Carl Jung: You too are infected with this collective sickness.
Therefore away with your crude and vulgar desirousness, which childishly and shortsightedly sees only goals within its own narrow horizon.
Admittedly sulphur is a vital spirit, a “Yetser Ha-ra,” an evil spirit of passion, though like this an active element; useful as it is at times, it is an obstacle between you and your goal.
The water of your interest is not pure, it is poisoned by the leprosy of desirousness which is the common ill.
You too are infected with this collective sickness.
Therefore bethink you for once, “extrahe cogitationem,” and consider:
What is behind all this desirousness?
A thirsting for the eternal, which as you see can never be satisfied with the best because it is “Hades” in whose honour the desirous “go mad and rave.”
The more you cling to that which all the world desires, the more you are Everyman, who has not yet discovered himself and stumbles through the world like a blind man leading the blind with somnambulistic certainty into the ditch.
Everyman is always a multitude. Cleanse your interest of that collective sulphur which clings to all like a leprosy.
For desire only burns in order to burn itself out, and in and from this fire arises the true living spirit which generates life according to its own laws, and is not blinded by the shortsightedness of our intentions or the crude presumption of our superstitious belief in the will.
Goethe says . . .
That livingness I praise
Which longs for flaming death.
This means burning in your own fire and not being like a comet or a flashing beacon, showing others the right way but not knowing it yourself.
The unconscious demands your interest for its own sake and wants to be accepted for what it is.
Once the existence of this opposite is accepted, the ego can and should come to terms with its demands. Unless the content given you by the unconscious is acknowledged, its compensatory effect is not only nullified but actually changes into its opposite, as it then tries to realize itself literally and concretely.
and thou wilt have in thy power
the Fount of the Knight of Tresunt
whose waters are rightfully
. dedicated to the maiden Diana.
The fountain of Bernardus Trevisanus is the bath of renewal that was mentioned earlier.
The ever-flowing fountain expresses a continual flow of interest toward the unconscious, a kind of constant attention or “religio,” which might also be called devotion.
The crossing of unconscious contents into consciousness is thus made considerably easier, and this is bound to benefit the psychic balance in the long run.
Diana as the numen and nymph of this spring is an excellent formulation of the figure we know as the anima.
If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water.
For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our psychic life are separated.
Worthless is this thief, armed
with the malignity of arsenic,
from whom the winged youth
fleeth, shuddering. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 192-193
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