Subtle Body – Anthology
Such things can happen: a projection is a very tangible thing, a sort of semi-substantial thing which forms a load as if it had real weight. It is exactly as the primitives understand it, a subtle body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1495.
It seems to me that we are at the end of an era. The splitting of the atom and the nuclear bomb bring us a new view of matter. As physical man cannot develop any further, it would seem that this particular evolution ends with man. Like the caterpillar dissolves and turns into a butterfly, it is conceivable that the physical body of man could change into a more subtle body. It might not be necessary for him to die to be clothed afresh and be transformed. ? ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 63.
The part of the unconscious which is designated as the subtle body becomes more and more identical with the functioning of the body, and therefore it grows darker and darker and ends in the utter darkness of matter. . . . Somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked. And that is the [subtle body] where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls “psyche.” ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.
Around the birth of Christ, there follows the Age of Pisces. Pisces is a water sign. That is probably why we have to look for the spirit in the water, in life’s flow of images, and in the unconscious. And now we are on the threshold of the sign of Aquarius. The air element is assigned to it, and it is symbolized by an angel or a human being, instead of an animal. Here the spirit is meant to become something subtle again, and man to become who he is. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 354-355.
The psychic seems to me to be in actual fact partly extra-spatial and extra-temporal. “Subtle body” may be a fitting expression for this part of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 522-523.
There is another possibility, that of the subtle body, a fine material veil of the soul, which cannot exist so to speak without a body. This is the “corpus glorificationis” (glorified body), the transfigured body, which is our future portion. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 115.
The Chinese philosophy of yoga is based upon the fact of this instinctive preparation for death as a goal, and, following the analogy with the goal of the first half of life, namely, begetting and reproduction, the means towards perpetuation of physical life, it takes as the purpose of spiritual existence the symbolic begetting and bringing to birth of a psychic spirit body (‘subtle body’), which ensures the continuity of the detached consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.
This means an eternal body, or the subtle body, which is designated in alchemy as the philosopher’s stone, the lapis aethereus or invisibilis. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 159.
We can experience the body psychically, a prana-body, a subtle body, and there are certain exalted and ecstatic conditions in which we can experience spirit. So what we experience of spirit and body are really psychic modalities. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.
A mandala is a technical term for a magic circle which is used for meditation, but it is also used in a lower form for purpose of witchcraft; the witches’ circle was well known in the Middle Ages.
The Dharma Kaya = the world of absolute truth.
The Sambhoga Kaya = the world of subtle bodies.
The Nirmana Kaya = the world of created things.
One could also call these three: Self, anima and body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 35.
At all events the assumption of a perceptual body postulates a corresponding perceptual space that separates the mind from physical space in the same way as the subtle body causes the gap between the mind and the physical body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
One cannot individuate as long as one is playing a role to oneself; the convictions one has about oneself are the most subtle form of persona and the most subtle obstacle against any true individuation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 821
Parapsychology plays a subtle part in psychology because it lurks everywhere behind the surface of things. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 378-379
A subtle body, breath or smoke resembling, which can also be correctly described as anima. Anima is the feminine of animus, which is identical with the Greek word anemos which means wind or breath. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 24 Feb 1939
Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.12)
Ruland says, “Imagination is the star in man. The celestial or super-celestial body.”
This astounding definition throws a quite special light on the fantasy processes connected with the “opus.”
We have to conceive of these processes not as the immaterial phantoms we readily take fantasy-pictures to be, but as something corporeal, a “subtle body” (fig. 139), semi-spiritual in nature.
In an age when there was as yet no empirical psychology such a concretization was bound to be made, because everything unconscious, once it was activated, was projected into matter that is to say, it approached people from outside.
It was a hybrid phenomenon, As it were, half spiritual, half-physical, a concretization such as we frequently encounter in the psychology of primitives.
The “imagination”, or the act of imagining, was thus a physical activity that could be fitted into the cycle of material changes, that brought these about and was brought about by them in turn.
In this way the alchemist related himself not only to the unconscious but directly to the very substance which he hoped to transform through the power of imagination.
The singular expression “astrum” (star) is a Paracelsan term, which in this context means something like “quintessence.”
Imagination is therefore a concentrated extract of the life forces, both physical and psychic.
So the demand that the artifex must have a sound physical constitution is quite intelligible, since he works with and through his own quintessence and is himself the indispensable condition of his own experiment.
But, just because of this intermingling of the physical and the psychic, it always remains an obscure point whether the ultimate transformations in the alchemical process are to be sought more in the material or in the spiritual realm.
Actually, however, the question is wrongly put: there was no “either-or” for that age, but there did exist an intermediate realm between mind and matter, i.e., a psychic realm of subtle bodies whose characteristic it is to manifest themselves as well as a material form.
This is the only view that makes sense of alchemical ways of thought, which must otherwise appear nonsensical.
Obviously, the existence of this intermediate realm comes to a sudden stop the moment we try to investigate matter in and for itself, apart from all projection; and it remains non-existent so long as we believe we know anything conclusive about matter of the psyche.
But the moment when physics touches on the “untrodden, untreadible regions,” and when psychology has at the same time to admit that there are other forms of psychic life besides the acquisitions of personal consciousness-in other words, when psychology too touches on an impenetrable darkness-then the intermediate realm of subtle bodies comes to life again, and the physical and the psychic are once more blended in an indissoluble unity. We have come very near to this turning-point today. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Paragraph 394.
The concept of “imagination” is perhaps the most important key to understanding the opus. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Paragraph 395.
Image: Hermes conjuring the winged soul out of an urn.-Attic funeral lekythos (Figure 139 in Psychology and Alchemy)