On the second night thereafter, I spoke to my soul and said, This new world appears weak and artificial to me. Artificial is a bad word, but the mustard seed that grew into a tree, the word that was conceived in the womb of a virgin, became a God to whom the earth was subject. As I spoke thus, the spirit of the depths suddenly erupted. He filled me with intoxication and mist and spoke these words with a powerful voice: 1 have received your sprout, you who are to come! I have received it in deepest need and lowliness. I covered it in shabby patchwork and bedded down on poor words. And mockery worshiped it, your child, your wondrous child, the child of one who is to come, who should announce the father, a fruit that is older than the tree on which it grew. In pain will you conceive and joyful is your birth. Fear is your herald, doubt stands to your right, disappointment to your left. We passed by in our ridiculousness and senselessness when we caught sight of you. Our eyes were blinded and our knowledge foll silent when we received your radiance. You new spark of an eternal fire, into which night were you born? You will wring truthful prayers from your believers, and they must speak of your glory in tongues that are atrocious to them. You will come over them in the hour of their disgrace, and will become known to them in what they hate, foar, and abhor. Your voice, the rarest pleasing sound, will be heard amid the stammerings of wretches, rejects, and those condemned as worthless. Your realm will be touched by the hands of those who also worshiped before the most profound lowliness, and whose longing drove them through the mud tide of evil. You will give your gifts to those who pray to you in terror and doubt, and your light will shine upon those whose knees must bend before you unwillingly and who are filled with resentment. Your life is with he who has overcome himself I and who has disowned his selfovercoming. I also 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. Those who will dirty their pure hands and cheat on their best knowledge against error and take their virtues from a murderers grave are invited to your great banquet. The constellation of your birth is an ill and changing star. These, oh child of what is to come, are the wonders that will bear testimony that you are a veritable God. When my prince had fallen, the spirit of the depths opened my vision and let me become aware of the birth of the new God. The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly. I understood that the God whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation, humanity or even in godliness. Once the God was there. I understood that the new God would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him? If we have risen near the heights of good and evil, then our badness and hatefulness lie in the most extreme torment. Mans torment is so great and the air of the heights so weak that he can hardly live anymore. The good and the beautiful freeze to the ice of the absolute idea and the bad and hateful become mud puddles full of crazy life. Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his underworldly brother. No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it. The men of yore said that he had preached there to the deceased. What they say is true, but do you know how this happened? It was folly and monkey business, an atrocious Hells masquerade of the holiest mysteries. How else could Christ have saved his Antichrist? Read the unknown books of the ancients, and you will learn much from them. Notice that Christ did not remain in Hell, but rose to the heights in the beyond. Our conviction of the value of the good and beautiful has become strong and unshakable, that is why life can extend beyond this and still fulfill everything that lay bound and yearning. But the bound and yearning is also the,hateful and bad. Are you again indignant about the hateful and the bad? Through this you can recognize h(ow great are their force and value for life. Do you think that it is dead in you? But this dead can also change into serpents.These serpents will extinguish the prince of your days. Do you see what beauty and joy came over men when the depths unleashed this greatest war? And yet it was a frightful beginning. If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves; say it out loud that you are afraid of yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself Only the heroes say that they are fearless. But you know what happens to the hero. With fear and trembling, looking around yourselves with mistrust, go thus into the depths, but do not do this alone; two or more is greater security since the depths are full of murder. Also secure yourselves the way of retreat. Go cautiously as if you were cowards, so that you preempt the soul murderers.138 The depths would like to devour you whole and choke you in mud. He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. The depths are stronger than us; so do not be heroes, be clever and drop the heroics, since nothing is more dangerous than to play the hero. The depths want to keep you; they have not returned very many up to now, and therefore men fled. from the depths and attacked them. What if the depths, due to the assault, now change themselves into death? But the depths indeed have changed themselves into death; therefore when they awoke they inflicted a thousandfold death. We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back The dead matter will change into black serpents. Do not be rightened, the serpents will immediately put out the sun of your days, and a night with wonderful will-o-the-wisps will come over you. Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. . What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain. Hell is when you must thinlc and feel and do everything that you know you do not want. Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful. But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life. If the left foot does not move, then the right one does, and you move. The God wills this. You say: the Christian God is unequivocal, he is love. But what is more ambiguous than love? Love is the way of life, but your love is only on the way of life if you have a left and a right. Nothing is easier than to play at ambiguity and nothing is more difficult than living ambiguity. He who plays is a child; his God is old and dies. He who lives is awakened; his God is young and goes on. He who plays hides from the inner death. He who lives feels the going onward and immortality. So leave the play to the players. Let fall what wants to fall; if you stop it, it will sweep you away. There is a true love that does not concern itself with neighbors. When the hero was slain and the meaning recognized in the absurdity; when all tension came rushing down from gravid clouds, when everything had become cowardly and looked to its own rescue, I became aware of the birth of the God. Opposing me, the God sank into my heart when I was confused by mockery and worship, by grief and laughter, by yes and no. The one arose from the melting together of the two. He was born as a child from my own human soul, which had conceived him with resistance like a virgin. Thus it corresponds to the image that the ancients have given to us. But when the mother, my soul, was pregnant with the God, I did not know it. It even seemed to me as if my soul herself was the God, although he lived only in her body. And thus the image of the ancients is fulfilled: I pursued my soul to kill the child in it. For I am also the worst enemy of my God. But I also recognized that my enmity is decided upon in the God. He is mockery and hate and anger, since this is also a way of life. I must say that the God could not come into being before the hero had been slain. The hero as we understand him has become an enemy of the God, since the hero is perfection. The Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no one is perfect, we need the Gods. The Gods love perfection because it is the total way of life. But the Gods are not with him who wishes to be perfect, because he is an imitation of perfection. Imitation was a way of life when men still needed the heroic prototype. The monkeys manner is a way of life for monkeys, and for man as long as he is like a monkey Human apishness has lasted a terribly long time, but the time will come when a piece of that apishness will fall away from men. That will be a time of salvation and the dove, and the eternal fire, and redemption will descend. Then there will no longer be a hero, and no one who can imitate him. Because from that time henceforth all imitation is cursed. The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitators and no pupils. He forces men through himself The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself We think that there is singleness within us, and communality outside us. Outside of us is the communal in relation to the external, while singleness refers to us. We are single if we are in ourselves, but communal in relation to what is outside us. But if we are outside of ourselves, then we are single and selfish in the communal. Our self suffers privation if we are outside ourselves, and thus it satisfies its needs with communality Consequently; communality is distorted into singleness. If we are in ourselves, we fulfill the need of the sel£ we prosper, and through this we become aware of the needs of the communal and can fulfill them. If we set a God outside of ourselves, he tears us loose from the self since the God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the God moves into the self he snatches us from what is outside us. We arrive at singleness in ourselves. So the God becomes communal in reference to what is outside us, but single in relation to us. No one has my God, but my God has everyone, including myself The Gods of all individual men always have all other men, including myself so it is always only the one God despite his multiplicity You arrive at him in yourself and only through your self seizing you. It seizes you in the advancement of your life. The hero must fall for the sake of our redemption, since he is the model and demands imitation. But the measure of imitation is fulfilled.We should become reconciled to solitude in ourselves and to the God outside of us. If we enter into this solitude then the life of the God begins. If we are in ourselves, then the space around us is free, but filled by the God. Our relations to men go through this empty space and also through the God. But earlier it went through selfishness since we were outside ourselves. Therefore the spirit foretold to me that the cold of outer space will spread across the earth. With this he showed me in an image that the God will step between men and drive every individual with the whip of icy cold to the warmth of his own monastic hearth. Because people were beside themselves, going into raptures like madmen. Selfish desire ultimately desires itself You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain. If you desire yourself you produce the divine son in your embrace with yourself your desire is the father of the God, your self is the mother of the God, but the son is the new God, your master. If you embrace yourself then it will appear to you as if the world has become cold and empty The coming of God moves into this emptiness. If you are in your solitude, and all the space around you has become cold and unending, then you have moved far from men, and at the same time you have come near to them as never before. Selfish desire only apparently led you to men, but in reality it led you away from them and in the end to yourself which to you and to others was the most remote. But now, if you are in solitude, your God leads you to the God of others, and through that to the true neighbor, to the neighbor of the self in others. If you are in yoursel£ you become aware of your incapacity. You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself So you will also no longer force others to become heroes. Like you, they suffer from incapacity Incapacity; too, wants to live, but it will overthrow your Gods. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 242-245.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 11:08:57 +0000
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