The Light and Dark principle
Tragedies of life become the stepping-stones and opportunities for climbing Jacob's ladder of ascension. We come face to face with our entire Self, including the dark truths about ourselves. The experience of the inner darkness is the vivid confrontation with one's repressed nature. Ultimately, we realize that we alone are responsible for our character traits and who we are. Not our mother, not our father, not God, not our spouse and not our children - but we, ourselves, climb the ladder or fall down or never begin the climb. JViJP 89
Anyone who identifies with the daylight half of his psychic
life will therefore declare the dreams of the night to be null and void,
notwithstanding that the night is as long as the day and that all
consciousness
is manifestly founded on unconsciousness, is rooted in it and every night is
extinguished in it.
“There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion”
Although light is obviously necessary as a guide for life, too much light creates blindness. Blinding light represents a state of human purity that is unachievable.
Of this natural light innate in man Dorn says: "For
the life, the light of men, shineth in us, albeit dimly, and as though in
darkness. It is not to be extracted from us, yet is it in us and not of
us, but of Him to Whom it belongs, Who deigns to make us his dwelling-place ....
He has implanted that light in us that we may see in its light the light of Him
Who dwells in inaccessible light, and that we may excel His other creatures; in
this wise we are made like unto Him, that He has given us a spark of His light.
Thus the truth is to be sought not in ourselves, but in the image of God which
is within us."
… the inferior function is practically identical with the dark side of the human personality. The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness. 123
Before his fall, Satan one day
visited the earth, which was still covered by the primal waters, and on
descending into them, found “two fishes lying upon the waters, and they were
like oxen yoked for ploughing, holding the whole earth by command of the
invisible Father from sunset to sunrise”. Here is an account
of two fishes that
must certainly, as Jung points out, be interpreted as “ruling powers”, as if
they were divine primeval figures still existing in the unconscious.
Both together can hardly refer to Christ, for which reason Jung surmises
that, in view of the heretical beliefs of the Ebionites and later of the
Bogomils, the two
fishes could allude to their idea of the two sons of God.
These sects taught that God had two sons, Satanaël the elder and Christ the
younger. The two fishes would seem to refer to these two sons
of God, as well as to the zodiacal sign of the Age of the Fishes.
The doubling of the fishes asserts symbolically that this world-month is
ruled by two principles, Christ-Antichrist or Christ- Satanaël, which must,
however, finally work together side by side (like oxen yoked to the plough) in
order to take possession of and cultivate the earth. TGL 199