Carl Jung “The powers of my depths are predetermination and pleasure.

The powers of my depths are predetermination and pleasure.

Predetermination or forethinking is Prometheus who, without determined thoughts, brings the chaotic to form and definition, who digs the channels and holds the object before pleasure.

Forethinking also comes before thought.

But pleasure is the force that desires and destroys forms without form and definition.

It loves the form in itself that it takes hold o£ and destroys the I forms that it does not take.

The forethinker is a seer, but pleasure is blind. It does not foresee, but desires what it touches.

Forethinking is not powerful in itself and therefore does not move. But pleasure is power, and therefore it moves.

Forethinking needs pleasure to be able to come to form. Pleasure needs forethinking to come to form, which it requires.

If pleasure lacked forming, pleasure would dissolve in manifoldness and become splintered and powerless through unending division, lost to the unending.

If a form does not contain and compress pleasure within itself it cannot reach the higher, since it always flows like water from above to below.

All pleasure, when left alone, flows into the deep sea and ends in the deathly stillness of dispersal into unending space.

Pleasure is not older than forethinking, and forethinking is not older than pleasure. Both are equally old and in nature intimately one.

Only in man does the separate existence of both principles become apparent.

Apart from Elijah and Salome I found the serpent as a third principle. It is a stranger to both principles although it is associated with both.

The serpent taught me the unconditional difference in essence between the two principles in me.

If I look across from forethinking to pleasure, I first see the deterrent poisonous serpent.

If I feel from pleasure across to forethinking, likewise I feel first the cold cruel serpent. The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious.

Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother.

The earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself.

The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges.

It is always the serpent that causes man to become enslaved now to one, now to the other principle, so that it becomes error.

One cannot live with forethinking alone, or with pleasure alone. You need both.

But you cannot be in forethinking and in pleasure at the same time, you must take turns being in forethinking and pleasure, obeying the prevailing law, unfaithful to the other so to speak.

But men prefer one or the other. Some love thinking and establish the art of life on it.

They• practice their thinking and their circumspection, so they lose their pleasure. Therefore they are old and have a sharp face.

The others love pleasure, they practice their feeling and living.

Thus they forget thinking. Therefore they are young and blind.

Those who think base the world on thought, those who feel, on feeling. You find truth and error in both.

The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking.

Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life.

The place where Elijah and Salome live together is a dark space and a bright one.

The dark space is the space of fore-thinking.

It is dark so he who lives there requires vision. This space is limited, so fore thinking does not lead into the extended distance, but into the depth of the past and the future.

The crystal is the formed thought that reflects what is to come in what has gone before. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 247.