Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it?

This lovely quote from Carl Jung’s Red Book is in keeping with the quote from James Hillman’s A Blue Fire from yesterday. Accepting and embracing all that is within is. It’s been a constant practice during this time of great healing for me. The practice and the education of a lifetime. It is the crux of the wounded healer’s journey it seems.

Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life. ― C.G. Jung, The Red Book