Black Books

Oh, you speak of the book, that I forced you to read- a teacher, who should learn from his own children!-it was not I, noble master, who raised himself and was presumptuous.

It was a Dream vision gifted to me, a gift of heaven, that fell to me that night from the middle of the fourfold division of the world, when I saw the starry heaven of the eternal desert for the first time.

Yes, what nights! I wasn’t presumptuous, a dream from unknown eternity was.

I longed for you, my most beautiful friend, in all cold and foggy darknesses, in all the confusion and sickness of Europe.

Yet you were far and only once did I hear a distant message from you.

Yes, I have seen your true divine beauty; I didn’t do it from the hubris of my imagination, but the dream from the foreign heaven showed it to me.

My eye was truly unworthy, my understanding, dull. I believed that I had seen you, but I saw only your appearance, and I didn’t know this.

Net: I didn’t teach you from myself, from my hubris, but the dream sent from the heaven of the Gods showed it to me.

I didn’t teach you my wisdom, but I taught you from a book that I found on the carpet, the red carpet of your he-use chamber.

It lay in your house.

The book didn’t belong to me. It was precious and more beautifully written than I could ever write.

I never saw more delicate, whiter parchment than this, never was there a blacker ink than that which the book was written with.

It was indeed an old book, and it spoke a language which wasn’t my language, but one more beautiful and perfect than there truly has been on earth.

And how could I have taught you, if that dream hadn’t shown it, that thrice blessed dream, that truly flowed to me from the heart of the world. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. VII, Page 223