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1935 16 Oct. LECTURE I Zarathustra Seminar

Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group

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Zarathustra Seminar

1935 16 Oct. LECTURE I Zarathustra Seminar

Prof. Jung:

We are continuing to plow through Zarathustra.

But before beginning I want to tell those among you who have not been in our former

seminars that Zarathustra is a very particular case.

It is not a case in which we can expect a differentiation of consciousness from the unconscious; on the contrary, we find a considerable identity of conscious and unconscious.

Nietzsche’s unconscious being activated, he is therefore identical with all its contents, especially in the very first indications of the onslaught of the collective unconscious, which eventually was his undoing.

He is identical with the anima and with the archetype of the old wise man and with various other figures, particularly the self, which naturally has then not the quality of a psychic self, but rather the quality of an ancient rather primitive god.

That is, of course, at the bottom of his famous Dionysian experience.

Now, this very peculiar psychical condition is exceedingly difficult to deal with, because it always must be kept in mind that there is such a complete identity.

It is a condition which we hardly ever find in practical analysis.

We would find it naturally in creative people in a creative mood, but such cases are very rare because, when in the creative mood, they surely would not care to be analyzed.

All our ordinary expectations are baffled by this condition, and that makes it particularly difficult to understand his peculiar psychology.

But I must say again that you have brought it on yourselves. I would not have chosen it.

Of course, it is very interesting, but you must cock your ears and work in order to understand this very involved tangle.

And I would call your attention again to the report on the first seminar about Zarathustra, where I tried to clarify this strange psychology in the form of a syllogismos, a diagram which shows the identity of all the figures that turn up in Zarathustra.’

Now we will take up the chapter called, “The Flies in the Market-Place.”

Flee, my friend, into thy solitude! I see thee deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.

Admirably do forest and rock know how to be silent with thee.

Resemble again the tree which thou lovest, the broad-branched one-silently and attentively it o’erhangeth the sea.

You remember, the principal contents of the preceding chapter, “The New Idol,” are his ideas about the state; it is as if he had foreseen modern developments.

He speaks of the state as the great monster that takes on an extraordinary importance: namely, the wave of collectivism which begins to sway the world and to drown the individual.

And as he is fighting for his ideal of the Superman, he naturally tries to assert the right of the individual to live.

He sees his Superman in absolute contrast to the state.

The state is the archenemy of the Superman, and because the state is the enemy, it is the equivalent of that individual who strives to assert himself and become a Superman.

You see, what has happened there is that the idea of the Superman, or the differentiated individual, having not reached the surface of consciousness, remains in the dark, and therefore it is everywhere; it is in everybody, and everybody becomes so individualized and also so inflated in consciousness that they needs must make a state in order to be able to live.

For, when everyone has an inflation they are no longer able to understand one another, and the human and social organizations will disintegrate.

Then one sees that it is absolutely necessary that even the most paradoxical standpoints shall be united in order to maintain a sort of order; so all the inflated individuals will form a state in which nobody has any meaning.

Naturally, such a condition is quite against the differentiation of the individual; differentiation would be even a danger.

That kind of state, which is a sort of compromise between inflated individuals, is afraid of an individual who shows his differentiation; it would mean that the compromise did not work because an individual was sticking out in some way, and the whole compromise was made with the purpose that this should not occur.

Such a state is of course the guarantee that no individual shall be able to stick out.

That was the situation in Nietzsche’s case, and for quite a while after Nietzsche, until things became so impossible that suddenly individuals began to stick out very badly, especially in certain nations.

The world is quite doubtful in regard to that however; some think it is all wrong, others that it is just right.

But at all events, that has been the development in our conscious world.

Now Nietzsche, being chiefly confronted with a state which was a guarantee against individuals who might stick out, felt that pressure tremendously, which explains why he condemns the state as being the absolute caricature of the idea of the Superman.

You see, it is invariably the case when such an idea is hovering above mankind-or is happening in the fundamental structure of the unconscious mind-that it is then everywhere: everybody is infected by it, and everybody has an inflation over it; everybody is an unconscious Superman.

And since the individual is unconscious of it, the state has to voice it.

All the inflated individuals are anarchistically set against each other, and therefore the state has to assume authority in order to hold them together.

So people are invariably forced into a sort of society which guarantees a certain amount of life to every inflated particle under the condition that nobody sticks out.

Miss Wolff I would like to read to you what Jakob Burckhardt says about the new state.”

In a letter to a German friend, Friedrich von Preen, he gives a prophecy of future conditions.

He says: Oh, how many things dear to educated minds they will have to throw overboard as mental “luxury.” And how strangely difficult to us the new generation will grow up. It may happen that we shall appear to the younger ones as wholly based on luxuries as the French emigrants appeared to those people to whom they fled. The essential political nature (commonwealth) of people is a wall, in which this or that nail still can be driven, but the nail has no hold any longer.  Therefore in the agreeable twentieth century, Authority will again raise its head, and it will be a terrible head.

At last the taking of everything as merely provisional, this right to every wilful innovation, this privilege of every cupidity, will come to its end. Alas, what will happen to so many interests dear to us?  To science, for instance, which is so used to take the back seat on the car of “Progress in general”!  How little will the new authority care about science.

Prof Jung: That is a very remarkable prophecy.

It must have been written before the end of the eighties because Nietzsche “died” then.

Miss Wolff: Then when Nietzsche was sending Zarathustra to Gottfried Keller l he wrote him a letter (Rome, June 1883) describing his condition while writing the book as  follows:

How strange! Out of a very abyss of feelings in which I was thrown by this past winter, the most dangerous of my whole life, all of a sudden I rose and for ten days I was as if under the brightest sky and high over lofty mountains. The fruit of these days is now lying before you.

Prof. Jung: That is a valuable contribution.

Well, the feeling of such a condition brings up the realization of what the differentiated individual must feel when forced to live in such a state, and that we now find

in the chapter on “The Flies in the Market-Place.”

He admonishes his friend to flee to solitude, to nature, to be like a tree, because, he goes on:

Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

In the world even the best things are worthless without those who represent them: those representers, the people call great men.

He says that the best things are of no account in the world characterized by such a state; because no individual is allowed to stick out, the best things can hardly exist.

If they do exist, they must be shown, and for that demonstration there are special individuals like actors.

So if the role of a king is to be demonstrated, an actor is needed who demonstrates a king-or the hero, or the god-and then people call those showmen or actors the great men.

Little do the people understand what is great-that is to say, the creating agency.

But they have a taste for all representers and actors of great things.

The great things come into the world through people who are invisible, and then they must be shown by people like playactors, who have just as much relation to the great things as a playactor has to his role.

You know that famous passage in Hamlet, “What is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? … ”

Around the devisers of new values revolveth the world:-invisibly it revolveth.

Here he describes the very important fact that when a great thing is created, it is in the world; but since it is unconsciously in the world, since it is not visible, it is only known by the collective unconscious.

It is in the collective unconscious of everybody, and therefore everybody will turn to it; they are made to turn to it quite against their conscious will perhaps.

And they don’t know to what they turn-if they notice at all that they are turned!

But around the actors revolve the people and the glory; such is the course of things.

They are turned to the real thing, yet what they discover is the play actors who show it, so they see the mere outer appearance of the thing.

Spirit, hath the actor, but little conscience of the spirit.

He can act it as if it were his own product, as if it were really himself, and that could be called a lack of intellectual conscience.

He believeth always in that wherewith he maketh believe most strongly-in himself.

If he does not believe in himself, he is a bad actor.

He must believe in himself, must believe that he is the very thing he represents-or he does not represent it.

While the one who invents it always presents it in a way which is inspired by intellectual conscience; he doesn’t say: “This is myself,” and so people don’t see it.

They cannot, it is too subtle.

They only see the man who is acting it.

Tomorrow he hath a new belief, and the day after, one still newer.

Sharp perceptions hath he, like the people, and changeable humors.

To upset-that meaneth with him to prove.

To drive mad-that meaneth with him to convince.

And blood is counted by him as the best of all arguments.

Here we come to modern history.

A truth which only glideth into fine ears, he calleth falsehood and trumpery.

Verily, he believeth only in Gods that make a great noise in the world!

Nowadays, you hear many such great noises.

A noise is the evidence that it is something; the more one makes a noise about it, the more one convinces people.

We have it in our ears in recent events in Switzerland. That should be an argument.

Full of clattering buffoons is the market-place.

The play actors who identify themselves with the best thing. and the people glory in their great man! These are for them the masters of the hour.

But the hour presseth them; so they press thee.

And also from thee they want Yea or Nay.

Those people are also in a hurry, speak of conquest and cannot wait:

This is the day of the Lord! Now is the time! Step up to be a witness!

Don’t wait any longer because we are in a hurry to secure our success!

Alas! thou wouldst set thy chair betwixt For and Against?

On account of those absolute and impatient ones, be not jealous, thou lover of truth! Never yet did truth cling to the arm of an absolute one.

That hardly needs any comment.

On account of those abrupt ones, return into thy security: only in the market-place is one assailed by Yea? or Nay?

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths.

Away from the market-place and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the market-place and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values.

Flee, my friend, into thy solitude: I see thee stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee thither, where a rough, strong breeze bloweth!

Now what does he mean by poisonous flies? Why just this peculiar figure of speech?

Mrs. Fierz: Could they not be words which are in the air, stinging and poisonous?

Prof. Jung: Well, swarms of flies are poison in the air, so it might mean the thoughts that are flying about, the rumors, the newspapers, or a slogan of the day.

And from poisonous flies one gets terrible infections like blood poisoning; they are an awful pest.

This symbol of blood poisoning or infection often turns up in dreams where a collective

infection is meant, frequently represented as a venereal or tubercular infection, or any other contagious disease.

You see, the one on the way of individuation is naturally exposed to collective infection; all the obvious truth he hears out in the marketplace is decidedly poisonous because it is absolutely against his way, his attempt.

It tells him how wrong he is and how things ought to be done, which is all against his grain.

If he allows himself to be infected by such views, he will soon die as an individual and be part of a flood or a great river; he will rush along and think himself a great fellow, but he is only one fat sheep perhaps in a whole herd, no more.

So it is an almost mortal danger to expose oneself to the flies of the marketplace.

Of course one could ask, is there no possibility of immunity-a protection against this infection? Should such a differentiated individual not be particularly protected

just by his differentiation?

And I should say, yes he ought to be protected: I don’t think differentiation is of any use if one is simply more exposed to such dangers than before.

But this danger of infection comes from a certain condition.

Do you know what that is?

Mrs. Baumann: By being in participations through his unconscious.

Prof Jung: Yes, and by his likeness to the flies in the marketplace.

Nietzsche is a fly too, and he forgets all about it when he aims at the Superman.

You see, identifying with the Superman means that he is no longer a fly in the marketplace.

If he could only realize that he is just one of those ordinary people, he would be aware that it was quite natural that he should participate in that movement, and then it would not be dangerous.

He would say, “Naturally, the collective man in myself is feeling for them or against them, but inasmuch as I am not a collective man, I don’t mix in with all that.”

One could say, “Inasmuch as I am a body I am in the same swing; yet inasmuch as I am human I am out of it. I don’t identify with it as I don’t identify with my body or with

the lower layers of my psyche.”

So the danger Nietzsche describes here is only valid inasmuch as he has an inflation; he identifies with the Superman and leaves the ordinary man behind, as we saw long ago.

And naturally he has then no longer the protection of the collective being that surely would allow him to be one of the crowd in the marketplace without getting a dangerous infection.

Such infections only happen when one is not humble enough, when one immodestly and immoderately identifies with one’s ideals or the ideals of the Superman; then naturally one has no basis, but is suspended in the air, only to come down and wake up, perhaps, having fallen into a deep black hole.

Flee into thy solitude! Thou hast lived too closely to the small and pitiable. Flee from their invisible vengeance! Towards thee they have nothing but vengeance.

That would not be the case if he could accept his shadow, the collective man in himself; inasmuch as he cannot, naturally he will have the whole world against him.

Raise no longer an arm against them! Innumerable are they, and it is not thy lot to be a fly-flap.

You see, he should accept the fact that he is one of the flies; he cannot wipe out the ordinary man because he is one of them, and if he tries to do so he simply creates a hysterical dissociation in himself.

Innumerable are the small and pitiable ones: and of many a proud structure, rain-drops and weeds have been the ruin.

If you don’t take care of it, sure enough that will come.

Thou art not stone; but already hast thou become hollow by the numerous drops.

Thou wilt yet break and burst by the numerous drops.

One can only say, don’t be a stone because you are human; if you are a stone as well as a human being, you will hollow yourself out by your own raindrops: your own life will hollow you out.

You should not be stone, you should be flexible.

Exhausted I see thee, by poisonous flies; bleeding I see thee, and torn at a hundred spots; and thy pride will not even upbraid.

Blood they would have from thee in all innocence; blood their bloodless souls crave for-and they sting, therefore, in all innocence.

But thou, profound one, thou sufferest too profoundly even from small wounds; and ere thou hadst recovered, the same poison worm crawled over thy hand.

What does he mean by this peculiar figure, the poisonous creature, der Giftwurm, in the German text?

Mrs. Fierz: Did he not once dream that he had a toad on his hand?

Prof. Jung: Yes. Bernoulli published the correspondence between Nietzsche and his friend Overbeck, a professor of church history in Basel-it was he who fetched Nietzsche back from Turin to Basel when he broke down.

Now in this correspondence, he mentions the fact that Nietzsche always suffered from the peculiar phobia that when he saw a toad, he felt that he ought to swallow it.

And once when he was sitting beside a young woman at a dinner, he told her of a dream he had had, in which he saw his hand with all the anatomical detail, quite translucent, absolutely pure and crystal-like, and then suddenly an ugly toad was sitting upon his hand and he had to swallow it.

You know, the toad has always been suspected of being poisonous, so it represents a secret poison hidden in the darkness where such creatures live-they are nocturnal animals.

And the extraordinary fact is that it is a parallel to what actually happened to Nietzsche, of all people-that exceedingly sensitive nervous man has a syphilitic infection.

That is a historical fact-I know the doctor who took care of him.

It was when he was twenty-three years old.

I am sure this dream refers to that fatal impression; this absolutely pure system infected by the poison of the darkness.

But that kind of thing happens to such people; I don’t say it is always venereal disease-any other infection or injury may happen to people who are too intuitive, who live beyond themselves, without paying attention enough to the body, to the reality of life.

We of course hate to talk of disgusting or evil or dangerous things; we are like primitives in that respect.

It is unfavorable to mention them.

Yet we cannot live in a world which is not, but have to live in a world which is.

If Nietzsche had paid attention enough to the reality of his extraordinary sensitive nervous system on the one side, and to the fact of the world on the other side, he would have been very careful to avoid situations in which he could have gotten such an infection; he would have known the effect it would have in his life.

Such a situation is not unavoidable.

But it is to just those people whose reality sense is defective that those things do happen.

To anybody else it would not be so terrible, but to a nervous system such as Nietzsche possessed it was a horrible fatality, and I think that this dream expresses it.

Sitting beside that young woman the fact came back to him unconsciously and he felt forced to tell her of the dream in order to inform her: Don’t touch me! I am unclean-marked by my fate.

He had to give her full information.

People do that when they talk to you unconsciously; they always provide you with the necessary information about themselves.

It often happens that perfect strangers tell you all about themselves, provided you cock your ears and provided it is important to them to do so.

So I think the poisonous creature that creeps over his hand is really the quintessence of what the world did to Nietzsche.

But it could do such a thing to him only through the fact that he did not pay attention.

He was not aware of the world, did not see it as it was, because he did not see himself as he was.

In this way it could happen.

Too proud art thou to kill these sweet-tooths.

But take care lest it be thy fate to suffer all their poisonous injustice!

They buzz around thee also with their praise: obtrusiveness, is their praise.

They want to be close to thy skin and thy blood.

It is perfectly true that as soon as somebody sticks out-when he goes ahead, for instance-many leeches try to get to the foreground by drinking his blood; but they can only do it when such a man is absolutely unaware of his body, of his real existence.

If he is aware of it he simply brushes the flies away.

Miss Wolff: The flies could get at Nietzsche, also, because he was too isolated. He frightened his friends away, being very intolerant with them. Yet, even if they did not understand him, they were really very good friends. He was too much alone, and because he did not attend enough to his relationships, that amount of psychic energy which is to be applied to them was being sucked out of him by collectivity. So he could not just brush off the flies.

Prof Jung: Well, if he had known the collective man in himself he would have been protected, but he was too much alone and so was separated from the open door to himself through which all the leeches could creep in.

They flatter thee, as one flattereth a God or devil; they whimper before thee, as before a God or devil.

What doth it come to? Flatterers are they, and whimperers, and nothing more.

That that flattery is another source of the infection is of course perfectly obvious.

You see, projections can happen through hostility or a negative attitude as well as through a so-called positive attitude; those are simply two different ways of carrying projections or infections.

Often, also, do they show themselves to thee as amiable ones.

But that hath ever been the prudence of the cowardly. Yea! The cowardly are wise!

They think much about thee with their circumscribed souls thou art always suspected by them!

Well, he describes here the condition of a general idea which had not yet reached consciousness, which is in the collective unconscious, causing as I said, an infection of consciousness which can show, for instance, in a peculiar inflation.

You know, when a person has an unconscious content-say a certain archetype is constellated-then his conscious, not realizing what the matter is, will be filled with the emanation or radiation of that activated archetype.

And then he behaves unconsciously as if he were that archetype, but he expresses the identity in terms of his ego personality, so that everybody who is clearsighted and not prejudiced will say, “Oh, well, that fellow is just inflated, he is a pompous ass, he is ridiculous.”

For he unconsciously plays a role and tries to represent something which he has taken to be his own self-of course, not the self in the philosophic sense-but merely his ego personality exaggerated by the influx and emanations of the unconscious archetype.

You see, the unconscious, activated archetype is like a rising sun, a source of energy or warmth which warms up the ego personality from within, and then the ego personality begins to radiate as if it were God knows what.

But it radiates its own colors, expresses the archetype in its own personal way, and therefore it appears as if the ego were all important.

Whereas the ego is of no importance at all in reality, but is simply urged from within, pushed forward and made to perform as if it were important.

The importance is the greatness that is behind.

For instance, you find in the Upanishads the cosmogonic myth of Prajapati, the first being who, when he found that he was all alone, that there was nothing which was not himself, began to talk to his own greatness, or the greatness within himself spoke to him.’

You see, the original philosophic mind makes that difference-the ego thinks, “I am all alone,” a pretty miserable condition.

But there is also a greatness which is peculiarly myself, yet it is not myself; it speaks to me and even tells me that which I did not know.

So this is merely a projection of that original mind which knows very clearly that the opinions of consciousness are of little importance, and that it is a greatness behind that consciousness which speaks the truth.

But if one is unconscious of it, then naturally one has an inflation and behaves as if one were the greatness.

Now, when you see people who obviously have an inflation, of course you can blame them for having it, for being pompous asses, ridiculous playactors; but you can also understand them as being motivated, as being a symbolic expression of an underlying importance which they do not see.

And you make no mistake if you assume that those people have obviously touched upon something of great importance which works upon them and pushes them into an importance which perhaps they themselves have not sought.

But it is so sweet that when you get it you won’t let go of it-you cannot say no.

If somebody says, “Are you not grand, a wonder character?” you say, “No, no! “but push the crown a little nearer and you will take it.

So these things happen from that infection.

Then in the paragraph.

“They think much about thee with their circumscribed souls-thou art always suspected by them!” he speaks of people finding a fellow who represents the thing which causes their inflation.

You see, the cause according to Nietzsche is the all-pervading

archetypal idea of the Superman, the greatness of man-and his idealism

or ambition is to attain to that greatness.

And one cannot say this is not legitimate; it is a fact that there are philosophies, religious systems and so on, which hold such a conviction: they even teach it.

The idea that we should overcome, that we should be good, is all the Superman in different editions.

That we should try to attain a state of Nirvana, not desiring this or that, being free of the opposites, being beyond good and evil, is simply the Indian edition of the Superman.

To be in Tao is the Chinese form. Those are all very difficult appearances of the same idea. So his aspiration to become his own greatness is legitimate.

It is clear that this idea becomes conscious in Nietzsche and therefore, inasmuch as he identifies himself with the Superman’s greatness, he is that which moved everybody else at that time.

For instance, how did Jakob Burckhardt know about the future?

Through his own unconscious, by his own psychological condition.

How could he see the role authority would play?

Because those chapters were in Jakob Burckhardt as they were in everybody, so much in everybody that now they come off in reality: we see them performed before our eyes on the stage of the world.

Now, if Nietzsche is conscious of this idea and identical with it, it is quite to be expected that he will become suspect, for when people meet the apparent carrier of the source of their inflation, they naturally will immediately try to suppress that individual who sticks out, just because he threatens that inflation.

For then they are no longer the only sun in heaven-there is another sun, and that should not be.

That is not legitimate.

Naturally, they will say he apes something, aspires to something, and should be suppressed, because he threatens to take the value out of their pocket which is the happy cause of their most cherished inflation.

That is of course disagreeable and therefore people suspect the one who is perhaps conscious of that value.

Well, that of course must be.

You see, they are not conscious of it, and to be conscious of the idea which causes the general inflation is already an asset; that is more than to be merely unconsciously filled with it.

So Nietzsche, in having a conscious idea of the cause of his inflation, is in a better condition.

He is ahead of his time, and therefore he is naturally the object of envy because they all crave the consciousness of their possession.

They are the people who have a hundred dollars in their pocket without knowing it, and Nietzsche is the one who is conscious that he has that hundred dollars: that is just the difference.

But no more than the people of his time, did he know that the hundred dollars were merely a loan; the hundred dollars’ worth belongs to the greatness.

So naturally, those people would suspect him of thieving, of being a cheat and a liar.

Then it is also a fact that ordinary people are so deeply convinced of their nonentity, despite their inflation, that they are quite sure that in the street, or even in the town in which they live, there never has been and never will be a great man.

They cannot assume that a great man would live in a street with an ordinary name;

the great man lives in a faraway country where streets have very peculiar names, where the houses look very peculiar, and where they are all peculiar people.

They even assume that great men never sleep and eat; that they have wings or something of the sort and can fly.

Whatever is much thought about is at last thought suspicious.

That is true because their thoughts are made to turn round the thing which causes the inflation; so when they meet the carrier of that source of inflation, the idea, they naturally begin to think-but how they think is the question.

They punish thee for all thy virtues.

They pardon thee in their inmost hearts only-for thine errors.

It is of course a great relief to the ordinary man when he sees that the suspected Superman makes mistakes.

That alleviates their task and gives them a certain rope by which to hold on to their inflation.

Because thou art gentle and of upright character, thou sayest:

“Blameless are they for their small existence.”

But their circumscribed souls think: “Blamable is all great existence.”

This sounds almost grotesque, yet it is a great truth.

All greatness that comes into being is guilt, because it destroys the ordinary man.

You see, the invisible things cannot come into being without torture and destruction

for the collective man, for the unconscious natural existence; you always kill and destroy in order to bring something into existence.

Whatever you do, if it is of any importance, also means destruction.

It is the tragic guilt of Prometheus who brought the fire to mankind.

It was a very great advantage to mankind, yet he stole it from the gods and they were offended.

So the idea that man has greatness, that he is in touch with greatness or that he might attain to greatness, is a theft, because it is stolen from the unconscious and brought within the reach of man.

And then the ordinary man is in a very dangerous condition; the neighborhood of the archetype causes an inflation, and the man is mad: his whole world is filled with madness.

Such an archetypal presence should be withheld as long as possible therefore, for it causes no end of disturbance in the world.

Of course, even the creator or inventor of such ideas is moved by the archetypes; the only difference is that his nervous system is so sensitive that he cannot help realizing it.

He sees it, he understands it.

So he is not at just the same disadvantage as everybody else, but naturally he will be made responsible for all the destructive effects that come out of such an idea.

Even when thou art gentle toward them, they still feel themselves despised by thee; and they repay thy beneficence with secret maleficence.

Thy silent pride is always counter to their taste; they rejoice if once thou be humble enough to be frivolous.

What we recognize in a man, we also irritate in him.

Therefore be on your guard against the small ones In thy presence they feel themselves small, and their baseness gleameth and gloweth against thee in invisible vengeance.

Sawest thou not how often they became dumb when thou approachedst them, and how their energy left them like the smoke of an extinguishing fire?

Here is the observation that as soon as he approaches the ordinary people, their inflation naturally collapses, because it becomes visible that he carries the value, and the ordinary people thus lose a certain thrill or a motive power they had apparently possessed: they lost the hundred dollars.

For instantly the imaginary hundred dollars they carry in their pockets disappear, and then they discover that he has the hundred dollars really in his pocket and can put them on the table.

So everybody thinks that by some unknown trick he has robbed them, has taken all that value out of their pockets.

Naturally, they hate him and they will take their revenge.

Of course they don’t realize that even his hundred dollars are not his property, but are a loan; he has just as little as all the rest of them.

Yea, my friend, the bad conscience art thou of thy neighbours; for they are unworthy of thee. Therefore they hate thee, and would fain suck thy blood.

Thy neighbours will always be poisonous flies; what is great in thee-that itself must make them more poisonous, and always more fly-like.

Naturally, but he makes the mistake of thinking that he is great, not seeing that he is one of them.

When he shows his hundred dollars, he says, “Now look at what I have, this is my own!”-and that is the lie.

There he cheats them.

So when Nietzsche comes out and says, “This is my idea, I am identical with that Superman,” he deserves his fate: he really identifies with a thing which is not himself.

But it is quite natural-anybody would act like that, and everybody expects a fellow who has an idea to instantly identify with it.

For instance, no ordinary people would assume that a first-class tenor could be anything but a great man; they even think he must have a wonderful character because his tones are so high.

And all the young girls are in love with him, thinking he is up there in his high tones.

Then of course, when his voice has gone, if he is fool enough to identify with it, he is utterly gone too.

Where are the tenors? You must seek them with lanterns. Like the great cocottes, very beautiful women: when their beauty has gone, where are they? When the face withers, they disappear altogether because there was nothing behind the face. Where is Cleo de Merode, or La Belle Otero?

They have vanished.

Perhaps La Belle Otero is Frau Meier and lives in a back yard somewhere.

So all the poison which comes from the flies is caused by that inflation of the apparent owner of the hundred dollars.

Flee, my friend, into thy solitude-and thither, where a rough strong breeze bloweth.

It is not thy lot to be a fly-flap.

There is something positive in this advice; there he would have a chance to realize that he is not the greatness.

But he never would be able to realize that he is like the ordinary people and he should realize that too.

For instance, if he were really a sage, he would say to himself, “Go out into the street, go to the little people, be one of them and see how you like it, how much you enjoy being such a small thing.

That is yourself.” And so he would learn that he was not his own greatness.

Or he might say, “Go away from the little people and disappear into your mountain vastnesses; try to identify with that greatness, and you will see that you cannot identify with it, and so you will learn that you are not that greatness.”

You see, there are two ways of realizing it.

But to disappear into solitude in order to be desirous, to be longing for friends and recognition, effect, and so on, does not pay.

Then one never realizes that one is not one’s own greatness.

Mrs. Sigg: I don’t know what this means: “What we recognize in a man, we also stir in him.”

Prof. Jung: Well, it is a great truth that when you perceive something in a person, you also bring it out in him.

When you see a certain quality in a person, it is a sort of intuition, and that is not an indifferent fact:

it works upon him.

When somebody has a bad intuition about you, you feel it without knowing it; you feel suppressed because that intuition is a fact which takes its way through the unconscious.

We don’t know how an intuition comes, but it always has to do with something in the unconscious; and since the unconscious is in you both, you also get a shot from it.

It will most certainly come out in you, and it all depends upon the character of the intuition whether you are favorably or unfavorably impressed.

If somebody has an intuition that you have a certain thought, you are most probably made to think that thought.

Intuition seems to work through the sympathetic system, and being a half-unconscious

function, intuitions also bring out an unconscious effect in the object of the intuition.

In dealing with intuitives, you notice that they can intuit a thing in such a way that it is shot into your back bone, into your spinal cord, and you must admit that you thought it, though afterwards you will realize that the thought was surely not your own.

There are very curious examples.

For instance, certain salespeople read from your eyes what you apparently want; you buy the most amazing stuff and cannot understand afterwards why the devil you ever bought it, whoever put it into you!

And Eastern sorcerers put things into you so that you naively step into their trap.

A sorcerer tried that once with me and I stepped into the trap; he had such amazing intuition that he was able to twist a cell in my brain.

The famous rope trick is done in that way; it is a sort of projection.

I heard a story about a sorcerer who worked the rope-trick in a garrison in India while all the officers, the whole mess, were gathered round.

And when the thing was already in full swing, another man who had been delayed came to watch the performance.

He stepped up to the circle of men who were all gazing into the air at the boy climbing the rope, but he saw nothing there.

He only saw the boy standing beside the sorcerer and the rope lying on the ground, and he was just about to shout when the sorcerer caught him, saying, “Look at that man, he has no head!”

And he looked and the man had no head, and then he was all in-and there was the rope and the boy climbing up it.

The sorcerer saw of course that the man was not in the circle and that he had to put him on the spot, and he got him.

Intuition does work like that in certain cases.

You can observe very clearly that certain thoughts come into your head which afterwards you clearly feel have not been your own: you were infected by something.

One calls it magic but it is simply an effect through the unconscious, coming from the fact that the three other functions-perception, thinking, and feeling-move as if in consciousness; but intuition makes a way through the deep unconscious where you are one with everybody.

So when such a thing happens, everybody is stirred.

If I move on my chair you are not disturbed, but if the soil upon which you sit is shaken, you feel an earthquake and are disturbed.

Intuition is like a thing which goes through the floor and shakes everybody.

This is one of the important sources of mental infections and there is no defence against it; you cannot suppress the effect, it will happen.

The only thing you can do is to make up your mind as soon as possible whether this thought or effect or feeling is really your own.

But if you leave things, as most people do-just let them go from a sort of moral laziness-you undergo an infection.

It gets you by the neck.

The analyst is in a particularly disagreeable participation; for the sake of his own mental health he should clean himself every day from the intuitions of his patients in order to avoid mental infection.

If you let things go on, their accumulation eventually causes an inflation; you will one day wake up with a big inflation which will soon make you fall into a hole.

Analysts have to be very careful.

Nietzsche, of course, is not in that position: he is naively identical with his greatness.

And people like him swallow doses of poison with pleasure.

They are sort of morphine maniacs or alcoholics, but of a mental kind, and they do it in order to maintain their happy condition.

An inflation is a wonderful thing: you are lifted up from the earth and fly in heaven, looking down benevolently upon the masses. ~Carl Jung Depth Psychology, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 602-618


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