I spent years trying to climb out of my darkness. God kept pushing me back down. Thought He hated me. Then I realized He was drowning me in it on purpose. Like baptism but backwards. Under the black water something grows that can't grow in sunlight. Seeds need soil not sky. I kept reaching for transcendence He kept shoving me into my shadow. Now I understand. The light that matters doesn't come from escaping darkness it comes from darkness eating itself alive until only light remains. God doesn't want me to transcend my darkness He wants my darkness to birth something luminous. I am not climbing out of the pit I am becoming the fire that burns at the bottom of it. The real light grows in places where ordinary light dies
we could say that the light can only be discovered in the dark.
David Tacey • The Darkening Spirit: Jung, spirituality, religion
I had to appear to him as the devil, since I had accepted my darkness. I ate the earth and I drank the sun, and I became a greening tree that stands alone and grows.6728/29
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
Staying with the darkness allows something to happen that escapes us if we are hasty. If we resist our natural tendency to take flight before painful experiences, we can descend into the dark aspects of the unconscious, which is necessary if we are to make contact with what Goethe calls "infinite nature"' Turning toward such darkness requires a
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