The Red Book: A Reader's Edition

by C.G. Jung

He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone. He must embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love. A mountain is nothing, and a grain of sand holds kingdoms, or also nothing. Judgment must fall from you, even taste, but above all pride, even when it is based on merit. Utterly poor, miserable, humiliated, ignorant, go on through the gate. Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop yourself from looking and from living. The mystery play is soft like air and thin smoke, and you are raw matter that is disturbingly heavy. But let your hope, which is your highest good and highest ability, lead the way and serve you as a guide in the world of darkness, since it is of like substance with the forms of that world.

164

166

168

You begin to have a presentiment of the whole when you embrace your opposite principle, since the whole belongs to both principles, which grow from one root.

May the thinking person accept his pleasure, and the feeling person accept his own thought. Such leads one along the way.

You see, prophet, I am tired, my head is as heavy as lead. I am lost in my ignorance. I have toyed with myself enough. I played hypocritical games with myself and they all would have disgusted me, were it not clever to perform what others expect from us in the world of men. It seems to me as if I were more real here. And yet I do not like being here.”

190It is no small matter to acknowledge one’s yearning. For this many need to make a particular effort at honesty. All too many do not want to know where their yearning is, because it would seem to them impossible or too distressing. And yet yearning is the way of life. If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you. So you do not live your life but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life.

The image of the hero was set up for all in every age through the appetite for imitation. Therefore the hero was murdered, since we have all been aping him. Do you know why you cannot abandon apishness? For fear of loneliness and defeat.

To live oneself means: to be one’s own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore say that you are reluctant to live yourself. The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt, and shatters the sanctified.

197In the moment of your bewilderment, follow your forethinking and not your blind desire, since forethinking leads you to the difficulties that should always come first. They come nevertheless. If you look for a light, you fall first into an even deeper darkness. In this darkness you find a light with a weak reddish flame that gives only a low brightness, but it is enough for you to see your neighbor. It is exhausting to reach this goal that seems to be no goal. And so it is good: I am paralyzed and therefore ready to accept. My forethinking rests on the lion, my power.

Through your selfish wish, you pushed out of your thoughts everything that you do not consider ordered, that is, unfitting. You create order according to what you know, you do not know the thoughts of chaos, and yet they exist. My thoughts are not my self, and my I does not embrace the thought. Your thought has this meaning and that, not just one, but many meanings. No one knows how many.

Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, fol. vi(v)/vii(r) and one lays the blame on the other. If one-half of mankind is at fault, then every man is half at fault. But he does not see the conflict in his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster. If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what in you is similar to your brother.

If you overpower and kill your fellow man who is contrary to you, then you also kill that person in yourself and have murdered a part of your life. The spirit of this dead man follows you and does not let your life become joyful. You need your wholeness to live onward.

The hero strives after the utmost in the pure principle, and therefore he finally falls for the serpent. If you go to thinking,224 take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love. The serpent lurks behind the pure principle. Therefore I lost courage, until I found the serpent that at once led me across to the other principle.

Whoever is in love is a full and overflowing vessel, and awaits the giving. Whoever is in forethinking is deep and hollow and awaits fulfillment.

It was my will that deceived me. It was my will that provoked the huge uproar among the daimons. Should I therefore not want anything? I have, and I have fulfilled my will as well as I could, and thus I fed everything in me that strived. In the end I found that I wanted myself in everything, but without looking for myself. Therefore I no longer wanted to seek myself outside of myself, but within. Then I wanted to grasp myself, and then I wanted to go on again, without knowing what I wanted, and thus I fell into the mystery.

I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are

effectual.

If ever you have the rare opportunity to speak with the devil, then do not forget to confront him in all seriousness. He is your devil after all. The devil as the adversary is your own other standpoint; he tempts you and sets a stone in your path where you least want it. Taking the devil seriously does not mean going over to his side, or else one becomes the devil. Rather it means coming to an understanding. Thereby you accept your other standpoint. With that the devil fundamentally loses ground, and so do you. And that may be well and good.

Therefore try to find your real limits. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them. And this happens to you only if you have balance. Without balance you transgress your limits without noticing what has happened to you. You achieve balance, however, only if you nurture your opposite. But that is hateful to you in your innermost core, because it is not heroic.

The more manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous.

But if you remain with yourself, as a man who is himself and not of the devil, then you will remember your humanity. You will not behave toward women per se as a man, but as a human being, that is to say, as if you were of the same sex as her. You will recall your femininity. It may seem to you then as if you were unmanly, stupid, and feminine so to speak. But you must accept the ridiculous, otherwise you will suffer distress, and there will come a time, when you are least observant, when it will suddenly round on you and make you ridiculous. It is bitter for the most masculine man to accept his femininity, since it appears ridiculous to him, powerless and tawdry.

The feminine in men is bound up with evil. I find it on the way of desire. The masculine in the woman is bound up with evil. Therefore people hate to accept their own other. But if you accept it, that which is connected with the perfection of men comes to pass: namely, that when you become the one who is mocked, the white bird of the soul comes flying. It was far away, but your humiliation attracted it.29 The mystery draws near to you, and things happen around you like miracles.

If you remain within arbitrary and artificially created boundaries, you will walk as between two high walls: you do not see the immensity of the world. But if you break down the walls that confine your view, and if the immensity and its endless uncertainty inspire you with fear, then the ancient sleeper awakens in you, whose messenger is the white bird. Then you need the message of the old tamer of chaos. There in the whirl of chaos dwells eternal wonder. Your world begins to become wonderful. Man belongs not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul. Consequently you must make your ordered world horrible, so that you are put off by being too much outside yourself.

Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.

Thus if you go through Hell, you should not forget to give due attention to whatever crosses your path. Quietly look into everything that excites your contempt or rage; thereby you accomplish the miracle that I experienced with the pale maiden. You give soul to the soulless, and thereby it can come to something out of horrible nothingness. Thus you will redeem your other into life.

You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels.

Are there also prisons in Hell for those who never saw the inside of one while they were alive? Incidentally—mustn’t it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality?

Death? Does it not uncover the terrible deceit of life?

Without the depths, I do not have the heights.

Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve those riddles from which we suffer, but not those which please us.

He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness. He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy, since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death. He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes.

The Summa52 lies before you like a book, and an unspeakable greed seizes you to devour it. Consequently you lean back and stiffen and sit for a long time. You are completely incapable of grasping it. Here and there a light flickers, here and there a fruit falls from high trees which you can grasp, here and there your foot strikes gold. But what is it, if you compare it with the totality, which lies spread out tangibly close to you? You stretch out your hand, but it remains hanging in invisible webs. You want to see it exactly as it is but something cloudy and opaque pushes itself exactly in between. You would like to tear a piece out of it; it is smooth and impenetrable like polished steel. So you sink back against the wall, and when you have crawled through all the glowing hot crucibles of the Hell of doubt, you sit once more and lean back, and look at the wonder of the Summa that lies spread out before you. Here and there a light flickers, here and there a fruit falls. For you it is all too little. But you begin to be satisfied with yourself, and you pay no attention to the years passing away. What are years? What is hurrying time to him that sits under a tree? Your time passes like a breath of air and you wait for the next light, the next fruit.

But the unbounded makes you53 anxious since the unbounded is fearful and your humanity rebels against it. Consequently you seek limits and restraints so that you do not lose yourself, tumbling into infinity. Restraint becomes imperative for you. You cry out for the word which has one meaning and no other, so that you escape boundless ambiguity. The word becomes your God, since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic against the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds. You are saved if you can say at last: that is that and only that. You speak the magic word, and the limitless is finally banished. Because of that men seek and make words.

The darkness is your mother; she behooves reverence, since the mother is dangerous. She has power over you, since she gave birth to you. Honor the darkness as the light, and you will illumine your darkness.

If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars. Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night. Through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple. And you prepare to sleep through the millennia like everyone else, and you sleep down into the womb of the millennia, and your walls resound with ancient temple chants. Since the simple is what always was. Peace and blue night spread over you while you dream in the grave of the millennia.

Over there a small dark beetle is crawling along, pushing a ball in front of it—a scarab.61 You dear little animal, are you still toiling away in order to live your beautiful myth? How seriously and undiscouraged it works! If only you had a notion that you are performing an old myth, you would probably renounce your fantasies as we men have also given up playing at mythology.

It’s erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it’s always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent.”

No sooner do you touch the earth than your inner life is over; it flees from you into things.

Like a stray child you stand pitifully among the mighty, who hold the threads of your life. You cry for help and attach yourself to the first person that comes your way. Perhaps he can advise you, perhaps he knows the thought that you do not have, and which all things have sucked out of you.

And therefore what happened to every desirous solitary also happened to him: the devil came to him with smooth tongue and clear reasoning and knew the right word at the right moment. He lured him to his desire. I had to appear to him as the devil, since I had accepted my darkness. I ate the earth and I drank the sun, and I became a greening tree that stands alone and grows.

Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live.

Ideals are, according to their essence, desired and pondered; they exist to this extent, but only to this extent. Yet their effective being cannot be denied. He who believes he is really living his ideals, or believes he can live them, suffers from delusions of grandeur and behaves like a lunatic in that he stages himself as an ideal; but the hero has fallen. Ideals are mortal, so one should prepare oneself for their end: at the same time it probably costs you your neck. For do you not see that it was you who gave meaning, value, and effective force to your ideal? If you have become a sacrifice to the ideal, then the ideal cracks open, plays carnival with you, and goes to Hell on Ash Wednesday. The ideal is also a tool that one can put aside anytime, a torch on dark paths. But whoever runs around with a torch by day is a fool. How much my ideals have come down, and how freshly my tree greens!

And while I struggled with God, the devil prepared himself for my reception, and tore me just as far to his side. There, too, I found no boundaries other than surfeit and disgust. I did not live, but was driven; I was a slave to my ideals.

Henceforth I am completely alone. I can no longer say to you: “Listen!” or “you should,” or “you could,” but now I talk only with myself. Now no one else can do anything more for me, nothing whatsoever. I no longer have a duty toward you, and you no longer have duties toward me, since I vanish and you vanish from me. I no longer hear requests and no longer make requests of you. I no longer fight and reconcile myself with you, but place silence between you and me.

On this way, no one walks behind me, and I cross no one’s path. I am alone, but I fill my solitariness with my life. I am man enough, I am noise, conversation, comfort, and help enough unto myself.