Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers.
the Red Book: Liber Novusby c. G. Jung
Before him exist neither question nor answer.
My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else to express the words from the depths.
The mercy which happened to me gave me belief, hope, and sufficient daring, not to resist further the spirit of the depths, but to utter his word. But before I could pull myself together to really do it, I needed a visible sign that would show me that the spirit of the depths in me was at the same time the ruler of the depths of world affairs.
Jung’s search for the soul, then, stands at one with the search for appropriately dialogical and differentiated language.
The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.
I indignantly answered, do you call light what we men call the worst darkness? Do you call day night? To this my soul spoke a word that roused my anger, my light is not of this world. I cried, I know of no other world! The soul answered, should it not exist because you know nothing of it?
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.
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.
God is not dead. Now, as ever, he liveth.
