9/22/22
Happy 1st Day of Fall!
Oh dark act, violation, murder!
Abyss, give birth to the unredeemed.
Who is our redeemer?
Who is our leader?
Where are the ways through black wastes?
God, do not abandon us!
What are you summoning, God?
Raise your hand up to the darkness above you,
pray,
despair,
wring your hands,
kneel,
press your forehead into the dust,
cry out, but do not name Him,
do not look at Him.
Leave Him without name and form.
What should form the formless?
Name the nameless?
Step onto that great way
and grasp what is nearest.
Do not look out,
do not want,
but lift up your hands.
The gifts of darkness
are full of riddles.
The way is open
to whomever can continue
in spite of riddles.
Submit to the riddles
and the thoroughly
incomprehensible.
There are dizzying bridges
over the eternally deep abyss.
But follow the riddles.
Endure them,
the terrible ones.
It is still dark,
and the terrible goes on growing.
Lost and swallowed by the
streams of procreating life,
we approach the over-
powering inhuman forces that are
busily creating what is to come.
How much future
the depths carry!
Are not the threads
spun down there
over millennia?
Protect the riddles,
Bear them in your heart,
Warm them,
Be pregnant with them.
Thus, you carry the future.
The tension of the future
is unbearable in us.
It must break through narrow cracks,
it must force new ways.
You want to cast off the burden.
You want to escape the inescapable.
Running away is deception and detour.
Shut your eyes
so that you do not see
the manifold,
the outwardly plural,
the tearing away,
and the tempting.
There is only one way
and that is your way:
there is only one salvation
and that is your salvation.
Why are you looking around for help?
Do you believe that help
will come from outside?
What is to come
will be created in you
and from you.
Hence,
look into yourself.
Do not compare.
Do not measure.
No other way
is like yours.
All other ways
deceive and tempt you.
You must fulfill
the way that is in you.
Oh, that all men
and all their ways
become strange to you!
Thus might you find them again
within yourself
and recognize their ways.
But what weakness!
What doubt!
What fear!
You will not bear going your way.
You always want to have
at least
one foot on paths
not your own
to avoid the great solitude!
So that maternal comfort
is always with you!
So that someone
acknowledges you,
recognizes you,
bestows trust in you,
comforts you,
encourages you.
So that someone
pulls you over onto their path,
where you stray from yourself,
and where it is easier for you
to set yourself aside.
As if you were not yourself!
Who should accomplish your deeds?
Who should carry your virtues and your vices?
You do not come to an end
with your life,
and the dead will besiege you
terribly
to live your unlived life.
Everything must be fulfilled.
Time is of the essence,
so why do you want to
pile up the lived
and let the unlived rot?
Great
is the power
of the way.
The power
of the way
is so great
that it carries away
others
and ignites them.
You do not know
how this happens;
hence it is best
you call this effect
“magical.”
In it,
Heaven
and Hell
grow together,
and in it
the power
of the Below
and the Above
unite.
The nature of the way is magical,
as are supplication and invocation;
malediction and deed are magical
if they occur on the great way.
Magic is the working
of men on men,
but your magic action
does not affect your neighbor;
it affects you first,
and only if you withstand it
does an invisible effect
pass from you to your neighbor.
There is more of it in the air
than I ever thought.
However, it cannot be grasped.
Listen:
The Above is powerful,
The Below is powerful,
Twofold power is in the One.
North, come hither,
West, snuggle up,
East, flow upward,
South, spill over.
~ C.G. Jung, The Red Book, p. 381-83.
