Status Updates From The Black Books

“The work of redemption is always first to be done on ourselves. This work cannot be done without love for ourselves. Selfless love is a sin, because it is not true. We can never abandon, lose ourselves, or else we will abandon our work of redemption. But we should also not use the other for our own alleged redemption. The other is no ladder for our feet.” (419)

I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.
He replied: “They say that they think with their heads.”
“Why of course. Where do you think?” I asked him in
surprise.
“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.
I fell into a long meditation. For the first time in my life, so
it seemed to me, someone had drawn for me a picture of the
real white man.

Jung’s “I” asks his soul to tell him what she sees and the meaning of his fantasies. The unconscious is here viewed as a source of higher wisdom.
Jung concluded the essay by indicating the personal and
experiential nature of his new conceptions: “Our age is
seeking a new spring of life. I found one and drank of it and
the water tasted good.”

Visual types should concentrate on the expectation that an
inner image will be produced. As a rule such a fantasy-image
will actually appear perhaps hypnagogically and should be
carefully noted down in writing. Audio-verbal types usually
hear inner words, perhaps mere fragments or apparently
meaningless sentences to begin with. Others at such times
simply hear their “other” voices still rarer, but equally
valuable

Jung had it typed and edited it. On one manuscript, he made
alterations by hand (I refer to this manuscript as the
Corrected Draft). From the annotations on the Corrected
Draft, it appears that he gave this to someone (the
handwriting is not that of Emma Jung, Toni Wolff, or Maria
Moltzer) to read. That reader commented on Jung’s editing,
indicating that some sections that he had intended to cut
should be retained.

● Jung closely studied Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra
● It strongly shaped the structure and style of Liber Novus
● Jung read Dante’s Commedia, which also informs the structure of the work. Liber Novus depicts Jung’s descent into hell.

●The role of Philemon in Jung’s work has analogies to that of
Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s work and Virgil in Dante’s.

" My “scientific” question went:

what would happen if I switched off consciousness?

I noticed from dreams that
something stood in the background, and I wanted to give this
a fair chance to come forward. One submits to the necessary
conditions—as in a mescaline experiment—so that it
emerges. "

- come again? <(°^°)>

I recalled that until 1900 I had kept a diary, and I thought that
this would be a possibility for me to try to observe myself. This
would be an attempt to meditate on myself, and I began to
describe my inner states. These represented themselves to me
in a literary metaphor: for example, I was in a desert, and the
sun shone unbearably (sun = consciousness).

“Permitting fantasy in
myself had the same effect as would be produced on a man
if he came into his workshop and found all the tools flying
about doing things independently of his will.”

“The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently
occurs.”

288

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