Kindle Notes & Highlights
He held that the mandala represented one of the best examples of the universality of an archetype.
The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces 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 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.
But the spirit of the depths said: “No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the world of this time with iron, the call of the desert would break all chains. Truly, I prepare you for solitude.”
The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.
There is only one way and that is your way.
You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.
The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty.
Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon
I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system.39 Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.
Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration? You think that the dream is foolish and ungainly. What is beautiful? What is ungainly? What is clever? What is foolish? The spirit of this time is your measure, but the spirit of the depths surpasses it at both ends. Only the spirit of this time knows the difference between large and small. But this difference is invalid, like the spirit which recognizes it.
But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live or to think.55 You will say: “But I cannot live or think everything that others live or think.” But you should say: “The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.” It appears as though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now.56 But you cannot flee from yourself. It
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But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.
The spirit of the depths taught me that my life is encompassed by the divine child.58 From his hand everything unexpected came to me, everything living. This child is what I feel as an eternally springing youth in me.
Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.
I saw the things of my soul as small, pitiably small. You force me to see them as large, to make them large. Is that your aim? I follow, but it terrifies me. Hear my doubts, otherwise I cannot follow, since your meaning is a supreme meaning, and your steps are the steps of a God.
You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.
I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must even love what horrifies me. We must learn such from that saint who was disgusted by the plague infections; she drank the pus of plague boils and became aware that it smelled like roses. The acts of the saint were not in vain.
If you believe that you are the master of your soul, then become her servant. If you were her servant, make yourself her master, since she needs to be ruled. These should be your first steps.
But on the seventh night, the spirit of the depths spoke to me: “Look into your depths, pray to your depths, waken the dead.”71 But I stood helpless and did not know what I could do. I looked into myself, and the only thing I found within was the memory of earlier dreams,
all of which I wrote down without knowing what good this would do. I wanted to throw everything away and return to the light of day. But the spirit stopped me and forced me back into myself.
Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?”
The cleverer you are, the more foolish your simplemindedness. The totally clever are total fools in their simplemindedness. We cannot save ourselves from the cleverness of the spirit of this time through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most, namely simplemindedness. Yet we also do not want to be artificial fools because we have fallen into simplemindedness, rather we will be clever fools. That leads to the supreme meaning. Cleverness couples itself with intention. Simplemindedness knows no intention. Cleverness conquers the world, but
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My spirit is a spirit of torment, it tears asunder my contemplation, it would dismantle everything and rip it apart. I am still a victim of my thinking. When can I order my thinking to be quiet, so that my thoughts, those unruly hounds, will crawl to my feet?
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Speak then of sick delusion when the spirit of the depths can no longer stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech, and makes him believe that he himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take himself for the spirit of the times.
The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create. The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world.
If the hero in you is slain, then the sun of the depths rises in you, glowing from afar, and from a dreadful place. But all the same, everything that up till now seemed to be dead in you will come to life, and will change into poisonous serpents that will cover the sun, and you will fall into night and confusion.
You thought you knew that abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you. Think of all the frightful and devilish things that men have inflicted on their brothers. That should happen to you in your heart. Suffer it yourself through your own hand, and know that it is your own heinous and devilish hand that inflicts the suffering on you, but not your brother, who wrestles with his own devils.
The hero wants to open up everything he can. But the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot. Incapacity prevents further ascent. Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it. We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life. For how else shall it develop into ability?
We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it. But that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity will overcome us and demand its share of life. Our ability will desert us, and we will believe, in the sense of the spirit of this time, that it is a loss. Yet it is no loss but a gain, not for outer trappings, however, but for inner capability. The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal. This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands. If all heroism is erased, we fall back into the misery of humanity
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My soul: “Who gives you thoughts and words? Do you make them? Are you not my serf, a recipient who lies at my door and picks up my alms? And you dare think that what you devise and speak could be nonsense? Don’t you know yet that it comes from me and belongs to me?”
So I cried full of anger, “But then my indignation must also come from you, and in me you are indignant against yourself.” My soul then spoke the ambiguous words: “That is civil war.”
I do not yield, I am defiant. You can go on devising torments, spider-legged monsters, ridiculous, hideous, frightful theatrical spectacles. Come close, I am ready. Ready, my soul, you who are a devil, to wrestle with you too. You donned the mask of a God, and I worshiped you. Now you wear the mask of a devil, a frightful one, the mask of the banal, of eternal mediocrity! Only one favor! Give me a moment to step back and consider! Is the struggle with this mask worthwhile? Was the mask of God worth worshiping? I cannot do it, the lust for battle burns in my limbs. No, I cannot leave the
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It was civil war in me. I myself was the murderer and the murdered. The deadly arrow was stuck in my heart, and I did not know what it meant. My thoughts were murder and the fear of death, which spread like poison everywhere in my body.
If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their Gods, and because they do not know that they should kill their Gods in themselves.
Because you're too weak to kill the hero head-on.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 think 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...
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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.
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.
If you are in yourself, 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.
