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The living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence.

 

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Zarathustra Seminar

You see, inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence.

It is also a plurality which is gathered up in one mind, for the body is extended in space, and the here and the there are two things; what is in your toes is not in your fingers, and what is in your fingers is not in your ears or your stomach or your knees or anywhere else in your body.

Each part is always something in itself.

The different forms and localizations are all represented in your mind as more or less different facts, so there is a plurality.

What you think with your head doesn’t necessarily coincide with what you feel in your heart, and what your belly thinks is not what your mind thinks.

The extension in space, therefore, creates a pluralistic quality in the mind. That is probably the reason why consciousness is possible.
Different things are represented, and these are always supposed to be in a field of consciousness, in a sort of extension, that is.

Yet you feel that the whole, that plurality, is drawn together and referred to something you call “I”; it is referred to a center which you cannot say has extension, as little as you can say of a thought that it has extension.

Thought is a disembodied something because it has no spatial qualities.

So “I” is as if it were something abstract, yet in a vague way it coincides with your body; when you say “I” you beat your chest for instance, to emphasize the “I.” Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.