Saturday, May 13, 2017

Carl Jung: When we have made a God




When we have succeeded in making a God, and if through this creation our whole force has entered into this design, we are filled with an overwhelming desire to rise with the divine sun and to become a part of its magnificence.

But we forget that we are then no more than hollow forms, since giving form to God has sapped us completely. We are not only poor but have become sluggish matter throughout, which would never be entitled to share in divinity.

Like a terrible suffering or an inescapable devilish persecution, the misery and neediness of our matter creeps up on us. The powerless matter begins to suckle and would like to swallow its shape back into itself again.

But since we are always enamored of our own design, we believe that the God calls us to him, and we mal(e desperate attempts to follow the God into the higher realm, or we turn preachingly and demandingly to our fellow men to at any rate force others into following the God. Unfortunately there are men who allow themselves to be persuaded into doing this, to their and our detriment.

Much undoing resides in this urge: since who could suspect that he who has made the God is himself condemned to Hell?

But this is the way it is, because the matter that is stripped of the divine radiance of force is empty and dark. If the God alights from matter, we feel the emptiness of matter as one part of endless empty space.

Through haste and increased willing and action we want to escape from emptiness and also from evil. But the right way is that we accept emptiness, destroy the image of the form within us, negate the God, and descend into the abyss and awfulness of matter. The God as our work stands outside us and no longer needs our help. He is created and remains left to his own devices.

A created work that perishes again immediately once we turn away from it is not worth anything, even if it were a God.

But where is the God after his creation and after his separation from me? If you build a house, you see it standing in the outer world.

When you have created a God whom you cannot see with your own eyes, then he is in the spiritual world that is no less valuable than the outer physical world. He is there and does everything for you and others that you would expect from a God.

Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world.

Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you.

But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you.

Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives.


Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and obliterate the image of my child in me.

This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness.

Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows.


Nature is playful and terrible. Some see the playful side and dally with it and let it sparkle. Others see the horror and cover their heads and are more dead than alive. The way does not lead between both, but embraces both.

It is both cheerful play and cold horror. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 288.

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