The Red Book: A Reader's Edition

by C.G. Jung

“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world?

But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life.

He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul.

If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world.

The wound still bleeds, and I am far from being able to pretend that I do not hear the mockery.

I shall learn that my soul finally lies behind everything, and if I cross the world, I am ultimately doing this to find my soul. Even the dearest are themselves not the goal and end of the love that goes on seeking, they are symbols of their own souls.

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.

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.”

If you are boys, your God is a woman. If you are women, your God is a boy. If you are men, your God is a maiden. The God is where you are not.

A maiden is the pregnant future. A boy is the engendering future.

If you take a step toward your soul, you will at first miss the meaning. You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.

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.

You are afraid to open the door? I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught: God is love.66 But you should know that love is also terrible.

Think diligently about the images that the ancients have left behind. They show the way of what is to come. Look back at the collapse of empires, of growth and death, of the desert and monasteries, they are the images of what is to come. Everything has been foretold. But who knows how to interpret it?

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.

You are full, yes, you teem with intentions and desirousness!—Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?”

But no one will laugh more than I laughed at myself.

Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.