26 October 1932 Kundalini Yoga Seminar, LECTURE 3
26 October 1932 Kundalini Yoga Seminar, LECTURE 3
Dr. Jung: I will continue our discussion of the cakras.
You remember, we were speaking chiefly of the transformation from manipura to anahata.
In anahata something is attained which was begun in muladhara, through a series of four stages.
How might these four stages also be designated?
Dr. Reichstein: They are the four elements.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. Each of the four lower centers has an element belonging to it—muladhara, the earth, svadhi¡hana, the water, then comes fire in manipura, and finally air in Anahata.
So one can see the whole thing as a sort of transformation of elements, with the increase of volatility— of volatile substance.
And the next form we reach is visuddha, which is the ether center.
Now, what is ether? Do you know anything about it from the physical point of view?
Remark: It penetrates everything.
Mrs. Sawyer: You cannot catch it.
Dr. Jung: Why not? Since it penetrates everywhere, why can it not be found everywhere?
Mr. Dell: It cannot be measured; it is a thought.
Dr. Jung: Yes, one finds it only within one’s brain, nowhere else; it is a concept of substance that has none of the qualities that matter should have.
It is matter that is not matter, and such a thing must necessarily be a concept.
Now, in the visuddha center—beyond the four elements—one reaches what stage?
Mrs. Crowley: A more conscious state, abstract thought perhaps?
Dr. Jung: Yes, one reaches a sphere of abstraction.
There one steps beyond the empirical world, as it were, and lands in a world of concepts.
And what are concepts? What do we call the substance of concepts?
Mrs. Crowley: Psychology?
Dr. Jung: Or say psychical psychology; that would express the science of psychical things.
The reality we reach there is a psychical reality; it is a world of psychical substance, if we can apply such a term.
I think we get nearest to it when we say it is a world of psychical reality.
So another point of view to explain the series of the cakras would be a climbing up
from gross matter to the subtle, psychical matter.
Now, the idea of this transformation from earth to ether is one of the oldest constituents of Hindu philosophy.
The concept of the five elements is a part of the Samkhya philosophy, which is pre-Buddhistic, belonging to the seventh century B.C. at the latest.
All subsequent Hindu philosophies, like the Upanishads, took their origin in the Samkhya philosophy.
So this concept of the five elements dates back endlessly—there is no way of telling its age.
One sees from the age of that component that the fundamental ideas of tantric yoga reach back into a dim past.
Also the idea of the transformation of the elements shows the analogy of tantric yoga with our medieval alchemistic philosophy.
There one finds exactly the same ideas, the transformation of the gross matter into the subtle matter of the mind—the sublimation of man, as it was then understood.
Speaking of this alchemistic aspect of the cakras, I want to call your attention to the symbol of manipura, the fire center.
You remember, perhaps, that in the fire center there are those peculiar handles, one could call them, which Professor Hauer hypothetically explained as parts of the swastika.
Now, I must confess that I never have seen a swastika symbol that had only three feet.
There is the Greek form of the triskeles, but I don’t know whether that existed in India.
It was found on Greek coins in Sicily, from a period between four hundred and about two hundred B.C.—when Sicily belonged to Graecia Magna and was a large and flourishing Greek colony.
The triskelos is like this: the three-legged being.
But the swastika is like this: running on four feet.
So I suggest that these might be handles attached to the triangle of manipura.
I rather think that they are handles of a pot—to lift the pot—and there is a lid on top which has also a handle.
I think that is probably to be explained from the alchemistic aspect, because manipura is the fire region, and that is the kitchen, or the stomach, where the food is cooked.
One stuffs the food into the pot, or into the belly, and there it is heated by the blood. In that way food is prepared so that one can digest it.
Cooking is an anticipation of digestion, a sort of predigestion.
For example, in Africa the papaya tree has the very peculiar quality that its fruit and leaves are full of pepsin, the same stuff which is found in the juice of the stomach, the digestive stuff par excellence.
The Negroes wrap up their meat for two or three hours in papaya leaves instead of cooking it—it thus becomes partially digested; it is predigested.
And so the whole art of cooking is predigestion.
We have transferred part of our digestive ability into the kitchen, so the kitchen is the stomach of every house, and the labor of preparing the food is then taken away from our stomachs.
Our mouth is also a predigestive organ, because the saliva contains a digestive substance.
The mechanical action of the teeth is predigestive, because we cut up the food, which is what we also do in the kitchen in cutting up the vegetables, and so on.
So you could really say that the kitchen is a digestive tract projected from the human body.
And it is the alchemistic place where things are transformed.
Therefore manipura would be a center in which substances are digested, transformed.
The next thing one would expect would be the transformation shown as completed.
As a matter of fact, this center is right below the diaphragm, which marks the dividing line between Anahata and the centers of the abdomen.
For after manipura follows anahata, in which entirely new things occur; a new element is there, air, no longer gross matter.
Even fire is understood to be in a way gross matter.
It is thicker, denser than air, and it is quite visible, whereas air is invisible.
Fire is exceedingly movable, yet perfectly well defined, and also in a way tangible, whereas air is exceedingly light and almost intangible—unless you feel it as a wind.
It is relatively gentle in comparison with fire, which moves and burns.
So at the diaphragm you cross the threshold from the visible tangible things to the almost invisible intangible things.
And these invisible things in Anahata are the psychical things, for this is the region of what is called feeling and mind.
The heart is characteristic of feeling, and air is characteristic of thought.
It is the breath-being; therefore one has always identified the soul and thought with breath.
For instance, it is the custom in India, when the father dies, that the
oldest son must watch during the last moments in order to inhale the last breath of his father, which is the soul, in order to continue his life.
The
Swahili word roho means the stertorous breathing of a dying man, which
we call in German röcheln; and roho also means the soul.
It is no doubt
taken from the Arabic word ruch, which means wind, breath, spirit, with
probably the same original idea of stertorous breathing.
So the original idea of spirit or of psychical things is the idea of breath or air.
And I told you that the mind in Latin is animus, which is identical with the Greek word ánemos meaning wind.
The heart is always characteristic of feeling because feeling conditions influence the heart.
Everywhere in the world feelings are associated with the heart. If you have no feelings, you have no heart; if you have no courage, you have no heart, because courage is a definite feeling condition.
And you say, “Take it to heart.” Or you learn something “by heart.”
You learn it, of course, by the head but you won’t keep it in mind unless you take it to heart.
Only if you learn a thing by heart do you really get it.
In other words, if it is not associated with your feelings, if it has not sunk into your body until it reaches the anahata center, it is so volatile that it flies away.
It must be associated with the lower center in order to be kept.
Therefore that method of teaching pupils that I described to you last week, where the teacher used the whip, in order that their feelings of anger and suffering would make the pupils remember the letters.
If they were not associated with pain, they would not keep them.
That is particularly true for the primitive man: he learns nothing if not in such a way.
The real importance of thoughts and values becomes clear to us only when we consider them as compelling forces in our lives.
The beginning of such a recognition of such values and thoughts in primitives would be embodied in the secret teaching of the tribe, which is given at the time of the puberty initiations together with pain and torture to make them remember it.
At the same time they are taught certain moral values, which prevent the mere blind action of the manipura fires of passion.
So anahata is really the center where psychical things begin, the recognition of values and ideas.
When man has reached that level in civilization or in his individual development one could say he was in avatar, and there he gets the first inkling of the power and substantiality, or the real existence, of psychical things.
For instance, take a patient in analysis who has reached the stage of manipura, where he is an absolute prey to his emotions and passions.
I say: “But you really ought to be a bit reasonable; don’t you see what you do? You cause no end of trouble to your relations.”
And it makes no impression whatever.
But then these arguments begin to have a pull; one knows that the threshold of the diaphragm is crossed—he has reached avatar.
You see, values, convictions, general ideas are psychical facts that are nowhere to be met with in natural science.
One cannot catch them with a butterfly net, nor can one find them under microscopes.
They become visible only in Anahata.
Now according to tantric yoga, the purusha is first seen in anahata: the essence of man, the supreme man, the so-called primordial man then becomes visible.
So purusha is identical with the psychical substance of thought and value, feeling.
In the recognition of feelings and of ideas one sees the purusha.
That is the first inkling of a being within your psychological or psychical existence that is not yourself—a being in which you are contained, which is greater and more important than you but which has an entirely psychical existence.
You see, we could finish here; we could say that about covers the growth of humanity.
As we are all convinced that psychical things have a certain weight, mankind as a whole has about reached anahata.
For instance, the great war has taught practically everybody that the things that have the greatest weight are the imponderabilia, the things you cannot possibly weigh, like public opinion or psychical infection.
The whole war was a psychical phenomenon.
If you are looking for the causal root of it, it could not possibly be explained as arising out of the reason of man or out of economic necessity.
One could say that Germany needed a greater expansion and had to go to war, or that France felt threatened and had to crush Germany.
But nobody was threatened—everybody had enough money, the German exports were increasing from year to year, Germany had all the expansion she needed.
All the economic reasons you mention are no good at all; they don’t explain that phenomenon.
It was simply the time when that thing had to happen from unknown psychical reasons.
Any great movement of man has always started from psychical reasons; so it is our experience that has taught us to believe in the psychical.
Therefore we are rightly afraid of mob psychology, for instance.
Every man of today will take that into account.
And formerly man did not believe in the value of advertising; now look what is done with it!
Or would anybody have believed that the little sheets which appeared every fortnight—gazettes, which we now call newspapers—would be a world power?
The press is recognized as a world power today; it is a psychical fact.
So we can say that our civilization has reached the state of Anahata—we have overcome the diaphragm.
We no longer locate the mind in the diaphragm, as the Old Greeks did in Homeric times.
We are convinced that the seat of consciousness must be somewhere up in the head.
We already have a more farsighted view in Anahata; we become aware of the purusha.
But we do not yet trust the security of psychical existence, so we have not reached visuddha.
We still believe in a material world built of matter and psychical force.
And we cannot connect the psychical existence or substance with the idea of anything cosmic or physical.
We have not yet found the bridge between the ideas of physics and psychology.
Therefore collectively we have not crossed the distance between Anahata and visuddha.
So if one speaks of visuddha, it is of course with a certain hesitation.
We are stepping into the slippery future right away when we try to understand what that might mean.
For in visuddha we reach beyond our actual conception of the world, in a way we reach the ether region.
We are trying something that would be more than Professor Piccard achieved!
He was only in the stratosphere—he reached something exceedingly thin, I admit, but it was not yet ether.
So we have to construct a sort of skyrocket of very large dimensions which shoots us up into space.
It [Visuddha] is the world of abstract ideas and values, the world where the psyche is in itself, where the psychical reality is the only reality, or where matter is a thin skin around an enormous cosmos of psychical realities, really the illusory fringe around the real existence, which is psychical.
The concept of the atom, for instance, might be considered as corresponding to the abstract thinking of the visuddha center.
Moreover, if our experience should reach such a level, we would get an extraordinary vista of the purusha.
For then the purusha becomes really the center of things; it is no longer a pale vision, it is the ultimate reality, as it were.
You see, that world will be reached when we succeed in finding a symbolical bridge between the most abstract ideas of physics and the most abstract ideas of analytical psychology.
If we can construct that bridge then we will have reached at least the outer gate of visuddha.
That is the condition.
I mean, we will then have reached it collectively; the way will then be opened.
But we are still a long distance from that goal.
For visuddha means just what I said: a full recognition of the psychical essences or
substances as the fundamental essences of the world, and by virtue not of speculation but of fact, namely as experience.
It does not help to speculate about ajna and Sahasrara and God knows what; you can reflect upon those things, but you are not there if you have not had the experience.
I will give you an example of the transition from one state to another.
I remember the case of a man who was an extrovert in the most exaggerated sense of the word.
He was always convinced that the world was best wherever he was not; there was the real bliss, and he must make for it.
Naturally he was after women all the time, because always the women whom he did not yet know contained the secret of life and bliss.
He could never see a woman in the street talking to another man without being envious, because that might be the woman.
Of course, he never succeeded, as you can imagine.
He succeeded less and less, and he made a perfect fool of himself.
He grew older, and the chances of meeting the ultimate woman became exceedingly small.
So the time came for a new realization.
He got into analysis, but nothing changed until the following thing happened: he was walking in the street and a young couple came along talking intimately, and instantly there was pain in his heart—that was the woman!
Then suddenly the pain vanished, and for a moment he had an absolutely clear vision. He realized: “Well, they will do it, they are going on, the thing is taken care of, I have not to take care of it any longer, thank heaven!”
Now, what happened?
Simply that he crossed the threshold of the diaphragm, for in manipura one is blind in passion.
Of course, when he sees such a couple he thinks, “I want it, I am identical with that man.”
And he is identical in manipura.
He is identical with every buffalo, and naturally he complains when he cannot jump out of his skin and into the skin of somebody else.
But here he suddenly realizes that he is not that man; he breaks through the veil of illusion, that mystical identity, and knows that he is not that fellow.
Yet he has an inkling that he is in a peculiar way identical with him, that man is himself continuing life; he is not cast aside.
For his substance is not only his personal self but the substance of that young man, too. He himself lives on, and the thing is taken care of.
And he is in it, he is not out of it.
You see, that is a picture of psychical existence over or beyond the manipura form.
It is nothing but a thought—nothing has changed in the visible world; not one atom is in a different place from before.
But one thing has changed: the psychical substance has entered the game.
You see, a mere thought, or almost an indescribable feeling, a psychical fact, changes his whole situation, his whole life, and he can step across to Anahata, to the world where psychical things begin.
Now, going from avatar to visuddha is quite analogous, but it goes very much further.
You see, in anahata thought and feeling are identical with objects.
For a man, feeling is identical with a certain woman, for instance, and for a woman with that particular man.
The thought of a scientist is identical with such-and-such a book. It is such a book.
So there are always external conditions, either for the feeling or for the mind.
Thought is always specific—scientific, philosophic, or aesthetic, for example—because it is always identical with a particular object.
And so feeling is identical with certain people or things.
It is because somebody has done so-and-so that one is angry, because there are such-and-such conditions.
Therefore our emotions, our values, our thoughts, our convictions are interdependent with facts, with what we call objects.
They are not in themselves or through themselves.
They are, as I say, interwoven with concrete facts.
You know, it is sometimes an ideal not to have any kind of convictions or feelings that are not based upon reality.
One must even educate people, when they have to cross from manipura to anahata, that their emotions ought to have a real basis, that they cannot swear hell and damnation at somebody on a mere assumption, and that there are absolute reasons why they are not justified in doing such a thing.
They really have to learn that their feelings should be based on facts.
But to cross from avatar to visuddha one should unlearn all that.
One should even admit that all one’s psychical facts have nothing to do with material facts.
For instance, the anger which you feel for somebody or something, no matter how justified it is, is not caused by those external things.
It is a phenomenon all by itself.
That is what we call taking a thing on its subjective level.
Say somebody has offended you, and you dream of that person and feel again the same anger in the dream.
Then I say, “That dream tells me just what the anger means, what it is in reality.”
But you contend that the person had said such-and-such a thing, so you are perfectly justified in feeling such anger and assuming such an attitude toward him.
Well, I must admit all that to be perfectly true, and then I humbly say, “Now, when you have had your anger and are reasonable again, let us consider this dream, for there is a subjective stage of interpretation.
You consider that man to be your specific bête noire, but he is really yourself.
You project yourself into him, your shadow appears in him, and that makes you angry.
Naturally one is not inclined to admit such a possibility, but after a while, when the process of analysis is effective, it dawns upon one that it is most probably true.
We are perhaps identical even with our own worst enemy.
In other words, our worst enemy is perhaps within ourselves.
If you have reached that stage, you begin to leave avatar, because you have succeeded in dissolving the absolute union of material external facts with internal or psychical facts.
You begin to consider the game of the world as your game, the people that appear outside as exponents of your psychical condition.
Whatever befalls you, whatever experience or adventure you have in the external world, is your own experience.
For instance, an analysis does not depend upon what the analyst is.
It is your own experience.
What you experience in analysis is not due to me; it is what you are.
You will have exactly that experience with me which is your own experience.
Not everybody falls in love with me, not everybody takes offense when I make a caustic remark, and not everybody admires a very drastic expression I use.
The experience in analysis, in which I am always the same Dr. Jung, is a very different procedure with different people.
Individuals are very different, and on account of that, analysis is always a different experience, even to myself.
I am the one who is equal to myself in all such conditions, but the patients vary, and accordingly the experience of analysis varies to me all the time.
But naturally the patient believes that his analysis is so-and-so because I am in it.
He does not see that it is also his subjective experience.
As long as the patient looks at analysis in such a way—that it is merely a personal flirtation or a personal discussion—he has not gained what he ought to have
gained out of it, because he has not seen himself.
When he really begins to see it as his own experience, then he realizes that Dr. Jung, the partner in the game, is only relative. He is what the patient thinks of him.
He is simply a hook on which you are hanging your garment; he is not so substantial as he seems to be.
He is also your subjective experience.
If you can see that, you are on your way to visuddha, because in visuddha the whole game of the world becomes your subjective experience.
The world itself becomes a reflection of the psyche.
For instance, when I say that the world consists of psychical images only—that whatever
you touch, whatever you experience, is imaged because you cannot perceive anything else; that if you touch this table, you might think it substantial, but what you really experience is a peculiar message from the tactile nerves to your brain; and even this you may not experience because I can cut off your fingers, you still experience your fingers only because the cut-off nerves cannot function in any other way; and your brain even is also only an image up here—when I say such a heretical thing I am on the way to visuddha.
If I should succeed—and I hope I shall not—in taking all of you up to visuddha, you would certainly complain; you would stifle, you would not be able to breathe any longer, because there is nothing you could possibly breathe.
It is ether. In reaching visuddha, you reach the airless space, where there is no earthly chance for the ordinary individual to breathe.
So it seems to be a very critical kind of adventure.
Now, in talking about these centers, we must never omit the actual symbols; they teach us a great deal.
I want to call your attention to the animal symbolism of which I have not yet spoken.
You know that the series of animals begins in muladhara with the elephant that supports the earth, meaning that tremendous urge which supports human consciousness, the power that forces us to build such a conscious world.
To the Hindu the elephant functions as the symbol of the domesticated libido, parallel to the image of the horse with us.
It means the force of consciousness, the power of will, the ability to do what one wants to do.
In the next center is the makara, the leviathan.
So in crossing from muladhara to svadhisthana, the power that has nourished you hitherto shows now an entirely different quality: what is the elephant on the surface
of the world is the leviathan in the depths.
The elephant is the biggest, strongest animal upon the surface of the earth, and the leviathan is the biggest and most terrible animal down in the waters.
But it is one and the same animal: the power that forces you into consciousness and that sustains you in your conscious world proves to be the worst enemy when you come to the next center.
For there you are really going out of this world, and everything that makes you cling to it is your worst enemy.
The greatest blessing in this world is the greatest curse in the unconscious.
So the makara is just the reverse: the water elephant, the whale dragon that devours you, is the thing that has nourished and supported you hitherto—just as the benevolent mother that brought you up becomes in later life a devouring mother that swallows you again.
If you cannot give her up she becomes an absolutely negative factor—she supports the life of your childhood and youth, but to become adult you must leave all that, and then the mother force is against you.
So anyone attempting to leave this world for another kind of consciousness, the water world or the unconscious, has the elephant against him; then the elephant becomes
the monster of the underworld.
In manipura the ram is the symbolic animal, and the ram is the sacred animal of Agni, the god of fire. That is astrological.
The ram, Aries, is the domicilium of Mars, the fiery planet of passions, impulsiveness, rashness, violence, and so on. Agni is an apt symbol. It is again the elephant, but
in a new form.
And it is no longer an insurmountable power—the sacred power of the elephant.
It is now a sacrificial animal, and it is a relatively small sacrifice—not the great sacrifice of the bull but the smaller sacrifice of the passions.
That is, to sacrifice the passions is not so terribly expensive.
The small black animal that is against you is no longer like the leviathan of the depths in the cakra before; the danger has already diminished.
Your own passions are really less a danger than to be drowned in unconsciousness; to be unconscious of one’s passion is much worse than to suffer from passion.
And that is expressed by Aries, the ram; it is a small sacrificial animal of which you don’t need to be afraid, for it is no longer equipped with the strength of the elephant or the leviathan.
You have overcome the worst danger when you are aware of your fundamental
desires or passions.
The next animal is the gazelle, again a transformation of the original force.
The gazelle or antelope is not unlike the ram, living upon the surface of the earth—the difference being that it is not a domesticated animal like the male sheep, nor is it a sacrificial animal.
It is not at all offensive; it is exceedingly shy and elusive, on the contrary, and very fleet of foot—it vanishes in no time.
When you come upon a herd of gazelles, you are always amazed at the way they disappear.
They just fly into space with great leaps.
There are antelopes in Africa that take leaps of six to ten meters—something amazing; it is as if they had wings.
And they are also graceful and tender, and have exceedingly slender legs and feet.
They hardly touch the ground, and the least stirring of the air is sufficient to make them fly away, like birds.
So there is a birdlike quality in the gazelle.
It is as light as air; it touches the earth only here and there.
It is an animal of earth, but it is almost liberated from the power of gravity.
Such an animal would be apt to symbolize the force, the efficiency, and the lightness of psychical substance—thought and feeling.
It has already lost a part of the heaviness of the earth.
Also, it denotes that in avatar the psychical thing is an elusive factor, hardly to be caught.
It has exactly the quality that we doctors would mean when we say that it is exceedingly
difficult to discover the psychogenic factor in a disease.
Mr. Dell: Would you compare it also to the unicorn?
Dr. Jung: I would say it is a close analogy, and you know the unicorn is a symbol of the Holy Ghost—that would be a Western equivalent.
Mrs. Sawyer: The unicorn derives from the rhinoceros, so that would also be an analogy.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the rhinoceros has survived in the legend of the unicorn.
The unicorn is not a real animal, but the rhinoceros has been a very real animal in this country.
For instance, one half of a rhinoceros has been found, well preserved, in an oil pit somewhere in Eastern Europe—I think in Poland.
It was of the glacial period, a European rhinoceros.
So the unicorn is most probably a faint echo of those days when man saw the actual rhinoceros here.
Of course, one cannot prove it, but it is at least a very nice analogy to our process here—the transformation of the elephant into this tender, gentle, light-footed gazelle.
Now, that is a very apt symbol of the psychogenic factor.
And the discovery of the psychogenic factor in medicine was really something you
could compare with the crossing from manipura to anahata.
I remember very well the time when professors said: “Well, there is some psychic disturbance too, naturally imagination has something to do with it, and an upset psychology can produce all sorts of symptoms,” and so on.
It was thought originally that the psyche was some sort of foam or essence, produced by the body, and nothing in itself, and that so-called psychological causality did not really exist, that it was more symptomatic.
Not even Freud takes the psychogenic factor as substantial.
The psyche for him is something rather physiological, a sort of byplay in the life of the body.
He is convinced that there is a lot of chemistry in it, or ought to be—that the whole thing goes back to the chemistry of the body, that it is hormones or God knows what.
So the discovery of a real psychogenic factor (which is not yet realized in medicine, please!) is a great and taletelling event.
It would be the recognition of the psyche itself as something that of course functions together with the body, but which has the dignity of a cause.
You see, if a doctor admits such a thing he is going really a long way.
If he puts the psychogenic factor, as causal, among microbes, colds, unfavorable social conditions, heredity, and so on, with that he recognizes the psyche as something that does exist and has actual effect.
The logical medical mind does not quite trust whether it is really something you could lay hands on, for it has that elusive quality of the gazelle.
And you know that when the psyche manifests itself in reality, it is usually against us.
For inasmuch as it is not against us, it is simply identical with our consciousness.
Our consciousness is not against us, and we consider everything to be our own conscious doing, but the psychic factor is always something that we assume to be not our doing.
We try to deny it and to repress it.
Say I want to write a letter that is disagreeable to me.
Then immediately I have the psychic factor against me.
I am not able to find that letter—it has been spirited away; I discover that I have mislaid it unconsciously.
I wanted to take particular care of that letter, but because I have resistances against it I put it in the wrong pocket or in a corner where I shall not find it for months.
One is inclined to speak of an imp that has busied himself with it.
One feels something demoniacal in the way just the things one painfully needs are spirited away.
The same thing occurs in hysteria: just where it would matter, things take a queer course.
Where it is very important that one should say the right thing, one says just the wrong thing; one’s words are turned in one’s mouth.
So one cannot help recognizing the fact that some living devil is against one.
Thus the old idea that such people were possessed by devils, were the victims of witches, and so forth.
Mr. Baumann: There is a very good book by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Auch Einer (Also one).
Dr. Jung: Yes, a German book about one of those who know about things, that is, the imp in objects.
For instance, when you lose your spectacles you will always lose them in an unlikely place, perhaps upon a chair of such a design that the spectacles fit in perfectly.
And you can be absolutely sure that when you drop a piece of buttered toast on the floor it will always fall on the buttered side.
Or when you are putting your coffeepot upon the table, it will try by all means to put its spout through the handle of the milk pot, so that you spill the milk when you lift the pot.
Mr. Dell: Die Tucked des Objekts (the malice of objects).
Dr. Jung: Yes, the devilish cunning of objects, and Vischer made a whole system of that in Auch Einer.
It is exceedingly quixotic naturally, but he gets the psychic factor all right, because it is in a way our doing, and yet it is not our doing; it happens in an impish way.
The elusiveness of the psychogenic factor is amazing.
In analysis also it is always escaping, because wherever you try to attack it the patient denies it and says, “But that is what I wanted to do; that is myself.”
He keeps it out of the way all the time because he himself is afraid to discover it.
He is afraid that a screw is loose somewhere in his head; he thinks it would mean that he was mad.
So the crossing-over from manipura to anahata is really very difficult.
The recognition that the psyche is a self-moving thing, something genuine and not yourself, is exceedingly difficult to see and to admit.
For it means that the consciousness which you call yourself is at an end.
In your consciousness everything is as you have put it, but then you discover that you are not master in your own house, you are not living alone in your
own room, and there are spooks about that play havoc with your realities,
and that is the end of your monarchy.
But if you understand it rightly,
and as tantric yoga shows you, this recognition of the psychogenic factor is merely the first recognition of the poruwa.
It is the beginning of the great recognition appearing in the most grotesque and ridiculous forms.
You see, that is what the gazelle signifies.
Now you remember the elephant appears in visuddha again.
So here we encounter the full power, the insurmountable sacred strength of the animal as it was in muladhara.
That is, we meet there [Visuddha] all the power which led us into life, into this conscious reality.
But here it is not supporting muladhara, this earth.
It is supporting those things which we assume to be the most airy, the most unreal, and the most volatile, namely, human thoughts.
It is as if the elephant were now making realities out of concepts.
We admit that our concepts are nothing but our imagination, products of our feeling or of our intellect—abstractions or analogies, sustained by no physical phenomena.
The thing that unites them all, that expresses them all, is the concept of energy.
In philosophy, for instance, take the example of Plato in his parable of the cave.
He tries by that rather clumsy parable to explain the subjectivity of our judgment, which is really the same idea which was called later on in the history of philosophy the theory of cognition.
He describes people sitting in a cave with their backs against the light, looking
at the shadows on the wall, cast by the moving figures outside.
Now, this is an exceedingly apt parable to explain the problem, but it needed more than two thousand years until that problem was formulated in a philosophically abstract way in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
We always have the impression that such philosophical or scientific concepts as energy—call them theories or hypotheses—are perfectly futile things that change tomorrow, like a breath of air that has no existence whatever.
Yet these are apparently the things sustained and pushed by the elephant, as if the elephant were making a reality of such concepts which are really the mere products of our mind.
That is our prejudice—to think that those products are not also realities.
But here is the hitch in the whole thing, this is not so simple.
Your speculations lead to abstractions, and these abstractions you very clearly feel to be merely your conclusions.
They are artificial; you are never sure that they do exist in reality.
But if perchance you should experience in reality what you have concluded, then you say, “Now this is real, insofar as my thought is real.”
For example, you say, “Tomorrow we shall have a thunderstorm.”
It is not very likely at this time of the year, but from all the meteorological data you make that conclusion though you yourself think it rather improbable.
And tomorrow we do actually have a thunderstorm, and then you say, “Is it not marvelous that I came to such a conclusion? My feeling must be right.”
So you substantiate your thinking in reality, and this reality affects the whole man.
It affects you through and through—you get drenched by the rain, you hear the thunder, and you may be struck by the lightning—you get the whole thing.
Now, according to the symbolism of the cakras something similar happens in visuddha. The power of the elephant is lent to psychic realities, which our reason would like to consider as mere abstractions.
But the power of the elephant is never lent to products of the mere intellect because they are never convincing; they always need physical evidence.
And for purely psychical things, there is no possibility of anything like physical evidence.
For instance, you know that it is impossible in physical fact ever to make a concept of God, because it is not a physical concept.
It has nothing to do with an experience in space and time.
It has simply no connection with space and time, and therefore you cannot expect any such subsequent effect.
But if you have the psychical experience, if the psychical fact forces itself upon you, then you understand it, and you can then make a concept of it.
The abstraction, or the concept of God, has come out of experience.
It is not your intellectual concept, though it can be intellectual too.
But the main thing in such an experience is that it is a psychical fact.
And psychical facts are the reality in visuddha.
Therefore the insurmountable force of reality is sustaining no longer the data of this earth but psychical data.
For example, you know that you would like to do something very much, but you feel it is simply not to be, as if there were an absolute interdiction.
Or you feel very strongly that you don’t want to do a certain thing, yet the psychical factor demands it, and you know there is no defense—you must go that way; there is no hesitation about it.
That is the power of the elephant, which you feel perhaps even in what you would call absurdities.
Those are the experiences of the reality of visuddha as expressed by the symbolism.
That is only the fifth cakra, and we are already out of breath—literally so—we are beyond the air we breathe; we are reaching, say, into the remote future of mankind, or of ourselves.
For any man has at least the potential faculty to experience that which will be the collective experience in two thousand years, perhaps in ten thousand years.
What we are dealing with today has already been we don’t know how many millions of times before in dim ages of the past by primitive medicine men, or by old Romans or Greeks—it has all been anticipated.
And we anticipate thousands of years to come, so we really reach out into a future which we do not yet possess.
Therefore it is rather bold to speak of the sixth cakra, which is naturally completely beyond our reach, because we have not even arrived at visuddha.
But since we have that symbolism we can at least construct something theoretical about it.
The ajna center, you remember, looks like a winged seed, and it contains no animal.
That means there is no psychical factor, nothing against us whose power we might feel.
The original symbol, the linga, is here repeated in a new form, the white state.
Instead of the dark germinating condition, it is now in the full blazing white light, fully conscious.
In other words, the God that has been dormant in muladhara is here fully awake, the only reality; and therefore this center has been called the condition in which one unites with Siva.
One could say it was the center of the unio mystica with the power of God, meaning that absolute reality where one is nothing but psychic reality, yet confronted with the psychic reality that one is not.
And that is God. God is the eternal psychical object. God is simply a word for the non-ego.
In visuddha psychical reality was still opposed to physical reality.
Therefore one still used the support of the white elephant to sustain the reality of the psyche.
Psychical facts still took place within us, although they had a life of their own.
But in the ajna center the psyche gets wings—here you know you are nothing but psyche.
And yet there is another psyche, a counterpart to your psychical reality, the non-ego reality, the thing that is not even to be called self, and you know that you are going to disappear into it.
The ego disappears completely; the psychical is no longer a content in us, but we become contents of it.
You see that this condition in which the white elephant has disappeared into the self is almost unimaginable.
He is no longer perceptible even in his strength because he is no longer against you.
You are absolutely identical with him.
You are not even dreaming of doing anything other than what the force is demanding, and the force is not demanding it since you are already doing it—since you are the force.
And the force returns to the origin, God.
To speak about the lotus of the thousand petals above, the Sahasrara center, is quite superfluous because that is merely a philosophical concept with no substance to us whatever; it is beyond any possible experience.
In ajna there is still the experience of the self that is apparently different from the object, God.
But in Sahasrara one understands that it is not different, and so the next conclusion would be that there is no object, no God, nothing but brahman.
There is no experience because it is one, it is without a second.
It is dormant, it is not, and therefore it is nirvana.
This is an entirely philosophical concept, a mere logical conclusion from the premises before. It is without practical value for us.
Mrs. Sawyer: I would like to ask you if the Eastern idea of going up through the cakras means that each time you have reached a new center you have to return to muladhara?
Dr. Jung: As long as you live you are in muladhara naturally.
It is quite self-evident that you cannot always live in meditation, or in a trance condition.
You have to go about in this world; you have to be conscious and let the gods sleep.
Mrs. Sawyer: Yes, but you could think of it in two ways: as doing all these things together, or as making a trip up and down.
Dr. Jung: The cakra symbolism has the same meaning that is expressed in our metaphors of the night sea-journey, or climbing a sacred mountain, or initiation.
It is really a continuous development.
It is not leaping up and down, for what you have arrived at is never lost.
Say you have been in muladhara and then you reach the water center, and afterward you return apparently.
But you do not return; it is an illusion that you return—you have left something of yourself in the unconscious.
Nobody touches the unconscious without leaving something of himself there.
You may forget or repress it, but then you are no longer whole.
When you have learned that two times two makes four, it will be so in all eternity—it will never be five.
Only those people return who thought they touched it but were only full of illusions about it.
If you have really experienced it, you cannot lose this experience.
It is as if so much of your substance had remained, so much of your blood and weight.
You can return to the previous condition, forgetting that you have lost a leg, but your leg has been bitten off by the leviathan.
Many people who got into the water say, “Never shall I go there again!”
But they left something, something has stayed there.
And if you get through the water and into the fire of passion, you never can really turn back, because you cannot lose the connection with your passion that you have gained in manipura.
Question: Is it like Wotan, who loses one eye?
Dr. Jung: Exactly. And like Osiris, the god of the underworld, who also loses one eye.
Wotan has to sacrifice his one eye to the well of Mimir, the well of wisdom, which is the unconscious.
You see, one eye will remain in the depths or turned toward it.
Thus Jakob Boehme, when he was “enchanted into the center of nature,” as he says, wrote his book about the “reversed eye.”
One of his eyes was turned inward; it kept on looking into the underworld—which amounts to the loss of one eye.
He had no longer two eyes for this world.
So when you have actually entered a higher cakra you never really turn back; you remain there.
Part of you can split off, but the farther you have reached into the series of the cakras, the more expensive will be the apparent return.
Or if you return, having lost the memory of the connection with that center, then you are like a wraith.
In reality you are just nothing, a mere shadow, and your experiences remain empty.
Mrs. Crowley: Do you think the idea is to experience those cakras, which one has gone through, simultaneously?
Dr. Jung: Certainly. As I told you, in our actual historical psychological development we have about reached anahata and from there we can experience muladhara, and all the subsequent centers of the past, by knowledge of records, and tradition, and also through our unconscious.
Suppose somebody reached the ajna center, the state of complete consciousness,
not only self-consciousness.
That would be an exceedingly extended consciousness which includes everything—energy itself—a consciousness which knows not only “That is Thou” but more than that—every tree, every stone, every breath of air, every rat’s tail—all that is yourself; there is nothing that is not yourself.
In such an extended consciousness all the cakras would be simultaneously experienced, because it is the highest state of consciousness, and it would not be the highest if it did not include all the former experiences. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 42-59
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
