Carl Jung: We can never abandon self, or else we will abandon our work of redemption.
It lies in giving. One should give what one can relinquish or the abundance that makes one suffer.
Otherwise one gives according to the principle of the do ut des.
The joy I have intentionally given to the other obliges the other to provide a gift in return.
Your own overflowing joy never obliges the other.
High barriers would still need to be erected between men, less to protect them against mutual burdens than against mutual virtues.
The Christian morality of our time goes on producing mutual enchantment.
But sin resides in that.
If I accept self-forgetting virtue, I make myself the selfish tyrant of the other, and I am thus also forced to surrender myself again in order to make another my master, which always leaves me with a bad impression and is not to the other’s advantage.
Admittedly, this interplay underpins the state, but the soul of the individual becomes damaged since man thus learns always to live from the other instead of from himself.
We can enjoy the fruits of a tree without cutting it down.
If one is capable, one should not surrender oneself, as that induces, indeed even forces, the other to do likewise.
Not that it would be a beautiful or a pleasant thing to live with one’s self, but it serves the redemption of the self.
He who falls away from himself has not abandoned himself.
He has simply freed himself. He has lost out, he suffers it, but at the same time through this loss he has brought about less damage to the other than through self-forgetting virtue.
Because his self-loss entails no obligation to the other, but only something contagious.
This occurrence belongs to the natural events in human life.
Normally a better knowledge of the self follows from it.
Self-forgetting virtue is an unnatural alienation from one’s own essence, which is thus deprived of redemption. 205 Bili It is a sin to deliberately alienate the other from his self by means of** one’s own virtuousness.
This sin rebounds on us.
It is submission enough, amply enough, if we subjugate ourselves to our self.
The work of redemption is always first to be done on ourselves.
This work cannot be done without love for ourselves.
Selfless love is a sin, because it is not true.
We can never abandon self, or else we will abandon our work of redemption.
But we also should not use the other for our own alleged redemption.
The other is no ladder for our feet. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. V, Page 236-239
Enlightenment, Godhead, Gnostics, Sacrifice, Redemption
The text continues:
Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable Light Buddha Amitabha.
The soul is assuredly not small, but the radiant Godhead itself. The West finds this statement either very dangerous, if not downright blasphemous, or else accepts it unthinkingly and then suffers from a theosophical inflation. Somehow we always have a wrong attitude to these things.
But if we can master ourselves far enough to refrain from our chief error of always wanting to do something with things and put them to practical use, we may perhaps succeed in learning an important lesson from these teachings, or at least in appreciating the greatness of the Bardo Thodol which vouchsafes to the dead man the ultimate and highest truth, that even the gods are the radiance and reflection of our own souls.
No sun is thereby eclipsed for the Oriental as it would be for the Christian, who would feel robbed of his God; on the contrary, his soul is the light of the Godhead, and the Godhead is the soul. The East can sustain this paradox better than the unfortunate Angelus Silesius, who even today would be psychologically far in advance of his time.
It is highly sensible of the Bardo Thodol to make clear to the dead man the primacy of the psyche, for that is the one thing which life does not make clear to us. We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and oppress that we never get a chance, in the midst of all these “given” things, to wonder by whom they are “given.” It is from this world of “given” things that the dead man liberates himself; and the purpose of the instruction is to help him towards this liberation.
We, if we put ourselves in his place, shall derive no lesser reward from it, since we learn from the very first paragraphs that the “giver” of all “given” things dwells within us. This is a truth which in the face of all evidence, in the greatest things as in the smallest, is never known, although it is often so very necessary, indeed vital, for us to know it.
Such knowledge, to be sure, is suitable only for contemplatives who are minded to understand the purpose of existence, for those who are Gnostics by temperament and therefore believe in a savior who, like the savior of the Mandaeans, is called “knowledge of life” (Manda d’Hayye). Perhaps it is not granted to many of us to see the world as something “given.”
A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as “given” by the very nature of the psyche. It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see
all the things that happen to me than to observe how I make them happen. Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances.
That is why attempts of this kind were always the object of secret initiations, culminating as a rule in a figurative death which symbolized the total character of this reversal. And, in point of fact, the instruction given in the Bardo Thodol serves to recall to the dead man the experiences of his initiation and the teachings of his guru, for the instruction is, at bottom, nothing less than an initiation of the dead into the Bardo life, just as the initiation of the living was a preparation for the Beyond.
Such was the case, at least, with all the mystery cults in ancient civilizations from the time of the Egyptian and Eleusinian mysteries. In the initiation of the living, however, this “Beyond” is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind’s intentions and outlook, a psychological “Beyond” or, in Christian terms, a “redemption” from the trammels of the world and of sin.
Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything “given.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Pages 513-514, Paragraphs 839-842.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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