Tao Te Ching
Red Book, Liber Novus
By Carl Jung
Considered the most important of all Jung’s writings but held as private legacy by his heirs, The Red Book was not published until 2009, 48 years after he died. Jung wanted to keep the contents of this book private, secret, and uninfluenced by public opinion. Written during a period called by Jung, “the most important time of my life,” but by historians “a creative illness, a period of introspection, a psychotic break, or simply madness”; Jung channeled this magnificent creation at night while he worked during the day seeing patients, lecturing, writing more conventional books, and as officer in the Swiss army. Jung said the entire rest of his life was only an elaboration of this unconscious content that “burst forth and flooded me like an enigmatic stream.”
Themes
Quotes from Red Book, Liber Novus
“Do you believe in this false measure, that laughter is lower than worship?”
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“Dreams are the guiding words, the speech of the soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me.”
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“I daily weigh up my whole life and continue in the fiery brilliance of a sacred world far higher than the suicidal ashes of rationality.”
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“If you are a boy, your God is a woman. If you are a woman, your God is a boy. If you are a man, your God is a maiden. The God is where you are not. A maiden is the pregnant future. A boy is the engendering future. A woman is having given birth. A man is having engendered.”
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“If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.”
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“If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.”
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“If your virtues hinder you from salvation, discard them, since they have become evil to you. The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices.”
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“Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.”
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“Most will throw themselves with greed back at men, things, and thoughts, whose slaves they will become from then on.”
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“My path is not your path therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.”
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“Supreme meaning is the Path, the Way, and the Bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come.”
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“The God of words is cold and dead and shines from afar like the moon, mysteriously and inaccessibly”
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“The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom.”
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“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; 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.”
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“Words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.”
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“You find yourself in your desire… wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil’s own seed. But do not forget to wait.”
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“You say the Christian God is unequivocal, he is love. But what is more ambiguous than love?”
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Related Lineages (0 lineages)
Quotes about Red Book, Liber Novus (1 quotes)
“In the Red Book I tried an esthetic elaboration of my fantasies, but never finished it. I became aware that I had not yet found the right language, that I still had to translate it into something else. Therefore I gave up this estheticizing tendency in good time, in favor of a rigorous process of understanding.”
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