Earth, isn’t this what you want: an invisible arising in us?…What is your urgent command, if not transformation?
— Rilke, Ninth Duino Elegy

 

on this good friday, this day of crucifixion, i contemplate Rilke’s question as a centering thought and turn to one of my transformational teachers’ words of wisdom…

Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion.

For he will infallibly run into things that thwart and “cross” him:

first, the thing he has no wish to be (the shadow);

second, the thing he is not (the “other,” the individual reality of the “You”);

and third, his psychic non-ego (the collective unconscious).

  The Psychology of the TransferenceCollected Works 16Paragraph 470~Carl Jung ~ 

Yet, although the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb sacrificed between opposites, One divided into Many, etc.) undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype.

The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect.

Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves.

This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites.

Aion

Page 44

~ Carl Jung ~

 

suspending across the tensions of the opposites, letting go of everything is indeed not a path for the faint of heart… as Jesus tells us…