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 214
This night begins with the feeling of ignorance and incapacity. Only expectancy is on the lookout as if from a high tower that dominates the surrounding country. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 197
What shadows over the earth! All lights gutter out in final despondency and loneliness.
Death has entered, and there is no one left to grieve.
This is a final truth and no riddle.
The most extreme human truths are no riddles.
Why did we think they were riddles
What delusion could make us believe in riddles? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 214
This night begins with the feeling of ignorance and incapacity.
Only expectancy is on the lookout as if from a high tower that dominates the surrounding country. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 197
Death, does it not uncover the terrible deceit of life? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 213
Do you believe that all that struggle and all these blood sacrifices left no mark on the soul of the Christian?
And do you believe that one who has not experienced this struggle most intimately can still partake of its fruit?
No one can flout the spiritual development of many centuries and then reap what they have not sowed. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 201
I know that there are those who are always in heat, and those who also want to dance for their Gods; some are ridiculous jubilant old men and women and others posture at antiquity, instead of honestly admitting their utter incapacity for religious expression. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 201
The more uncommon these highest truths are, the more inhuman must they be and the less they speak to you as something valuable or meaningful concerning human essence and being.
Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom that you seek. ~Scholar’s Maiden, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 208
After that I had this dream around l 1/2 years ago: I am lying on a bed with my wife in a chamber with an open ceiling (similar to the roofless houses of Pompeii.)
All at once my wife startles and climbs the wall rapidly and disappears upward.
She wears a long white dress with mystical figures, such as witches or heretics, who are burnt at the stake. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 160
You may call us symbols for the same reason that you can also call your real fellow men symbols, if you wish to.
But we exist and are just as real as your fellow men. Y
ou invalidate nothing and solve nothing by calling us symbols. ~Elijah, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 189
It seems as if compulsory realities exist here.
What forced me to come here if not those “other” realities?
Apparently they are somehow superior to me as I did not know anything about them, whereas they knew about me and forced me-could force me-to come to them on a way unknown to me, that I must have flown through unconsciously. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 190
I see around me the mighty walls that form the horizon-jagged crenellations.
Gray and yellow lichen grows on the stones, apart from this not a blade of grass.
What is it with this place? I think it could be a Druidic sacred place of worship. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 192
Your work is fulfilled here. Other things will come, of which you do not know yet.
But seek untiringly, and above all write exactly what you see. ~Elijah, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 196
I am the one who, when love
Breathes on me, notices, and in the manner
That he dictates within, I utter words.”
Dante. Purgatorio.
And then, in the same manner as a flame
Which follows whatever shape it takes,
The new form follows the spirit exactly.
Dante. [Purgatorio]. ~Dante, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 197
So, I have come to absolutely the right place. I have wandered a long time through the world, seeking those like you who sit upon a high tower on the lookout for things unseen. ~The Red One, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 198
I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 200
I thought after waking: a men’s cloister. Ever since then many new thoughts about new forms of society. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page163
The air shook with the anthem of blaspheming souls, when the God plunged you into my heart. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 177
You new spark of an eternal fire, into which night, into what kind of mud. were you born! Fires of madness are blazing toward you as sacrificial fires. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 177
You will wring truthful prayers from your believers, and they must invoke your glory in tongues that are atrocious to them.
You will fall on them in the hour of their disgrace and humiliation, and will become known to them in what they hate, fear, and abhor. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 178
Oh I know that the salvation of mercy is given only to those who believe in the highest and faithlessly betray themselves for thirty pieces of silver. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 178
You do me wrong, Elijah is my father, and he knows the deepest mysteries, the walls of his house are made of precious stones, his wells hold healing water and his deep eye sees the things of the future-And what wouldn’t you give for a single look into the infinite unfolding of what is to come? Are these not worth a sin for you?” ~Salome, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 181
We [Elijah/Salome] are really together and are not symbols. We are real and together. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 182
I do not love her, I fear her. My knees tremble.
A voice says: “Therein you acknowledge her divine power.” Must I love Salome? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 183
Turn all your anger against yourself, because only you can hinder yourself from looking.
The mystery play is delicate as air and thin smoke and you are brutal matter that itself is already disturbingly heavy. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 185
Yet let all your hope, which is your greatest good and highest ability, precede and serve you as a leader in the world of the dark, because it is of similar substance as the creations of this world. let your hope swell toward it into the indeterminable. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 185
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” (Auguries of Innocence). ~William Blake, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 185, fn 186
You have not forgotten it. It burned deep inside you.
But you are afraid of megalomania? Are you that cowardly?
Or can you not differentiate this thought from your own self, from your human nature, enough so that you wished to claim it for yourself? ~Elijah, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 188
I think it would be obvious that your thoughts are just as much outside your mind: self as trees and animals are outside your body. ~Elijah, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 188
Keep interpretation far from me, that bad prison master of science who binds the soul and imprisons it in a lightless cell, but above all protect me from the venomous serpent of critique, which is a healing serpent only on the surface, yet in your depths is infernal poison and agonizing death. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 170
Book of my most difficult experiments, I open you with inner resistance!
Everything in me balks at the immediacy of this experience! I want to coax myself like a nervous horse.
I shy away from myself as if I were a nocturnal monster. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 171
But on the fourth night I cried, “To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself.” ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 171
Anyone who fights with monsters should take care that he does not in the process become a monster.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into you. ~Nietzsche, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 171, fn 113
Perhaps I ensnare myself in self-deceit and hellish monkey business, and I am a rascal grinning at myself in a mirror, a fool in my own madhouse.
Perhaps, my soul, you stumble over my folly. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 172-173
Gradually it dawned on me that the highest truth is one and the same with the absurd. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 175
The first step in individuation is tragic guilt.
The accumulation of guilt demands expiation ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page on” 176, fn 142
This sounds like religion, but it is not.
I am speaking just as a philosopher. People sometimes call me a religious leader.
I am not that. I have no message, no mission; I attempt only to understand.
We are philosophers in the old sense of the word, lovers of wisdom. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 98
With inner resistance I approach this book.
I ceaselessly devalue it and yet something forces me to dive into it, actually into myself. Why?- It wants to follow this way. Strange- ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 163
What a deception! I have avoided myself, no, actually my self, the place of my soul, where she dwelled and lived.
I have never returned to this place except while dreaming. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 164
Is it solitude, to be with oneself?
Solitude is true only when the self is a desert. I hear the words:
“An anchorite in his own desert.” The monks in the Syrian desert occur to me. My dream? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 164
Only life is true. And only life leads me into the desert, truly not my thinking, which would like to return to thoughts, to men and events, since it feels uncanny in the desert. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 164
I hear the cruel word “Wait.” This is the devil’s most horrible punishment of hell, he lets people wait. Torment belongs to the desert- I actually know it, but I didn’t want to know. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 165
After a hard struggle I have come a piece of the way nearer to you.
How hard this struggle was! I had fallen into an undergrowth of doubt, confusion, and scorn.
Only the love of those, to whom I gave love, saved me from the darkness. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 165
Do you still not know yet that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?
Do you still not know that fulfilment comes only to the one who does not desire, to the one who is not greedy. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 166
Then, listen, you think little of me.
Do you still not know that you are not writing a book to feed your vanity, but that you are speaking with me?
How can you suffer from scorn if you address me with those words that I give you? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 167
I have learned that one must give one’s heart to men, but one’s intellect to the spirit of humanity, God.
Then its work can be beyond vanity, since there is no more hypocritical whore than the intellect when it replaces the heart. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 168
I live first in the upper world, but in your inner world, my soul, I am like a shadow without substance, trembling and blown away by every breeze. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 170
Forgive me, my heart is full, because I have come from far wandering. wandered for eleven years, so long that I forgot that I possessed a soul that I could call my own. I belonged to men and things. I did not belong to myself. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 151
I am thinking of this first vision that you gave me in a dream, where I saw You [Jung’s Soul] hovering. (Is it 14 years since then?) ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 152
Life tore me away, and I deliberately moved away from you and I have done so for all these years.
But I remained with you minimally until the love for women tore me completely off and away from you. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 152
My child, you are not God, how could you be God?
You are my soul and I am not allowed-not yet-to know, why you call yourself “child” – and why a girl? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 153
Why must I tell you all that, my soul? Why do you chain me to this book?
And why do you drive my pen so furiously, as if it had to go a long way and hurry to cover it? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 154
You [Jung] write to be printed and circulated among people. You want to cause a stir through the unusual. Nietzsche did this better than you. You are aping Saint Augustine. ~Jung’s Soul, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 157
What is it I shall do? Tell you more about my inner matters?
Shall I overcome the daimon of my interior? Is it the hundred-headed dragon? ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 159
My pen bristles-regardless. Oh what impotence of the intellect! Life pushes me beyond criticism. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 160
But one thing you must know, the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life.
This life is the way, the long sought after way to the unfathomable, which we call “divine.” ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 149
My soul, I found you again, I would like to, no, I will stay with you.
My journey should continue with you.
I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude, no longer alone as before and greedy and impatient, but with comforting courage and quiet delight. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 150