Seek life humbly! Beware, it wants to find soil in you!
Encounters with C. G. Jung: The Journal of Sabi Tauber (1951–1961)
1954
Then we looked at my newest tarot and geoscope:
Jung commented: “Many epees, that is a lot of spirituality, but also high values of coupes (reine coupes): large femininity – it’s the problem of masculine and feminine within you.”
Everywhere he saw something positive, as, for example, “no deniers – well, those you don’t really need!”
Furthermore, “fortuna maior + coniunctio, 11, 12, 13, 14 – great destiny, big goal.
16 (superiudex) tells you how 15 (iudex) wants to be understood.
Here, it is success in relation to the unconscious (otherwise it could also point
to appearance in the world, success in the collective).
In the fourth house, puella together with coupes means uncontrolled, natural femininity; in the tenth, puella together with epees is spiritualized femininity (through work!).
Laetitia in the ninth house
is an overcoming of tristitia in the second (source of libido).
As a primary disposition you have a natural masculinity (epees in the second house).
Acquisitio in the eighth house says, one acquires what before was believed to be lost (or counted as lost).
Masculine signs are action oriented; one has to do something with them.
Puer I cavalier coupes represents the masculine in a woman, the animus acquired in childhood, where puella is inferior.
The fifth house is the secret preparation for life; cauda draconis is oriented backwards, so there is an inhibition here; you don’t dare to come out (probably due to experiences in your youth).
In the sixth house, the self is hidden; cavalier batons is a masculine animus as, for example, Faust at his desk. In the seventh house; reine coupes I amissio indicate a loss in relationships, a defect.
With such a loss of relationship you are standing at the threshold of death!
Reine coupes is really a royal vessel, high femininity, large capacity for comprehension, royal attitude (restraint).
Acquisitio in the eighth house wants to say that, if it comes to a ‘declaration’ (that is, when it matters; when it is illuminated), you are feminine in your disposition, receiving, ready.
You have a gain that way.
In the ninth house, you overcome the obstacle and ‘have an effect’ (batons), (behind the masculine activity there is a positive sign).
No monies.
In the tarot, I-VII shows high intensity of life; accumulation of great things (pape, by the way, occurs frequently in all cases); V, VI, and VII point to your illness.”
With regard to Ignaz, Jung said that he should not intuit; he should think.
Select a myth, for example, find all the instances where it is mentioned, and carefully record these texts; look where they occur and how they are related in each instance.
What this myth meant for the Egyptian, not for himself!
He has to explore the reality of the Egyptians, that is the truth, not what kind of meaning he finds in it.
For example, what is the ‘eye of Horus’ and what was it for the Egyptians?
With individual symbols he can proceed in the same way:
put together images and texts carefully and make use of his thinking.
Jung, for example, did not intuit what the number four might mean when he studied it, but he compiled the reality of the number four from all he could find in the world.
The four is reality and truth; he had not to invent the correspondences.
Restored, and with a new found love for the darkness, I returned home.
Thanks for your boundless kindness, for your heart, which I could feel today.
Thus I will not freeze -May God have lost me not.
The darkness enveloped me gently once I had left everyday life behind and found myself alone on a recovery vacation.
And there, time was extinguished as well.
Slowly, all grief settles to form a solid ground which stands as heavy anchor in the abyss.
There upon, gradually, a pillar, stone by stone, and, golden, there’s a bow leading up to heaven.
But the darkness also showed its uncannily wild and destructive side.
As an encouragement to stand strong, Jung sent me a couple of books with the newest scientific insights, i.e. Pascual Jordan, Verdrangung und Komplementaritat (Stromverlag, Hamburg-Bergedorf 1947), and James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy (1943).
They were fabulously clear and aroused my enthusiasm, for they all gave prime iportance to the soul.
Strong hands
that stand like walls
before all harm
and never go away.
Help me live!
Help me believe
in the strength
of the soul.
Furthermore, there were Jung’s letters to an English clergyman, which I got to read as well, admiring their wonderful strength.
I made a translation for myself.
Water and heaven are my Thou!
Perhaps the door to people will close –
lonely I can see the winds,
blowing quietly across the earth:
Fertilizing spirit – timeless
it works for eternity.
This retreat gave me the gift of the essential Yin.
To live it fully without coming under its spell is an art.
Pray that my now inevitable afternoon nap may become a true Yin ritual!
Spring had returned, but the old wise man was tired and sad.
He warned, “One should, as far as possible, withdraw all projections in life.
They make life poor and steal libido.
I don’t want to be a ‘myth’ either, but a real man, a human being, not a god – otherwise each word of mine has either an annihilating or an eternalizing effect, and that is very burdensome for me.
I simply lived my potentials, like any other, and did what I thought was right.
One can, in fact, make projections to the point of self-destruction.
Then one no longer has gana at one’s disposal; it seeps into the unconscious.
Every relationship is aggravated and burdened through projections.
It only starts to live when they are withdrawn.
This is when real life can start!
Otherwise one lives in an auto-:erotic fashion, loving one’s projection in the other.
Things can exist in themselves; they have mana in themselves; nature does and humans do.
With the projection gone, the false glow falls away and one can see the true value.
Nothing is ever only this way or that, but has multiple facets that are alive and reveal new ones all the time!
Only when something becomes mythic, that is, full of the highest projection, is it ‘only this or that’ (that is, either godly or demonic!)
We humans must live in reality, that is, have our own mana and real relationships!
Nobody knows what Christ was like as a real person; like William Tell he is a myth.
I only want to be real, without the burden and responsibility of a myth.
The natural sciences work only with dry statistics; theology weighs everything morally. In that way, both lose their essential, real values.
Psychology on the other hand includes everything and is therefore true, real life!”
I told him the following dream:
I played the Bach fugues from memory on the grand piano, while he leaned against it on the other side.
Jung explained that he represented ‘the other end’ and thus gave me moral support.
He accepted the situation: with him I could do more than without him.
The expression of my feelings was still on feeble ground, he said; I have a need for it, but can’t yet express myself sufficiently.
It is most often in the inferior function where the greatest storms take place.
With Jung at the other end, the feeling is adapted, while alone it is too uncivilized.
I told him about the grief I still felt, along with bliss, when contemplating a blossom in the spring.
(While typing up my notes, now, in the spring of 1956, I’m happy to say that this is no longer the case. At long last I can experience the blessing of spring fully!)
Jung said, “this is melancholy because one cannot live one’s feeling openly and fully.
Then, of course, one is not as vulnerable as a flower in nature that might be plucked by anyone at any moment.
Individuation grows on its own.
It is the totally true and real way of a human being, his essential pattern, as in the example of the leaf-cutting ant.
One has to follow faithfully, go with the current, ‘grow in the forest.’
We must do what we hold to be right and what is possible.
In that way we answer the question that our destiny puts to us.
For example, I never would have wanted to become a gynecologist, so as to avoid having anything to do with women – and lo, how many women did I have to deal with in my practice!
Maybe you are losing libido at the moment, because deep inner realizations during your illness haven’t found expression.
Try with a spiritual project on synchronicity.
At the last convention in Brussels, the ‘Rhine’s experiments’ were discussed (parapsychology, telepathy), but they all talked past it!
They don’t understand my idea of synchronicity.
It doesn’t work causally, but meaningfully, and only when emotion is involved!
One should read everything that has been recently published, follow up on the newest biological experiments, make excerpts, prove exactly where the thinking went wrong, and present my ideas about the living reality of the archetype.
The principle of probability calculations is wrong.
‘Mere coincidence’ is more than we assume – it’s not just ‘chance,’ it’s all ‘arranged’! Synchronicity is a reality!”
Jung told me that he’d like to leave out the astrological experiments
in the next edition of his book on synchronicity, because, time and again, people get the idea that he wants to prove the correctness of astrology.
But that wasn’t the point! His reservation is with the application of the theory of probability.
“The flying saucers , too, are a phenomenon of synchronicity: new life is coming from outside the earth, from a new standpoint.
But it’s like a ‘spook in the stable’: one doesn’t talk about it, because it is dangerous!”
Jung had been collecting material about this since 1946.
It could be:
- a) a mass-hallucination,
- b) a subtle materialization through active imagination of a ‘chap’
on Sirius, for example (or anywhere else outside planet earth),
- c) new apparitions of incarnation.
Focusing on me again, Jung continued, “You had to leave your family to witness that they could do without you.
(I took a deep breath – what could he possibly know?)
Now, don’t slide back into your old life!
By all means, find a spiritual task. Struggle for verbal expression, so that your libido can see the light of day and be at your disposal, otherwise it will keep flowing back into the unconscious.”
In Jung’s presence one becomes totally and essentially oneself.
It is such a wonderfully free feeling.
I wanted to keep it, always, so I asked him to give me my own special name (like in one of my earlier dreams, in which, at the Psychology Club, he had whispered a secret
name into my ear).
He only smiled.
Perhaps he was helping me to my own name through my work on the synchronicity phenomenon?
For July 26, 1954
What you, with your strength
created throughout life,
it shines broadly
into my darkness,
prohibits the dying,
orders a becoming,
awakens a holy plea.
Thank you, lighthouse, for the center!
With desperate zeal I put myself to work yet again.
I was given access to Jung’s library and ‘allowed’ to seek out the most recent literature.
But it disgusted me like a swarm of insects sent out by the devil.
It was such a confusing mess of concepts and languages that I could make neither head nor tail of it.
I read and sorted, all the while gasping for air.
I had a keen awareness of my inadequacy, but suspected that I couldn’t simply abandon this assignment as long as it was so horribly uncomfortable for me.
So, I made excerpts and tried to give some sort of ‘answer’ to the various scientists by demonstrating Jung’s idea of synchronicity.
Jung’s response to my paper seemed quite natural to me:
“These people are simply too dumb, they don’t know anything about the unconscious.
This will take at least two generations. Why don’t you stay with your own work?
Moreover, this task would far surpass your intellectual capacity.
One has to stay within the frame of what is possible.”
But what did he mean by “your own work”?
Perhaps I completely misunderstood him.
At any rate, feeling quite liberated I put the paper on synchronicity to rest.
I, for myself, understand the principle of synchronicity naturally.
The moving archetype is like an arm coming up from the depth of the earth, the hand just below the surface and only the fingers sticking out, which we see in different places. The common root of the fingers – the hand and the arm – can only be guessed, as it is deep in the earth.
visible: reacting phenotype surface of the earth
invisible: living and moving archetype
For me, parapsychological phenomena are a natural proof of God.
My “own work,” however, which Jung may have seen as a possibility within me, will remain a mystery.
Did I evade in any way? Or was it a synchronistic misunderstanding?
I simply kept on working by myself in the Jungian mode, even without a formal “goal and result.”
In fact, the absence of a goal is the premise for such work (as in an active imagination); it arises from the unconscious and has an effect in the collective.
“The spiritual effort of the individual benefits the whole; conversely, individual neglect harms the whole.”
Then I dreamed:
I sat at a table together with Jung, drinking wine.
Soon thereafter I sat in the vicinity of the strong tower at the shore of the clear lake, listening to Jung, and experiencing how a single day may become a “pearl.”
During our conversation, Jung was saying that, “Mrs. X. may have a certain degree of pathology; she is a ‘witch,’ but that really doesn’t have anything to do with you.
It’s your business if you fill her up with so much projection that she is damaging you!
You are each other’s dark side, the shadow, a piece of unlived life.
She is scintillating, unreal, helplessly ungrounded.
You represent for her a piece of young, real life, standing firmly on your ground, a happy wife and mother.
This is why there is ‘electricity’ between the two of you.
But if you try to avoid her and run away, many other ‘witches’ will come your way.
Fate doesn’t let you get away without working on your negative mother complex.
You have to fill undeveloped land with real life!
Your naivete and insufficient experience cause you to make and ‘fall into’ projections.
Imagine that you are walking a path, and on either side are ‘pieces’ (parts of your life) scattered about.
You have to collect them all and take them with you!
The detour is the shortest way in the development of the soul!
You, however, rush towards your goal with averted eyes and without picking up those elements of your life on the left and right.
That’s why you are insecure. The goal is completeness.
One also has to be able to stand still and let things happen, not pursue the goal as stubbornly as a typical schoolteacher in Eastern Switzerland!
Synchronicity exactly fits into your life. You have to experience it in your own life, ‘for real.’
With you, either everything is here (full of life), or there is nothing (no joy, no gana); these are extreme opposites to be dealt with, if one has no experience.
With a goddam naivete, like ‘The Little Rose from the Santis,’ You fall into the traps of Mrs. X.!
You don’t experience yourself enough.
For this kind of work one needs better acquaintance with oneself, so one knows who one is and what one has to do.
Your insecurity is ‘unprejudiced life.’
If you only see the goal, the devil lures behind every corner (for example, Mrs. X.).
The shadow is so real; it lives itself out anyway.
You only fall victim if you don’t know your other side; otherwise you could say, ‘Yep, have known this for a long time!’
Something always happens when one inwardly says ‘yes’ to life.
You look like a teenager, outright ‘prohibitive,’ full of expectations and longings.
Say yes to yourself, then life will come to you! The light is only your will; God is in the shadow. Don’t mix this up!
Someone said, ‘The Lord wants it.’ The other one pointed to him and said, ‘No, this lord wants it!’
How can God test my obedience? Only if He wants something I don’t want.
But one cannot always just say ‘yes;’ each time one has to examine whether it is ‘physically’ possible to fulfill the will of God.
Learn to accept the slightest hint of a feeling.
It is often quite insignificant, but each time a piece of life wants to join you.”
As an example, he told me of a female patient who was on her way to her session with Jung when she saw some beautiful early strawberries on display.
Her impulse was to buy them and bring them as a gift, but then she changed her mind, thinking that perhaps it wasn’t appropriate.
When she arrived, she brought such a ‘hellish animus’ with her that he protested, asking what she had experienced just before the session. – Those strawberries were the little piece of rejected feeling, which is why her animus became so awful.
Jung confirmed: “Up to now you were a full-time mother and wife. A mother wants to give life.
When your freedom returns, after the task is fulfilled, you must take in life! It wants to come back to you.
For a man, it’s the reverse: In the first part of life he conquers life, in the second he gives of it.
Within you, there is too much land as yet uncultivated, then you don’t know what’s settling there – maybe Mrs. X. is planting her poisonous plants!
Erroneously, she is still giving of life, and negatively at that, because she shouldn’t do it anymore.
If one wants to prove all that one can do, the effect is negative and poisonous (power-complex!).
Seek life humbly! Beware, it wants to find soil in you!”
And then the door opened and Mrs. X. appeared in person – unannounced, as a complete surprise!
She stared me down, speechless, then started to talk sweetly (in her strong Basel dialect) to Jung, addressing him as ‘Carl.’
Jung roared with laughter, “Now that is synchronicity!”
Giving me a nudge, he added, “Now you can prove it!”
She had brought some books along and wanted to explain something, but Jung cut her short, “Go now,” whereupon, dumbfounded, she disappeared into the tower.
I felt horrible and wanted to leave immediately, but he ordered me to sit down again.
So, I showed him my latest glass-painting (a church pane), depicting the sun, dripping into a bowl, and the blue cross.
“There we go, exactly!” he exclaimed. “The sun is giving life (she is dripping). You
receive the substance of life from her. If it were a power-complex, you’d do it with bad means, but this way you only have to hold out the bowl.
Just don’t say no, otherwise the precious drops are lost – receive life, catch it! It has to be a church window, because you can see it only through a religious attitude.
The colors show when looking from the inside out, not from the outside in.
So, you are standing in the church (thus you don’t have to be afraid to derail), and you are looking out, meaning you have visions.
Church windows arevisions!”
With a laugh he pointed to the blue cross.
“Look here, your cross of temperance! Perhaps cold rationality as well, an annihilating
critique, wanting ‘only the spiritual.’
Und der Satan kommt verschmitzt, Wenn man einen Rausch besitzt.
Und mehr und mehr nach diesen Schritten hat der Teufel ihn geritten.
You have to know about your feelings and take them seriously, within the frame of what is possible, not with rigid principles.”
A swan was swimming slowly toward us and called out.
Jung got up to fetch bread from the tower, then handed it to me: I should feed the swan, and I did.
Whenever a piece of driftwood came floating to the shore, I fished it out, for Jung’s fireplace.
Jung is pleased that his books are better understood by the common people than by the unworldly intellectuals who have lost their instincts.
When he gave lectures in America, he had asked for a small audience.
The organizers apologized for the crowd; it would only be for the first time because the regulations demanded public access.
Fig. 16: Sabi feeding the swan with bread.
Later there would be less because the people wouldn’t understand him anyway.
But the crowd got bigger, so that in the end the police had to assist!
(Apparently people could feel that this man was living what he spoke.)
Jung continued, saying that humility requires an unprejudiced attitude with a corresponding behavior.
One should accept what next comes up with great humility and examine it carefully as to its value for life.
If ‘it’ is appealing, one should say ‘yes’ to it, but with great trepidation, because one never knows whether it’s right.
Life is difficult, or it would be meaningless!
One should keep secrets; they enrich us.
This is why people invented mysteries when there weren’t any. ‘It’ had to be kept secret.
This gives security, independence, forms a personality.
Many pastors don’t understand the Book of Job, because they don’t have a genuine relationship with God, only an assumed one.
So, they have no idea of the terror of the religious man before God.
The most important thing for man is his personal relationship to God (children education).
All of Job (whether from different sources or not) is built around this one experience: the relationship between man and God.
People with a genuine religious sensibility understand this immediately. (Again, the simple folk!) ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounter with Jung, Page 67-80
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