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999 shadow

Red Book

The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together.

The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment.

The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the .fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew.

The image of God has a shadow.

The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow.

For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow?

The shadow is nonsense.

It lacks force and has no continued existence through itself.

But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning.

Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows.

There are many who need the shadows and not the light.

The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself.

The supreme meaning is great and small, it is as wide as the space of the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body.

The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness.

The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me.

It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic.

It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the spirit of the depths held me, and I had to drink the bitterest of all draughts.

The spirit of this time tempted me with the thought that all this belongs to the shadowiness of the God-image.

This would be pernicious deception, since the shadow is nonsense.

But the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead.

I resisted recognizing that the everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead.

I fled this thought, I hid myself behind the highest and coldest stars.

But the spirit of the depths caught up with me, and forced the bitter drink between my lips. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 230