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19 October 1932 Kundalini Seminar LECTURE 2
Dr. Jung: We will go on with further information about the cakras.
You remember, I told you last time that I would analyze the meaning of the symbolic attributes of the muladhara.
You probably have noticed that in analyzing these symbols we have followed very much the same method that we use in dream analysis: we look at all the symbols and try to construct the meaning which seems to be indicated by the totality of the attributes.
In that way we reached the conclusion that muladhara was a symbol of our conscious earthly personal existence.
To repeat in a few words the argument: muladhara is characterized as being the sign of the earth; the square in the center is the earth, the elephant being the carrying power, the psychical energy or the libido.
Then the name muladhara, meaning the root support, also shows that we are in the region of the roots of our existence, which would be our personal bodily existence on this earth.
Another very important attribute is that the gods are asleep; the linga is a mere germ, and the Kundalini, the sleeping beauty, is the possibility of a world which has not yet come off.
So that indicates a condition in which man seems to be the only active power, and the gods, or the impersonal, non-ego powers, are inefficient—they are doing practically nothing.
And that is very much the situation of our modern European consciousness.
Then we have still another attribute which is not shown in that symbol itself but which is given in the Hindu commentaries—namely, that this cakra is located, as it were, in the lower basin, which at once gives an entirely different meaning to the thing. For it is then something that is within our body, whereas we had reached the conclusion that it was without—that is, our conscious world.
That the Hindu commentaries put the conscious world inside the body is to us a very astonishing fact.
We can take this commentary exactly like a patient’s association in a dream or vision, and according to his idea, the association would be: it was something in his belly.
Now, why does he say so?
Perhaps our existence here in the flesh, in the three-dimensional space, really has some-thing to do with the symbol in question.
Perhaps it is a condition that could be expressed by the allegory of an abdomen—as if we were in an abdomen.
And to be in an abdomen would mean most probably that we were in the mother, in a condition of development or beginning.
That point of view would throw a peculiar light on our symbolism.
It would convey the idea that our actual existence, this world, is a sort of womb;
we are mere beginnings, less than embryos; we are just germs that have still to become, like an egg in the womb.
Of course, this is simply a commentary, showing how the Hindu would look upon our world as it is—he perhaps understands his conscious world as being merely a nursery.
Now, that is a piece of philosophy.
As you see, it is an analogy with Christian philosophy according to which this actual personal existence is only transitory.
We are not meant to stay in this condition; we are planted on this earth for the purpose of becoming better and better, and when we die we shall become angels.
In the Islamic world there is very much the same idea.
I remember talking to an Arab in the tombs of the Caliphs in Cairo.
I was admiring a tomb that was made in a wonderful style, really a very beautiful thing.
He noticed my admiration and said: You Europeans are funny people. To admire this house is what we do, that is what we believe. You believe in dollars and automobiles and railways. But which is wiser, to build a house for a short time or for a long time?
If you know that you will be in a place only for a few years, and that you will later stay in another place for fifty years, will you build your house for those few years, or for the fifty years?
I said, sure enough, “For the fifty years.” And he said: “That is what we do—we build our houses for eternity, where we shall stay the longest.”
That is the point of view of many peoples, whether they are Hindus or Christians or Mohammedans.
According to their idea muladhara is a transitory thing, the sprouting condition in which things begin.
Of course, that is very much in opposition to what people of today believe.
We read our papers, we look into the political and economic world, believing this to be the definite thing, as if all depended on what we were going to do about the currency, the general economic conditions, and so on.
We are all quite crazy about it, as if it were particularly right to be concerned with it.
But those other people are countless; we are few in number compared with the people who have an entirely different point of view as to the meaning of the world.
To them, we are just ridiculous; we are living in a sort of illusion about our world.
So this standpoint of the yoga philosophy is thus far a part of the general tendency of the philosophic and religious world.
It is very general to look at the muladhara as a transitory phenomenon.
For our purpose we can leave aside this particular philosophic comment.
It is quite interesting, yet it should not disturb us.
For we have to take for granted that this is the world where the real things happen, that
it is the only world, and perhaps there is nothing beyond—at least, we have no experiences that would prove it to us.
We have to be concerned with the immediate reality, and we must say, as it is shown in the muladhara symbol, that the gods which would stand for that other eternal order of things are asleep.
They are inefficient, they mean nothing.
Yet we are allowed to admit that in the very center of this field of consciousness are germs of something that point to a different kind of consciousness, though for the time being they are inactive.
So, to put it on a psychological level, it seems evident that even in our consciousness, of which we believe that it is “nothing but,” and perfectly clear and self evident and banal—even in that field there is the spark of something that points to another conception of life.
This is merely a statement about a generally prevailing condition, namely, through the consensus gentium, the harmony of opinion in the whole world, among men, it is understood that somewhere in the interior of our normal consciousness, there is such a thing.
There are sleeping gods, or a germ, that might enable us, as it has enabled people at all
times, to look at the muladhara world from an entirely different point of view, that allows them even to put muladhara right down into the bottom of the trunk where things start—meaning that in the great body of the cosmic world, this world holds the lowest place, the place of the beginning.
So what we take to be the culmination of a long history and a long evolution would be really a nursery, and the great, important things are high above it and are still to come—exactly as the unconscious contents which we feel down below in our abdomen are slowly rising to the surface and becoming conscious, so that we begin to have the conviction: this is definite, this is clear, this is really what we are after.
As long as it was down below in the abdomen it simply disturbed our functions; it was asmall germ.
But now it is an embryo, or as it reaches the conscious, it is slowly seen as a full-grown tree.
If you look at the symbol of the muladhara in such a way, you understand the purpose of the yoga in the awakening of Kundalini.
It means to separate the gods from the world so that they become active, and with
that one starts the other order of things. From the standpoint of the gods this world is less than child’s play; it is a seed in the earth, a mere potentiality.
Our whole world of consciousness is only a seed of the future.
And when you succeed in the awakening of Kundalini, so that she begins to move out of her mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is a world of eternity, totally different from our world.
Here it will become clear why I speak at length about this whole problem.
You remember that in our former seminars I always tried to point out to you that the series of visions was an experience of a nonpersonal or impersonal kind, and to explain to you why I was so particularly reticent in speaking about the personal side of our patient; the personal side is really perfectly negligible in comparison with her visions.
Her visions could be the visions of anybody, because they are impersonal, they correspond to the world of Kundalini and not to the world of muladhara.
They are experiences which really mean the development of Kundalini and not of Mrs. So-and-So. Sure enough, a very clever analyst would be able to analyze out of that material a series of personal incidents in her life, but it would be from only the muladhara point of view, that is, our rational point of view of this world as the definite world.
But from the standpoint of the Kundalini yoga, that aspect is not interesting, because
it is merely accidental muladhara is the world of illusion from that other point of view—as the world of the gods, the impersonal experience, is naturally an illusion from the muladhara psychology, the rational viewpoint of our world.
I insist upon this particular symbolism because it really can give you an incomparable opportunity to understand what is meant by the impersonal experience, and by the peculiar duality, even duplicity, of the human psychology, where two aspects form a bewildering crisscross.
On the one side the personal aspect, in which all the personal things are the only meaningful things; and another psychology in which the personal things are utterly uninteresting and valueless, futile, illusory.
You owe it to the existence of these two aspects that you have fundamental conflicts at all, that you have the possibility of another point of view, so that you can criticize and judge, recognize and understand.
For when you are just one with a thing you are completely identical—you cannot compare it, you cannot discriminate, you cannot recognize it.
You must always have a point outside if you want to understand.
So people who have problematic natures with many conflicts are the people who can produce the greatest understanding, because from their own problematical natures they are enabled to see other sides and to judge by comparison.
We could not possibly judge this world if we had not also a standpoint outside, and that is given by the symbolism of religious experiences.
Now, if the yogin or the Western person succeeds in awakening Kundalini, what starts is not in any way a personal development, though of course an impersonal development can influence the personal status, as it does very often and very favorably.
But it is not always so. What starts are the impersonal happenings with which you should not identify.
If you do, you will soon feel obnoxious consequences—you will get an inflation, you will get all wrong.
That is one of the great difficulties in experiencing the unconscious—that one identifies with it and becomes a fool.
You must not identify with the unconscious; you must keep outside, detached, and observe objectively what happens.
But you then see that all the events that happen in the impersonal, nonhuman order of
things have the very disagreeable quality that they cling to us, or we cling to them. It is as if the Kundalini in its movement upward were pulling us up with it, as if we were part of that movement, particularly in the beginning.
It is true that we are a part, because we are then that which contains the gods; they are germs in us, germs in the muladhara, and when they begin to move they have the effect of an earthquake which naturally shakes us, and even shakes our houses down.
When that upheaval comes, we are carried with it, and naturally we might think we were moving upward.
But it makes, of course, a tremendous difference whether one flies, or whether it is a wave or a great wind that lifts one.
For to fly is one’s own activity, and one can safely come down again, but when one is carried upward, it is not under one’s control, and one will be put down after a while in a most disagreeable way—then it means a catastrophe.
So, you see, it is wise not to identify with these experiences but to handle them as if they were outside the human realm.
That is the safest thing to do—and really absolutely necessary.
Otherwise you get an inflation, and inflation is just a minor form of lunacy, a mitigated term for it.
And if you get so absolutely inflated that you burst, it is schizophrenia.
Of course the idea of an impersonal, psychical experience is very strange to us, and it is exceedingly difficult to accept such a thing, because we are so imbued with the fact that our unconscious is our own—my unconscious, his unconscious, her unconscious—and our prejudice is so strong that we have the greatest trouble disidentifying.
Even if we must recognize that there is a non-ego experience, it is a long way until we realize what it might be.
That is the reason why these experiences are secret; they are called mystical because the ordinary world cannot understand them, and what they cannot understand they call mystical—that covers everything.
But the point is that what they call mystical is simply not the obvious.
Therefore the yoga way or the yoga philosophy has always been a secret, but not because people have kept it secret.
For as soon as you keep a secret it is already an open secret; you know about it and other people know about it, and then it is no longer a secret.
The real secrets are secrets because nobody understands them.
One cannot even talk about them, and of such a kind are the experiences of the Kundalini yoga.
That tendency to keep things secret is merely a natural consequence when the experience is of such a peculiar kind that you had better not talk about it, for you expose yourself to the greatest misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
Even if it is a matter of dogmatized experience of things that already have a certain form, you still feel, as long as the original fresh impression of such an experience is alive, that you had better continue to cover it up.
You feel that these things will not fit in, that they may have an almost destructive influence upon the convictions of the muladhara world.
For the convictions of the muladhara world are very necessary.
It is exceedingly important that you are rational, that you believe in the definiteness
of our world, that this world is the culmination of history, the most desirable thing.
Such a conviction is absolutely vital.
Otherwise you remain detached from the muladhara—you never get there, you are never born, even.
There are plenty of people who are not yet born.
They seem to be all here, they walk about—but as a matter of fact, they are not yet born, because they are behind a glass wall, they are in the womb.
They are in the world only on parole and are soon to be returned to the pleroma where they started originally.
They have not formed a connection with this world; they are suspended in the air; they are neurotic, living the provisional life.
They say: “I am now living on such-and-such a condition.
If my parents behave according to my wishes, I stay.
But if it should happen that they do something I don’t like, I pop off.”
You see, that is the provisional life, a conditioned life, the life of somebody who is still connected by an umbilical cord as thick as a ship’s rope to the pleroma, the archetypal world of splendor.
Now, it is most important that you should be born; you ought to come into this world—otherwise you cannot realize the self, and the purpose of this world has been missed.
Then you must simply be thrown back into the melting pot and be born again.
The Hindus have an extremely interesting theory about that.
I am not strong on metaphysics, but I must admit that in metaphysics there is a great deal of psychology.
You see, it is utterly important that one should be in this world, that one really fulfills one’s entelechia, the germ of life which one is.
Otherwise you can never start Kundalini; you can never detach. You simply are thrown back, and nothing has happened; it is an absolutely valueless experience.
You must believe in this world, make roots, do the best you can, even if you have to believe in the most absurd things—to believe, for instance, that this world is very definite, that it matters absolutely whether such-and-such a treaty is made or not.
It may be completely futile, but you have to believe in it, have to make it almost a religious conviction, merely for the purpose of putting your signature under the treaty, so that trace is left of you.
For you should leave some trace in this world which notifies that you have been here, that something has happened.
If nothing happens of this kind you have not realized yourself; the germ of life has fallen, say, into a thick layer of air that kept it suspended. It never touched the ground, and so never could produce the plant.
But if you touch the reality in which you live, and stay for several decades if you leave your trace, then the impersonal process can begin.
You see, the shoot must come out of the ground, and if the personal spark has never gotten into the ground, nothing will come out of it; no linga or Kundalini will be there, because you are still staying in the infinity that was before.
Now if, as I say, you succeed in completing your entelechia, that shoot will come up from the ground; namely, that possibility of a detachment from this world—from the world of Maya, as the Hindu would say—which is a sort of depersonalization.
For in muladhara we are just identical.
We are entangled in the roots, and we ourselves are the roots.
We make roots, we cause roots to be, we are rooted in the soil, and there is no getting away for us, because we must be there as long as we live.
That idea, that we can sublimate ourselves and become entirely spiritual and no hair left, is an inflation.
I am sorry, that is impossible; it makes no sense.
Therefore we must invent a new scheme, and we speak of the impersonal.
Other times may invent other terms for the same thing.
You know, in India they do not say “personal” and “impersonal,” “subjective” and “objective,” “ego” and “non-ego.”
They speak of buddhi, personal consciousness, and Kundalini, which is the other thing; and they never dream of identifying the two.
They never think, “I myself am Kundalini.”
Quite the contrary, they can experience the divine because they re so deeply conscious of the utter difference of God and man.
We are identical with it from the beginning because our gods, inasmuch as they are not just conscious abstractions, are mere germs, or functions, let us say.
The divine thing in us functions as neuroses of the stomach, or of the colon, or bladder—simply disturbances of the underworld.
Our gods have gone to sleep, and they stir only in the bowels of the earth.
For our conscious idea of God is abstract and remote.
One hardly dares to speak of it. It has become taboo, or it is such a worn-out coin that one can hardly exchange it.
Well now, Kundalini yoga in its system of cakras symbolizes the development of that impersonal life.
Therefore it is at the same time an initiation symbolism, and it is the cosmogonic myth. I will tell you one example.
There is a Pueblo myth according to which man was generated far down in the earth in a pitch-black cave.
Then, after untold time of a dormant and absolutely dark wormlike existence, two heavenly messengers came down and planted all the plants.
Finally they found a cane which was long enough to go through the opening in the roof and was jointed like a ladder, so mankind could climb up and reach the floor of the next cave; but it was still dark.
Then, after a long time, they again placed the cane under the roof and again climbed up and reached the third cave.
And so again, until finally they came to the fourth cave where there was light, but an incomplete and ghostly light.
That cave opened out upon the surface of the earth, and for the first time they reached the surface; but it was still dark.
Then they learned to make a brilliant light, out of which finally the sun and the moon were made.
You see, this myth depicts very beautifully how consciousness came to pass, how it rises from level to level.
Those were cakras, new worlds of consciousness of natural growths, one above the other.
And this is the symbolism of all initiation cults: the awakening out of muladhara, and the going into the water, the baptismal fount with the danger of the makara, the devouring quality or attribute of the sea.
Then, if you pass through that danger you reach the next center, manipura, which means the fullness of jewels.
It is the fire center, really the place where the sun rises.
The sun now appears; the first light comes after the baptism.
This is like the initiation rites in the Isis mysteries, according to Apuleius, where the initiate at the end of the ceremony was put upon the pedestal and worshiped as the god Helios, the deification that always follows the baptismal rite.
You are born into a new existence; you are a very different being and have a different name.
One sees all that very beautifully in the Catholic rite of baptism when the godfather holds the child and the priest approaches with the burning candle and says: Dono tibi lucem eternam” (I give thee the eternal light)—which means, I give you relatedness to the sun, to the God.
You receive the immortal soul, which you did not possess before; you are then a “twice-born.”
Christ receives his mission and the spirit of God in his baptism in the Jordan.
He is only a Christus after baptism because Christus meant the anointed one. He too is “twice-born.”
He is now above the ordinary mortal that he was as Jesus, the son of the carpenter.
He is now a Christus, a nonpersonal or symbolic personality, no longer a mere person belonging to this or that family.
He belongs to the whole world, and in his life it becomes evident that this is a very much more important role than if he were the son of Joseph and Mary.
So manipura is the center of the identification with the god, where one becomes part of the divine substance, having an immortal soul.
You are already part of that which is no longer in time, in three-dimensional pace; you belong now to a fourth-dimensional order of things where time is an extension, where space does not exist and time is not, where there is only infinite duration—eternity.
This is a worldwide and ancient symbolism, not only in the Christian baptism and the initiation in the Isis mysteries.
For instance, in the religious symbolism of ancient Egypt, the dead Pharaoh goes to the underworld and embarks in the ship of the sun.
You see, to approach divinity means the escape from the futility of the personal existence and the achieving of the eternal existence, the escape to a nontemporal form of existence.
The Pharaoh climbs into the sun bark and travels through the night and conquers the serpent, and then rises again with the god, and is riding over the heavens for all eternity.
That idea spread in the later centuries, so that even the nobles who were particularly friendly with the Pharaoh succeeded in climbing into the ship of Ra.
Therefore one finds so many mummies buried in the tomb of the Pharaohs, the hope being that all the bodies in the tombs would rise with him.
I saw something very touching in a newly excavated tomb in Egypt.
Just before they had locked up the tomb of this particular noble, one of the workmen had put a little baby that had recently died, in a miserable little basket of reeds with a few poor little pieces of cloth, right inside the door, so that the baby—who was probably his child—would rise with the noble on the great day of judgment. He was quite satisfied with his own futility, but his baby, at least, should reach the sun.
So this third center is rightly called the fullness of jewels.
It is the great wealth of the sun, the never-ending abundance of divine power to which man attains through baptism.
But of course, that is all symbolism.
We come now to the psychological interpretation, which is not as easy as the symbolic or comparative method.
It is far less easy to understand manipura from a psychological point of view.
If one dreams of baptism, of going into the bath or into the water, you know what it means when people are in actual analysis: that they are being pushed into the unconscious to be cleansed; they must get into the water for the sake of renewal.
But it remains dark what follows after the bath. It is very difficult to explain in psychological terms what will follow when you have made your acquaintance with the unconscious.
Have you an idea?
Mind you, this question is not easy to answer, because you will be inclined to give an abstract answer, for a psychological reason.
Dr. Reichstein: You could say that the old world is burning down.
Dr. Jung: That is not just abstract, but it is very universal and at a safe distance.
Dr. Reichstein: The old conventional forms and ideas are breaking down.
Dr. Jung: Oh yes, our philosophy of the world may be changed tremendously, but that is no proof that you have reached manipura.
Dr. Reichstein: But is not manipura a symbol of fire, of things burned?
Dr. Jung: Well, it is not just a destructive symbol; it means more a source of energy.
But you are quite right—there is always a note of destruction when one speaks of fire; the mere mention of fire is enough to rouse the idea of destruction.
And there you touch upon that fear that causes abstraction; we easily get abstract when we do not want to touch a thing that is too hot.
Miss Hannah: Is one not able, then, to see the opposites at the same time?
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is nicely put, very abstract, but you could designate it more completely.
Mrs. Sawyer: In the visions, the patient came to the place where she had to stand the fire, and then the stars fell down. So the impersonal things began.
Dr. Jung: Quite so—there we have a connection.
Dr. Bertine: Is it not a capacity for living more fully? A greater intensity of conscious living?
Dr. Jung: We think we are living quite consciously and with great intensity.
What is the next effect when you become acquainted with the unconscious and take it seriously?
You see you are inclined not to take it
seriously and to invent an apotropaic theory that is “nothing but”—nothing but infantile memories or inhibited wishes, for instance.
Why do you accept such a theory? In reality it is something quite different.
Mrs. Crowley: It is becoming acquainted with the shadow part.
Dr. Jung: That is also conveniently put, but what does it mean?
Mrs. Sigg: Isolation.
Dr. Jung: That might be the consequence of it, but first of all it is just the horrible thing that leads into isolation, just the opposite.
Mrs. Crowley: Desirousness, all that shadow part of yourself.
Dr. Jung: Yes, desire, passions, the whole emotional world breaks loose.
Sex, power, and every devil in our nature gets loose when we become acquainted with the unconscious.
Then you will suddenly see a new picture of yourself.
That is why people are afraid and say there is no unconscious, like children playing hide-and-seek.
A child goes behind a door and says, “Nobody is behind this door; don’t look here!”
And so we have two marvelous psychological theories that nothing is behind this door,
don’t look here, this is nothing important.
Those are apotropaic theories.
But you will see that there is something, you must admit that there are such powers.
Then you make an abstraction, you make marvelous
abstract signs of it, and talk of it with only a sort of shy hinting. You speak
euphemistically.
As sailors never dared to say, “This damned hell of a sea, this black sea that is always so stormy and smashes our ships!”
They said, “The welcoming benevolent sea . . .”—in order not to arouse those alarming impressions, or to irritate those dark wind demons.
Instead of saying the archbishop of Canterbury, you say His Grace.
You don’t say the pope has issued a very foolish encyclical, you say the Vatican.
Or instead of speaking of those hellish liars, you say Wilhelmstraße, or Downing
Street, or the Quai d’Orsay.
That is the euphemistic abstract way of putting things.
Our science has the same purpose in using Latin or Greek words.
It is a marvelous shield against the demons—the demons are afraid of Greek because they do not understand it.
And therefore we talk, as you have just demonstrated, in such an abstract way.
So it is just that—you get into the world of fire, where things become red-hot.
After baptism you get right into hell—that is the enantiodromia.
And now comes the paradox of the East: it is also the fullness of jewels.
But what is passion, what are emotions? There is the source of fire, there is the fullness of energy.
A man who is not on fire is nothing: he is ridiculous, he is two-dimensional. He must be on fire even if he does make a fool of himself.
A flame must burn somewhere, otherwise no light shines; there is no warmth, nothing.
It is terribly awkward, sure enough; it is painful, full of conflict, apparently a mere waste of time—at all events, it is against reason.
But that accursed Kundalini says, “It is the fullness of jewels; there is the source of energy.”
As Heraclitus aptly said: war is the father of all things.
Now this third center, the center of emotions, is localized in the plexus Solaris, or the center of the abdomen.
I have told you that my first discovery about the Kundalini yoga was that these cakras really are concerned with what are called psychical localizations.
This center then would be the first psychical localization that is within our conscious psychical experience.
I must refer again to the story of my friend, the Pueblo chief, who thought that all Americans were crazy because they were convinced that they thought in the head.
He said: “But we think in the heart.” That is anahata.
Then there are primitive tribes who have their psychical localization in the abdomen.
And that is true of us as well; there is a certain category of psychical events that take place in the stomach.
Therefore
one says, “Something weighs on my stomach.”
And if one is very angry, one gets jaundice; if one is afraid, one has diarrhea; or if in a particularly obstinate mood, one is constipated.
You see, that shows what psychical localization means.
Thinking in the abdomen means that there was once a time when consciousness
was so dim that people noticed only the things that disturbed their intestinal functions, and everything else simply passed by the board; it did not exist because it had no effect upon them.
There are still traces of that among the central Australian aborigines, who have the funniest ceremonies in order to make them realize a thing.
I told you about the ceremony of making a man angry; and one sees other forms of the
same thing in all primitive tribes.
Before they can make up their minds to go hunting, for instance, there must be a whole ceremonial by which they are put into the mood of hunting; otherwise they don’t do it.
They must be excited by something. It has to do not only with the intestines,
then, but with the whole body.
Therefore that primitive method of the schoolmasters fifty years ago, which I myself have experienced.
We were taught the ABCs with a whip.
We were eight boys sitting on one bench, and the schoolmaster had a whip of three willow wands, just long enough to touch all the backs at once.
He said, “This is A” (bang), “This is B” (bang).
You see, causing a physical sensation was the old method of teaching.
It was not very painful, because when he beat on eight backs at the same time you just
cringed and didn’t feel it very much.
But it makes an impression; the boys were actually sitting up and listening.
That was instead of “Will you be kind enough to pay attention, please?”
Then nobody listens; they think he is a damned fool. But when he cracks the whip over them and says, “That is A,” then they get it.
It is for the same reason that primitives inflict wounds in initiations when they hand over the secrets, the mystical teaching of the tribe.
At the same time they cause intense pain: they make cuts and rub ashes into them, or they starve the initiants, they don’t let them sleep, or frighten them out of their wits.
Then they give the teaching, and it catches hold of them because it has gone in with physical discomfort or pain.
Now, as I said, the first psychical localization that is conscious to us is the abdomen; we are not conscious of anything deeper.
I don’t know of a trace in primitive psychology where people would locate their psyche
in their bladder.
Then the next is the heart, which is a very definite center that still functions with us.
For instance we say, “You know it in the head, but you don’t know it in the heart.”
There is an extraordinary distance from the head to the heart, a distance of ten, twenty, thirty years, or a whole lifetime.
For you can know something in the head for forty years and it may never have touched the heart.
But only when you have realized it in the heart do you begin to take notice of it.
And from the heart it is an equally long distance down to the plexus Solaris, and then
you are caught. For there you have no freedom at all.
There is no air substance: you are just bones and blood and muscles; you are in the intestines; you are functioning there like a worm with no head.
But in the heart you are on the surface.
The diaphragm would be about the surface of the earth.
As long as you are in manipura you are in the terrible heat of the center of the earth, as it were.
There is only the fire of passion, of wishes, of illusions.
It is the fire of which Buddha speaks in his sermon in Benares where he says, The whole world is in flames, your ears, your eyes, everywhere you pour out the fire of desire, and that is the fire of illusion because you desire things which are futile.
Yet there is the great treasure of the released emotional energy.
So when people become acquainted with the unconscious they often get into an extraordinary state—they flare up, they explode, old buried emotions come up, they begin to weep about things which happened forty years ago.
That simply means that they were prematurely detached from that stage of life; they have forgotten that there are buried fires still burning.
Then they were unconscious, but when they touch the lower centers, they get back into that world and become aware that it is still hot, like a fire that has been left forgotten under the ashes.
But take away the ashes and there are still the glowing embers underneath, as it is said
of pilgrims going to Mecca: they leave their fires buried under the ashes, and when they return the following year the embers are still glowing.
Now, in manipura you have reached an upper layer where there comes a definite change.
The bodily localization of this cakra under the diaphragm is the symbol for the peculiar change that now takes place.
Above the diaphragm you come into anahata, the heart or air center, because the heart is embedded in the lungs and the whole activity of the heart is closely associated with the lungs.
One must be naive to understand these things. In primitive experience, it is the same thing. In fact, it is a physiological truth.
We understand more or less what manipura means psychologically, but now we come to the great leap, anahata.
What follows psychologically after you have fallen into hell? When you have come into the whirlpool of passions, of instincts, of desires and so on, what follows after?
Mrs. Crowley: Usually an enantiodromia; some opposite will now be constellated. Some vision perhaps, or something more impersonal will follow. Dr. Jung: An enantiodromia, which would be the discovery of something impersonal?
In other words, that one no longer identifies with one’s desires.
Now, one must consider the fact that it is hard to talk of these things, because most people are still identical with manipura.
It is exceedingly difficult to find out what is beyond. Therefore we must remain
a bit in the symbolism first.
The next center, as I told you, has to do with the air.
The diaphragm would correspond to the surface of the earth, and apparently in getting into anahata we reach the condition where we are lifted up from the earth.
What has happened? How do we get there at all?
You see in manipura we still don’t know where we are; we are in muladhara just as well, at least our feet are still standing in muladhara: but in avatar they are lifted up above the surface of the earth.
Now, what could literally lift one above the earth?
Dr. Meier: The wind.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that would be within the symbolism, but there is another thing that would make it a bit plainer.
Dr. Bertine: A sort of distillation?
Dr. Jung: That is a good idea, which leads us right away into alchemistic symbolism.
The alchemist calls this process sublimation.
But to remain in the symbolism of which we were speaking today?
Mr. Allemann: The sun rises above the horizon.
Dr. Jung: Yes, you rise above the horizon according to the Egyptian symbolism.
If you are identical with the sun, you rise above the horizon with the sun ship and travel over the heavens.
The sun is a superior power.
If you are an appendix of the Pharaoh, the sun can lift you up to almost a divine position.
And the contact with the sun in manipura lifts you up off your feet into the sphere above the earth.
The wind also can do it, because in primitive beliefs the spirit is a kind of wind.
Therefore in many languages there is the same word for wind and spirit, spiritus for instance, and spirare means to blow or breathe.
Animus, spirit, comes from the Greek anemos, wind; and pneuma, spirit, is also a
Greek word for wind. In Arabic ruch is the wind or soul of the spirit; and in Hebrew ruach means spirit and wind.
The connection between wind and spirit is due to the fact that the spirit was thought originally to be the breath, the air one breathes out or expires.
With a person’s last breath his spirit leaves the body.
So it would be either a magic wind or the sun that lifts you up. And where do we find the two things coming together?
Perhaps you still remember in analytical literature that very interesting case.
Mrs. Sawyer: Is it the primitives blowing on their hands and worshiping the sunrise?
Dr. Jung: That is identification with the sun.
It is not the same, you see, but I have published an example of the wind and the sun being the same.
Mr. Baumann: The sun is sometimes the origin of the wind.
Dr. Jung: Yes. You remember the case of the insane man who saw a sort of tube hanging down from the sun.
He called it the “sun phallus,” and it caused the wind.
That shows that the sun and the wind are the same.
Mr. Baumann: I think there is a Greek myth, where you hear voices before the sun has risen.
Dr. Jung: That is the figure of Memnon in Egypt, which was said to produce a peculiar sound when the sun rises, because according to the Greek legend Memnon is the son of Aurora, the dawn, so when dawn appears he greets his mother.
But that is not exactly the wind and the sun.
You see, the symbolism tells us what happens in anahata.
But that is not psychological; we are really in mythology so far, and we ought to
know what it means psychologically. How do you get lifted up above the manipura center, above the world of your mere emotions?
Miss Hannah: You get an inflation, and you identify with the god.
Dr. Jung: That might be, it is very inflating, but we are speaking here of the normal case.
We are supposing that sequence of the Kundalini is a normal sequence, because it is the condensation of the experiences of perhaps thousands of years.
Mr. Baumann: When you are very emotional you try to express yourself, for instance, by music or poetry.
Dr. Jung: You mean it produces a certain utterance. But emotions always produce utterances.
You can manifest all sorts of things when you are still caught in your emotions.
It must be something above the emotions.
Mrs. Mehlich: Is it that one begins to think?
Dr. Jung: Exactly.
Dr. Reichstein: It is said that here the purusha is born, so it would be here that the first idea of the self is seen more completely.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but how would that show in psychology?
We must try now to bring the thing down to psychological facts.
Dr. Reichstein: That we become conscious of something which is not personal at this point.
Dr. Jung: Yes, you begin to reason, to think, to reflect about things, and so it is the beginning of a sort of contraction or withdrawal from the mere emotional function.
Instead of following your impulses wildly, you begin to invent a certain ceremony that allows you to disidentify yourself from your emotions, or to overcome your emotions actually.
You stop yourself in your wild mood and suddenly ask, “Why am I behaving like
this?”
We find the symbolism for that in this center.
In anahata you behold the poruwa, a small figure that is the divine self, namely, that which is not identical with mere causality, mere nature, a mere release of energy that
runs down blindly with no purpose.
People lose themselves completely in their emotions and deplete themselves, and finally they are burned to bits and nothing remains—just a heap of ashes, that is all.
The same thing occurs in lunacy: people get into a certain state and cannot get out of it.
They burn up in their emotions and explode.
There is a possibility that one detaches from it, however, and when a man discovers this, he really becomes a man.
Through manipura he is in the womb of nature, extraordinarily automatic; it is merely a process.
But in avatar a new
thing comes up, the possibility of lifting himself above the emotional
happenings and beholding them. He discovers the purusha in his heart, the thumbling, “Smaller than small, and greater than great.”
In the center of anahata there is again Siva in the form of the linga, and the small flame means the first germ like appearance of the self.
Mr. Dell: Is the process you describe the beginning of individuation in psychological terms?
Dr. Jung: Yes. It is the withdrawal from the emotions; you are no longer identical with them.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate.
So in anahata individuation begins.
But here again you are likely to get an inflation.
Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist.
You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist.
Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.
Therefore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing
which you are not, which is not the ego.
The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection.
For the ego is always far down in muladhara and suddenly becomes aware of something
up above in the fourth story, in anahata, and that is the self.
Now, if anybody makes the mistake of thinking that he lives at the same time in the basement and on the fourth story, that he is the purusha himself, he is crazy.
He is what the German very aptly call verrückt, carried off his feet up to somewhere else.
He just sits up there and spins.
We are allowed to behold only the purusha, to behold his feet up there.
But we are not the purusha; that is a symbol that expresses the impersonal process.
The self is something exceedingly impersonal, exceedingly objective.
If you function in your self you are not yourself—that is what you feel.
You have to do it as if you were a stranger: you will buy as if you did not buy; you will sell as if you did not sell.
Or, as St. Paul expresses it, “But it is not I that lives, it is Christ that liveth in me,” meaning that his life had become an objective life, not his own life but the life of a greater one, the purusha.
All the primitive tribes that are on a somewhat higher level of civilization usually have discovered anahata.
That is, they begin to reason, and to judge; they are no longer quite wild.
They have elaborate ceremonies—the more primitive they are the more elaborate are the ceremonies.
They need them in order to prevent manipura psychology.
They have invented all sorts of things, magic circles, forms for the palavers, for
the intercourse of people; all those peculiar ceremonials are special psychological
techniques to prevent an explosion of manipura. In a palaver with primitives it is simply de rigueur that you do certain things—to us, perfectly superfluous things—but you can do nothing with the primitives unless you observe the rules.
For instance, there must be an unmistakable hierarchy; therefore the man who calls the palaver must be a man of power.
If I call a palaver, I must have a stool, and the other people are on the ground; they must sit down immediately.
The chief has men with whips who whip everybody down if they don’t sit down at once.
And then one does not begin to talk.
One first hands around presents—matches, cigarettes—and the chief necessarily must have many more cigarettes than his subjects, because the hierarchy of that moment must be emphasized to show that there is authority on top.
That is all ceremony against manipura, and only when that is silently done can the man who calls the palaver begin to speak.
I say that I have a shauri, a business. That is the beginning.
You see, I must speak a mantra by which everybody is caught—nobody is allowed to talk; everybody listens.
Then I say my shauri, after which my partner, with whom I have to deal, talks too, but in a very low voice, hardly audible, and he shall not get up.
If a man speaks too loudly, somebody comes with a whip. He may not speak loudly, because that would show emotion, and as soon as there is emotion, there is danger of fighting and killing.
Therefore no weapons are allowed.
Also, when the palaver ends one must say shauri kisha, meaning, “Now the palaver is finished.”
I once got up before I had said that, and my headman came quite excitedly to me and said, “Now, don’t get up!”
And then I said shauri kisha, and everything was all right. If I said a mantra, I could go.
I must say that the whole magic circle is now dissolved, and then I can go without
rousing the suspicion that somebody is offended or in a wild mood.
Otherwise it is dangerous, then there might be anything, perhaps murder, for one is getting up obviously because one is crazy.
It sometimes happens that they get so excited in their dances that they begin to kill.
For instance, those two cousins Sarasin, who made the exploration in Celebes, were almost killed by men who were really very friendly with them.
They were showing them the war dances, and they got so much in the mood of war, so frenzied, that they threw their spears at them.
It was sheer luck that they escaped.
You see, anahata is still very feeble, and manipura psychology is quite close to us.
We still have to be polite to people to avoid the explosions of manipura. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Yoga Seminar, Page 23-41
