Liber Primusfol.i(v) p. 120, Reader’s Edition

I am getting older (does not everybody do this?!), though I feel this ageing more and more as I’m heading towards my seventieth of that day in which I’ve opened my eyes to the sun. That’s why one may contemplate deeply about religion and the purpose of life, striving to understand and grasp the concept of God, as I am daring to do today.

When I became acquainted with C.G. Jung, I realized that I had found a guide who could help me think more clearly to find answers to my questions. I don’t know about you, but I believe that when ageing, one feels more solitude and begins to enjoy it. However, it’s important to note that he is not a saviour but rather a teacher who can point the way and offer valuable insights through his writings, particularly in his Red Book.

For me, the Red Book by Carl Jung is like the holy book. I may say it is like the Bible for a Christian, or the Koran for a Muslim, and the same as the Torah for a Jew, etc. The difference between them is that Dr Jung never tries to make statements of one particular God as their messenger but tries to define how a god can be definite! Here comes the concept: Supreme Meaning! The melting of sense and nonsense. And I think that this aspect needs a broad view.

The supreme meaning is great and small; it is as wide as the space of the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body. C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus.

I present you a small part, a page, of his words of knowledge on this concept. I hope it opens one or more doors in your life as it did for mine.

The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He rubbed me of speech and wrote me for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.
But the supreme meaning is the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself, but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. (1)

God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the image of the supreme meaning. The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity; it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together.

The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfilment. (2)

The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies; it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision, the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew.

The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actually corporeal and have no shadow?

The shadow is nonsense. It lacks force and has no continued existence through itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning.

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.

The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself.

The supreme meaning is great and small; it is as wide as the space of starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body.

1- In Transformations and Symbol of the Libido (1912), Jung interpreted God as a symbol of the libido (CW B, §111). In this subsequent work, Jund laid great emphasis on the distinction between the God image and the metaphysical existence of God (cf. passages added to the revised retitled 1952 edition, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, § 95)

2- The terms Hinübergehen (going across, passing over), Übergang (transition), Untergang (down-going, downfall), and Brücke (bridge) feature in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in relation to the passage from man to the Übermensch (superman). For example, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a “going-across” and a “downfall”. //I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a “downfall”, for they are those who are going over”(tr. R. Hollingdale [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984], p. 44, tr. mod; words are asunderlined in Jung’s copy).

Top image by Ettore Aldo Del Vigo

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