Once upon a time in Roosevelt...
We were going out for a walk. But I wanted to leaf through this immense and irresistible Red Book. As soon as I opened the oversized bible, this "cell-like" image was staring back at me. We had to leave, so I asked: can you send me that image? I want to remember it.
As if I could forget it.
Much less could I forget the words that accompanied that chapter. I read one line and it felt like a memory: "The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd."
Days later I got the complete text. It's an absurdity, but I knew the words even before I read it. I knew it by simply looking at that "cell-like" image.
"If God grows old, he becomes shadow, nonsense, and he goes down. The greatest truth becomes the greatest lie, the brightest day becomes the darkest night. As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning. Day does not exist through itself, night does not exist through itself. The reality that exist through itself is day and night. So the reality is meaning and absurdity. Noon is a moment. Midnight is a moment. Morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but evening comes from the day and morning turns into day. So meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning."
- C.G.Jung ~ Red Book: Liber Novus | Liber Primas fol.iv (v)/v(r)
Jung collected his visions, fantasies or imaginations in journals and later artfully transcribed text into the illuminated calligraphic volume known as the “Red Book”. In the later years of his life Jung stated:
"The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then."
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