A personal selection of quotes from Liber Secundus (Book Two) of Jung's Red Book:
FIND YOUR REAL LIMITS
"Your life will not take kindly to being hemmed in by artificial barriers. Life wants to jump over such barriers and you will fall out with yourself...Therefore try to find your real limits. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them. And that happens to you only if you have balance."
EVEN THE STONES SPEAK TO YOU
“Even the stones speak to you, and magical threads spin from you to things and from things to you.”
SECRET ENTANGLEMENT
“Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner, for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things…The stars whisper your deepest mysteries to you, and the soft valleys of the earth rescue you in a motherly womb.”
MEANING AND CHANGE
“You find manifold meaning only in yourself, not in things, since the manifoldness of meaning is not something that is given at the same time, but is a succession of meanings."
"Things also change, but you do not notice this if you do not change.”
I WANT TO LIVE LIKE THE SUN
“I want to live from my own force like the sun which gives light and does not suck light.”
ALL YOUR REBIRTHS COULD MAKE YOU SICK
“As long as you are not conscious of your self you can live, but when you become conscious of your self you fall from one grave into another. All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick. The Buddha therefore finally gave up on rebirth, for he had had enough of crawling through all human and animal forms.”
THE POWER OF NAMING
“One often gives the sick new names to heal them, for with these names, they come by new essence. Your name is your essence.”
TAKE THE GOD WITH YOU
“If you are clever, take the God with you, then you know where he is.”
YOU CAN LEAVE CHRISTIANITY BUT IT DOES NOT LEAVE YOU
“It is better to be thrown into visible chains than invisible ones. You can certainly leave Christianity but it does not leave you. Your liberation from it is delusion. Christ is the way.”
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST
“If I thus truly imitate Christ, I do not imitate anyone.”
SIMPLICITY
"When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to simple life."
Source: C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus edited by Sonu Shamdasani (New York: Norton, 2009).
