1934 5 December LECTURE 9 Zarathustra Seminar
Dr. Jung:
We began last time the sermon called, “The Academic Chairs of Virtue.”
You remember we discussed its wisdom and came to the conclusion that that professor of the virtues was by no means stupid, that the sermon contained very commendable truth.
Now we will continue:
A small company is more welcome to me than a bad one: but they must come and go at the right time.
So doth it accord with good sleep.
Well, also, do the poor in spirit please me: they promote sleep.
Blessed are they, especially if one always give in to them.
Thus passeth the day unto the virtuous.
When night cometh,then take I good care not to summon sleep.
It disliketh to be summoned-sleep, the lord of the virtues!
But I think of what I have done and thought during the day.
Thus ruminating, patient as a cow, I ask myself: What were thy ten overcomings?
And what were the ten reconciliations, and the ten truths, and the ten laughters with which my heart enjoyed itself?
Thus pondering, and cradled by forty thoughts, it overtaketh me all at once-sleep, the unsummoned, the lord of the virtues.
Sleep tappeth on mine eye, and it turneth heavy. Sleep toucheth my mouth, and it remaineth open.
Verily, on soft soles doth it come to me, the dearest of thieves, and stealeth from me my thoughts: stupid do I then stand, like this academic chair.
But not much longer do I then stand: I already lie.
What is your chief impression of this second part?
Prof Fierz: It is ironic.
Dr. Jung: Yes, one feels that he is even rather sarcastic over it.
But without taking into consideration what Zarathustra would say, what about the thoughts themselves?
For instance: “Well, also, do the poor in spirit please me: they promote sleep.”
Or: “A small company is more welcome to me than a bad one; but they must come and go at the right time. So doth it accord with good sleep.”
Dr. Allernann: It is common sense.
Dr. Jung: Yes, it is not at all stupid, particularly when we know how Nietzsche suffered from insomnia; it would be a sound admonition.
If Nietzsche had consulted me, I would have given him such advice and he would have thought I was a good teacher of the virtues that conduce sleep.
One cannot help thinking that Nietzsche sympathized with the teacher; otherwise, he could hardly have reproduced his sermon so well.
So the general tendency here is quite clear, it indicates a sort of attitude which would lead the way to a healthy and normal condition.
Now we will see what Zarathustra does with it:
When Zarathustra heard the wise man thus speak, he laughed in his heart: for thereby had a light dawned upon him.
And thus spake he to his heart:
A fool seemeth this wise man with his forty thoughts: but I believe he knoweth well how to sleep.
Happy even is he who liveth near this wise man!
Such sleep is contagious-even through a thick wall it is contagious.
A magic resideth even in his academic chair.
And not in vain did the youths sit before the preacher of virtue.
His wisdom is to keep awake in order to sleep well.
And verily, if life had no sense, and I had to choose nonsense, this would be the most desirablest nonsense for me also.
Now know I well what people sought formerly above all else when they sought teachers of virtue. Good sleep they sought for themselves, and poppy-head virtues to promote it!
To all those belauded sages of the academic chairs, wisdom was sleep without dreams: they knew no higher significance of life.
Even at present, to be sure, there are some like this preacher of virtue, and not always so honourable: but their time is past.
And not much longer do they stand: there they already die.
Blessed are those drowsy ones: for they shall soon nod to sleep.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
We said last time that this wise man was another form of the old wise man we met in the woods, who is left over out of a time Zarathustra has left behind him: he represents the spirit that has been.
Now why is this spirit so much associated with sound sleep?
Mrs. Crowley: It would seem to me, if we compare this chapter of the virtues with the one following, as if Zarathustra sees this old man in the woods in rather a caricatured fashion. I mean he sees him in opposition to his own point of view, but he is always influenced by him in an extraordinary way. He always absorbs something from the contact with him that influences his attitude immediately, though he is unaware how it is brought about. So wouldn’t you say he represents the unconscious or shadow side of Zarathustra in a psychological sense, as well as in a symbolical one-the earth elements, the powers of nature that are eternally present, felt or at work even when they are not realized? The old man of the woods therefore suggests that capacity to receive or accept, as nature receives; and that constitutes the struggle in Zarathustra’s soul. The spirit or conscious attitude alone cannot evoke the new value; it emerges out of the dual play. My point is that the message of the old man of the woods retransforms in Zarathustra, and that each time they meet there is an attempt, however unconscious, at reconciliation, as if a new focus or new perspective had been established.
Dr. Jung: That is perfectly true. Zarathustra is in opposition to the wise man, as any new truth is in opposition to the old truth.
It is impossible to create without being in opposition to the thing that has been; the spirit of the time past is necessarily in opposition to the coming spirit, as the spirit prevailing now is in opposition to the one of the past.
So we could say the spirit of the past forms the shadow of the spirit that is or that is to come.
As in a time when the spirit of the past was still uppermost, still a ruling picture, the spirit of the future would be the shadow, because it would not yet be in the actual light.
Inasmuch as Zarathustra exists, the light, the moment of greatest intensity, is embodied in himself, and the old wise man of the woods is the shadow.
But as far as we can see here, the wisdom of the old man is in a way perfectly valid: that we keep awake in order to have sound sleep afterwards is also a point of view.
One cannot say that sleep is of no importance, or that it should not be an aim in itself.
As I said last time, there are certain fools who imagine that one could live without it, but anything that exists makes sense and is sought for or desired; since man has to sleep, it can be a goal, and particularly for a sleepless person.
Now, the fact that Nietzsche was sleepless is explained through that intensity, that excess of light, that identity with Zarathustra, who is of course sleepless. Zarathustra is a figure of the unconscious that not only lives during the night, but during the day as well, because any archetypal figure is in a timeless condition-or at all events in a condition which cannot be compared to what we call time.
Therefore, all archetypes have the particular quality of eternity, which is simply another word for timelessness; or it may be a different quality of time that is typical for archetypes.
And therefore Plato said that the archetypes, or the eidola, the images, were eternally preserved in a heavenly place because they had that character of timelessness; they are forever there, they never change.’
So, when you identify with an archetype in an inflation, your sleep is very often disturbed.
One sees that in cases of mental derangement, in schizophrenia particularly, where people become identical with the unconscious and hardly sleep at all.
They can be sleepless for weeks and weeks-I don’t know how long-if drugs are not given them; and even when drugged, they exhaust themselves by that inner intensity which eats up their brains.
They instantly share the wakefulness of the unconscious, which is always active.
That condition of identity with an archetype naturally makes the old standpoint, which would allow one to sleep, particularly precious; and therefore, inasmuch as you want to hold to your new insight, you must fight the old, despite the fact that it is perhaps right, that it is common sense.
And you particularly have to fight the continuous longing to return to the condition in which you were protected against the identity with archetypes.
You know, that identity is a torture, and naturally everything in you aches for liberation, and tries to go back to the protected condition where the archetypes are caught in symbols, in dogmas or in forms.
That is the reason, for instance, why a man like Angelus Silesius, the German poet and philosopher, having realized the relativity of God (which was remarkable for his time), finally regressed into the Catholic church; he could not stand the extraordinary wakefulness of the idea, that devouring light. He was simply forced to seek shelter in the Catholic dogmatic forms where there seemed to be peace for him.
But he forgot altogether that, having touched a new truth, retreat would mean the denial of the divine light and the return into darkness, into the thing which should have been overcome.
So he was really denying his best.
It was as if Nietzsche should say: “Oh, that damned Zarathustra makes me sleepless and excited, I cannot stand this new thing,”- and make a regression into the Lutheran church or, still farther, into the Catholic church.
Then what would become of Nietzsche?
Then he would make no point any longer; he would be settled forever, though he might think that he could sleep then.
But he would simply become hellishly neurotic.
He would destroy himself quite certainly, like Angelus Silesius, who began as a Protestant, then went far beyond Protestantism in his vision, and then, unable to stand it, returned and regressed into the Catholic church, where he became a bad neurotic, really a fiend.
He lived in a monastery where his sole occupation was to write pamphlets reviling Protestantism, and that was his end.
If Nietzsche had denied Zarathustra, he would probably have come to his end much sooner, he also would have become an awful neurotic, and Zarathustra would never have been written at all.
He fights that danger though he always craves for it; it is quite excluded that a man who suffers from such terrible sleeplessness should not crave for any kind of drug which puts him to sleep.
And here he ridicules the teacher of sleep despite the fact of seeing that if he could only apply his advice to himself, he would be able to sleep.
Being identical with Zarathustra, he sees too clearly; he cannot help seeing and he cannot help being Zarathustra.
Therefore, he is in a terrible conflict all the time between that new being, Zarathustra, and the old thing which would be needed for the peace of his soul.
In the next chapter we shall see the same struggle going on, the attempt at liberation from the standpoint of the past which recommends itself all the time.
He constantly looks back to the past and yet his very life consists in keeping himself away from it.
Now, that is the characteristic attitude of Protestantism.
Zarathustra simply exaggerates it in a most extravagant way, but that is inevitable.
Or could you conceive of another way of liberating himself from the spirit of the past?
Pro(: Fierz: He could become Catholic.
Dr. Jung: Oh yes, but that would be no solution.
He must keep his Zarathustra ideas and by becoming Catholic he would deny them, and then that whole explosion of light would have been in vain.
Well, I must say I would not know any other way; the only thing Nietzsche can do under those circumstances is to go with his Zarathustra, with that attempt at liberation from the spirit of Protestantism, by applying the rule and mechanism which Protestantism always has applied-by kicking itself away from Catholicism.
Something else can come only when he is entirely separated-when he has overcome the Protestant attitude, that is.
But he must first be clearly separated from the Christian idea in general; only then can he adopt another attitude.
He has to be a super-Protestant. So we can call the Superman a super-Protestant just as well.
We will now go to the next chapter: “Backswordsmen.”
The German word really is Hinterwdldler; Nietzsche makes a sort of pun in using the similarity of the word Wald, which means “wood,” and Welt which means “world.” You see, people who live “behind the wood”-i.e., in a remote forgotten corner-would be backwoodsmen, Hinterwdldler; and Hinterweltler (a word which does not exist) would mean “people who didn’t live in the world of the present day.”
“He says:
Once on a time, Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen.
This means that he projected his dreams beyond man, beyond the human sphere, like all those people who believe in other worlds.
That is not, of course, exactly Nietzsche’s wording; the word backworldsmen can be translated as “metaphysicians,” people who don’t know the world and are out of tune with the history of the day.
The work of a suffering and tortured God, did the world then seem to me.
The dream-and diction-of a God, did the world then seem to me; coloured vapours before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.
Good and evil, and joy and woe, and I and thou-coloured vapours did they seem to me before creative eyes.
The creator wished to look away from himself,-thereupon he created the world.
Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.
This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction’s image and imperfect image-an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator:-thus did the world once seem to me.
Thus, once on a time, did I also cast my fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen. Beyond man, forsooth?
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
A man was he, and only a poor fragment of a man and ego.
Out of mine own ashes and glow it came unto me, that phantom.
And verily, it carne not unto me from the beyond.
Here Zarathustra begins to fight the metaphysical idea, the idea of a trans-subjective reality which would be embodied by gods or demons or angels or anything one puts into the beyond.
He begins to introject God, whom he supposes to be dead.
This is the super-Protestantism where the idea of God is beginning to evaporate; already in Church Protestantism of the liberal brand, one observes that God is becoming more and more an abstraction.
So a friend of mine used to say, speaking of the difference between the liberal and the more orthodox theologian, that the orthodox theologian thinks of God as an old German train conductor with a long beard; and the liberal theologians think he looks the same only a bit more gas-like.
You see, this is a tale-telling joke: it shows that old-fashioned idea of the old man with the beard sitting upon the throne, or snapping tickets and controlling the train for those that have not paid. It is the moral point of view; he looks out for order, and is either benevolent or thunders like God.
And “gas like” means a thinner substance, which shows a certain influence of natural science upon the more liberal element in theology; the god evaporates to a certain extent.
That is a very true description of the infantile image, and naturally you will discover nothing of the sort in theologists’ books; it is only an underlying image they have for their private use, utterly different from their books.
But in reality, it is not so different, because their God always appears as a being who can only move within the limits they give him.
They know exactly what God can do and what he cannot do: what he is and what he means and what his purpose is.
So it appears that God is a limited being who also has to be omnipotent, even if on the same page the same professor shows that he cannot be omnipotent.
For instance, to quote Gogarten, a famous theologian of our days: “God can only be good.”
But that means that he can only do half the work, because the other half of the work is surely bad, and that is a fearful limitation.
If I should set you the task of being only good, you would discover it to be well-nigh impossible; you would suffer like hell if you tried to be good only.
That is just our trouble.
You see, they make a neurotic of God, for he must suffer terribly if he cannot also do the bad things of the world; this is such a violation of the idea of the god that he needs must evaporate.
So it becomes very clear, even talking theologically, that they have created a vapor which cannot contain God-a powerful, dynamic thing that never would come down so far as to be good only. That is absolutely excluded.
Prof. Fierz: The devil is the other part, and they don’t see that it is exactly the same.
Dr. Jung: Well, they don’t talk of the devil so much.
That is not quite good form. I gave my own father very bad hours talking about the devil.
You find very little of the devil in their books.
They want to hush up the fact of the darkness-they don’t know what to do with it.
Too much of it will disturb their sleep and they are teachers of good sleep.
Mr. Baumann: There is a saying that you must not paint the devil on the wall, or he will come.
Dr. Escher: Is not the vision of Nicholas von der Flue the counterpart of this picture?
Dr. Jung: That was not a train conductor.
That was an appearance of the devil quite obviously.
Well, Nietzsche here tries to cut all that down for his own time and for our time still.
Theologians have created such a picture of God that it can only be cut clown; it is nothing but man’s work.
As soon as somebody tells me God can only be this or that, I know this is man’s work; it is as if a louse should say Goethe or Mussolini could only be or do certain things.
It is perfectly incongruous and absurd to even try to make limitations or definitions.
For instance, the Catholic church holds that you can only attain the forgiveness of sins
or redemption through the sacraments, by the means of grace of the church.
Of course that is man’s work; it is a limitation of the powers of God.
As the idea that you can only be saved through faith is man’s work, it is a limitation of the possible intervention of God.
If God chooses to save a man against his faith he can do so if he pleases.
You see, if I want, I can do something against my own principles apparently.
If people say that I am bound by what they think are my principles, I am not free if I comply.
Instead, I shall do everything in my power to prove to them that I am not what they suppose I am; I shall do just the contrary because I am a free being.
The more you create such constructions, such images and limitations, the more you drive out the living spirit, and then the living spirit will appear in an entirely different place.
Now, Zarathustra is here doing the necessary destructive work on those conceptions which still infest our late Christianity.
But he is doing even more.
We could not say that the idea of a suffering and tortured God was our only idea of God.
That would refer to only one third of the deity, it would be only in his form of Christ; another third would be God the Father who does not suffer at all, and neither is the
Holy Ghost tortured in any way; he is not the tortured hero.
Also, the explanation of the world as God’s imagination is not exactly a Christian point of view.
Here, surely, is an Eastern thought coming in via Schopenhauer, who took up that idea of the world as imagination, a dream of the primordial will in a sort of drunken self-forgetfulness.
Of course, in Schopenhauer’s world there was no such thing as a self that forgets itself: there was no self at all. It was a dream that just happened, a most irrational fact.
Once in the aeons, the primordial will happened to stumble into a dream of a world; it could have stumbled into anything else but it just happened to be a world.
It was absolutely incidental, having no meaning whatever.
Therefore, he says man must apply his intellect in order to mirror to the primordial will what a world of nonsense and suffering it has created.
A most pessimistic view in a way.
Now, that idea comes in here under the element of intoxicating joy; and that will play a great role later in the idea that the creator of the world was a sort of Dionysos who, with a drunken imagination and a drunken joy, revelled in producing fantasy pictures of the world.
The Dionysian idea came from the East by way of Asia Minor, probably from India.
He would be an equivalent of Shiva the dancer who, in a sort of drunken ekstasis, dances the world and all the ten thousand forms of existence, the joy and the suffering of such a world, its creation and its destruction.
Therefore, he is always represented as dancing upon corpses amidst the horrors of the burial ground, the idea being that this world is a paradise which grows luxuriantly upon the corpses; but soon this form also will decay and become corpses or a dung heap.
Schopenhauer reduces all that to the imagination of man, which is absolutely consistent.
It is super-Protestantism.
He not only protests against the dogma of the virgin birth, for example; he also protests against the last remnant of dogma in the Protestant church, the belief in God.
In the history of the Protestant church, you will find that the Lutherans have still preserved certain integral and essential parts of the Catholic dogma, the idea that you cannot be saved without the means of grace of the church for instance, that it needs the intercession of the church.
Or that you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven without partaking of the communion, the body of Christ, as administered by the church.
This was the cause of the conflict between the Swiss Reformer Zwingli and Luther.
Zwingli said that the communion was symbolic and not the real body of Christ.
It only meant the body of Christ, a metaphor in other words.
And against that Luther wrote on the table at which they were sitting during the discussion the Greek word estin, because in the Greek text it says, “This is my flesh, this is my blood,” and not “This means my blood.”
But Zwingli was already more liberal and insisted that it was only a memorial meal and was not to be taken literally-with that, of course, exploding the means-of-grace idea, the particular metaphysical magic which Luther wanted to preserve in order to save the church.
For the church makes no sense whatever without the sacrament.
You see, if the church doesn’t administer the magic means which cannot be obtained anywhere else than through that apostolic succession, then it has no existence at all.
It means nothing, but is just a place where people meet and somebody talks: all the magic, all the appeal to the unconscious is gone.
You can imagine what it means to be in the place where the actual magic is happening which can happen nowhere else; of course your unconscious is gripped, you are caught.
For instance, if I should imagine that, in Notre Dame de Paris or in St. Stephan’s in Vienna or in any other beautiful old church, there would be a priest of apostolic succession, who had received the blessing coming in direct line from the very first blessing bestowed upon the head of St. Peter by Christ himself and so handed on through the centuries, and that such a priest could perform a rite of magic value which could not be repeated anywhere else, which could not be imitated, which could not be bought, or produced by any other means-well, sure enough, I would gladly be a Catholic.
I could not avoid being Catholic. Only knowing it would mean that I was already Catholic.
I would be in the fold. The liberal Zwingli, a very common-sense and sober man, did not believe in that magic.
He laid all the weight upon the human mind, thereby showing that he was already super-Protestant; he protested against Luther and went one step further, destroying the legend of the magic performance in the communion.
It really meant the destruction of the communion, and so, piece by piece, all those symbolic forms were destroyed.
Protestant parsons of today take little interest in the Trinity and the
equality of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or in the virgin birth, etc., but the Catholic church still insists upon them.
And that is quite logical, for they express the unconscious just because they are irrational.
The sacrifice of the intellect demanded by the Catholic church is absolutely consistent with the idea of a church.
Inasmuch as Protestantism, with an increasingly liberal point of view discusses these matters, they lose their magic and fade away.
The very last dogma is the fact of God’s existence, and that is already undermined. We speak lightly of der liebe Gott, we say, “Oh, the lord knows!” “God has become far too much a sort of bon mot to have any particular magic still.
So Zarathustra doesn’t need to explode that idea. And then, naturally, that whole metaphysical or animistic world turns in to ourselves.
Then where is the virgin birth, or the Trinity, or anything of Christian metaphysics?
Well, that is all in my imagination; it is made of my own stuff.
It comes back to me. I am the whole show. Then I think, “Now this is pretty poor.
I have made such a tremendous enterprise and what is the result of it?
I cut the whole performance down, and I find only ashes and remnants and debris in myself.”
You see, you assume that those old things have collapsed into fantasies and imagination and forget entirely that they once had an extraordinary intensity and life.
And you don’t know that you secretly canalize a huge river into your unconscious.
You think all the time that you have only gathered up the remains, those nails and screws and door-handles and so on which belong to you.
You store them away and if nothing happens you forget entirely that an enormous manifestation of life and libido went into all that.
And you now have the whole thing in your unconscious, where it causes a tremendous tension.
That is the tension, the dynamis, which is pushing Zarathustra up to the surface, so that even the sleeplessness cannot convince Nietzsche that he should dismiss that figure.
Zarathustra is too strong for him-not even sleeplessness counts.
Mr. Baumann: Certain modern theologians have tried to give more metaphysical substance to God.
Dr. Jung: Oh yes, naturally, but they disregard entirely the fact that when a metaphysical form has lost substance, man cannot put artificial substance into it: that is absolutely excluded.
So when a theologian tries to show that God is very substantial and still working miracles, it is only a man-made god: that parson has invented an idol.
He found that the idea of God had become depleted, so he puts up an idol of his own make instead of the living god, or instead of trying to discover where the living god has disappeared.
He doesn’t follow after God and seek him everywhere; he is simply satisfied with the fact that God has gone and that something ought to be done about it-so he puts up an idol.
You see, you may try to create a god in a trans-subjective world, but he would surely not be of that trans-subjective reality; he would be an entirely subjective reality.
When Nietzsche says here that he has created a god, it means such an idol, and he realizes in this sentence the content of his god-image.
He says, “A man was he, and only a poor fragment of a man and ego.” In other words, his God was a man-made projection and nothing else: “Out of mine own ashes and glow it came unto me, that phantom.
And verily, it came not unto me from the beyond!”
He recognizes that in that image of God he has believed in, nothing has come from beyond, and that whatever the beyond may be, it is a trans-subjective sphere.
You see, the existence of a trans-subjective sphere is not discussed here.
The statement is merely that nothing of a trans-subjective nature has come to him: he recognizes nothing objective in his divine experience.
This is very much the condition which prevails in our actual times, a condition which has been brought about in the course of the last centuries, having begun at the time of the Reformation.
More and more people felt that nothing from beyond came to them, that they were safely cut off from beyond, that all things divine were on this side of the river, in the visible church for instance, in man-made images, ideas, rites, and so on.
And they missed the beyond, the trans-subjective fact, without which no religious experience is possible.
So one can say their religious experience was nil; it was Anempfindung, a sort of aesthetic feeling into, an imagining that one has experienced, but it was not the real experience.
If you study the quality of a real experience, like that vision of Nicholas Von Der Flue, you see it is of a very different and very peculiar nature.
The experiences of Francis of Assisi, of Jakob Boehme, or of Angelus Silesius, for example, were not within the dogma, and it would take any amount of diplomatic work to squeeze them somehow into the building of the church.
I realize that such a statement would be most offensive in certain milieus, yet I am thoroughly convinced that it is so.
And Zarathustra here simply gives voice to that generally prevailing conviction.
Of course, nobody would insist upon faith if they were sure in their faith.
A man who has had immediate experience of the trans-subjective reality never speaks of belief or faith because he knows.
You would not insist upon believing in the existence of Mussolini because you know he does exist, as you know America exists.
So, for anybody who has had an experience of trans-subjective reality-whatever that is-to preach of faith, what you ought to believe, would be as utterly futile as preaching the existence of London or Paris.
No preaching is needed, no faith is needed, because it is a fact; to such a person it was an overwhelming experience.
The very fact that Protestantism insists so much on faith shows the weakness of their situation.
It shows that nobody has actual experience, for the trans-subjective reality in which you ought to believe is exceedingly doubtful.
It is nice if you can, but it is really nothing you could experience-particularly when they say, like that very modern theologian Karl Barth, that there is an absolute god.
I don’t see how one can experience an absolute thing, for absolutus means completely detached, and if a thing is completely detached from us, how can we experience it? How can it touch us?
For instance, to know whether the planet Mars is inhabited or not is completely detached from us.
If there are any humanlike beings there we don’t know it; at all events, we have no connection with them.
They are to us absolute.
If a thing has relation to us, it is relative to us and we are relative to it.
And so the experience of an absolute god is excluded: that is only a man-made word.
If I were God, I would not be absolute.
I would relate myself to human beings, for I would like to do something to them and I would like them to do something to me.
To be absolute means that there is no creation.
Before the creation of the world God was bored to tears, the old records say.
He got awful headaches and finally contracted until the first light came forth because he simply could not stand his immense worldwide loneliness.
You know, all the symptoms of modern Christian conviction are very doubtful.
If anybody insists upon his absolute reliability and honesty, I know he lies; for why does he insist upon it? Why cannot we take it for granted that he is an honest and reliable being?
Obviously he himself does not, so he preaches it.
When I was a child it already sounded very queer to me to hear: “You ought to believe.”
I always said: “Do you know? Have you had any experience?”
Otherwise, you can say what you please: it carries no conviction whatever.
Now, the statement which Nietzsche makes here is not a subjective whim or his personal point of view.
He simply gives voice to the general fact that our modern conception of religion completely lacks primordial experience.
So I think he quite rightly says: “it came not unto me from the beyond.”
This “coming from the beyond” is most impressive in its brevity; you might easily read past it without paying particular attention, but it is of the utmost importance.
You see, belief or faith is your own activity, as what you touch or see, what you experience, is all your own making. You are entirely in the world of known things even
if you approach God, which is the strangest thing you can imagine.
You discover that you believe in God and if you did not he would not be.
God would be nowhere, he could do nothing.
You must believe and then he begins to operate.
Your belief instigates such a phantom; you can inflate the phantom till it exists, but it is all your own body, your own make.
So you are completely cut off from the beyond by your very faith. I say to people: “For heaven’s sake, don’t believe; we know nothing, we have no experience, so in what and why should I believe?””‘
If it is a thing which I create, I then simply envelop myself in the cloak of my own imagination.
I blindfold myself by a self-created veil.
The beyond is the trans-subjective, and this is the experience of something within that sphere you call psyche or mind, which is not your own make, which is very clearly an intercessio divina-an intervention of something which is not yourself and which is not a part of our external world.
It must be an effect within your innermost self, where you are quite alone with yourself, where certainly nothing else exists.
Then if something happens there which is clearly not yourself, you know it is from beyond.
It is trans-subjective.
This may come to you in a very banal form, in an almost imperceptible way, and if you are not in the mood, you will not see it at all; it may be in a dream, or it may come in the way of a fantasy.
I think I told you of that Catholic woman who discovered in her fantasy, after long vain attempts, that there was some moisture in the air.
That was the turning point, that did it.
She suddenly came across a fact which she had not created. It simply was there.
You naturally think that a fantasy is all your own make, so if something comes into it which is most certainly not your make, and not your ego, that is a trans-subjective experience.
Suppose you were quite alone in a room, and suddenly something stirred, something which could not be accounted for and which you have not moved; you can say it is a ghost or it might be a human being or an animal-God knows what-but you instantly have the feeling of not being alone in the room.
And so the experience of a trans-subjective reality gives you suddenly the feeling that you are not alone in your psychology.
There is something else that seems to come from outside, yet you clearly know it is nowhere outside.
Question: Is this not just the unconscious?
Dr. Jung: Oh yes, you can call it “the unconscious.” Just what the unconscious is we don’t know.
To call it “the unconscious” is merely Jargon de parler.
You can call it “the dark continent,” or “heaven,” or “hell,” or anything you like: it is simply something from the unknown.
When you recognize the unknown as a really existing thing, you have had the trans-subjective experience.
Now, neither Zarathustra nor Nietzsche have had that experience yet, though Nietzsche had an opportunity for just that.
What would it have been?
Mrs. Brunner: He might have noticed that Zarathustra was not himself.
Dr. Jung: Yes, you see that was a great chance. He himself said, you remember, Da wurde eins zu zwei und Zarathustra ging an mir vorbei ” … Zarathustra was passing by,” which means that Zarathustra was an objective reality .
But he did not realize it. He was identical.
If he had stopped at that verse and asked himself what it really meant, he would have seen that Zarathustra was a free agent and not exactly himself, and that would have been his first trans-subjective experience.
Otherwise, such a thing becomes identical with one: one fall;; into it.
Therefore, it is a principle in analysis that we always try to dissociate from the
unconscious, to make a difference between ourselves and the voice, or the influence, or the mana, or the archetype-whatever you like to call it.
And you can make that difference by criticizing carefully whatever your experience may be.
But if you take it for granted in a general way that of course your thoughts, for instance, are all your own, such an obscurity prevails that you can discern nothing.
Make the simple experiment of criticizing your own thoughts.
(I am now talking chiefly to the ladies.)
You have a certain opinion about something, and when I ask you if that is what you really think, you say, “No, I must think what my idea of it really is.”
And then you come to the conclusion that you think something quite different.
Now, how did you come to that other opinion? Did you make it? “No, it was just there.”
Who then produced it? Who had the intention or the will to create such an opinion?
If you can realize that, you have had a trans-subjective experience.
Therefore I say, don’t identify with your animus. That is not yourself, that is a trans-subjective reality.
And mind you, the animus is as terrible a reality as the anima.
If a man takes it for granted that his moods are just himself, he has an anima inflation and makes a fool of himself.
But if he can criticize his moods, he asks himself, “Is this really my feeling?” By no means.
His real feeling is even suppressed in favor of that nonsense, an emotion which is really strange to him.
And if he can make this a real experience, he has realized a trans-subjective reality.
That is the way I came to the conception of the anima.
I criticized my emotions and came to the conclusion that they were not myself.
They were simply made for me, so I asked myself, “Now who on earth can produce such things in me?”
I was almost inclined to believe in witchcraft.
That was of course the origin of witchcraft and why men still say they are bewitched;
they naively feel that their emotions are not their own.
A man who is bewitched is filled with intense feelings which he thinks must come from somewhere, and then he discovers a red-haired girl and thinks she is responsible-and then he could kill her for witchcraft.
But if he had a philosophical mind, he would understand that this is a trans-subjective reality which he must not project into a red-haired girl.
Prof. Fierz: What you have just said reminds me a little of Buber. He said that the real prophet did not even know what he was saying when he spoke. He was simply the medium. He spoke with his tongue and not with his head. It was unconscious.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is the thing.
Mr. Baumann: If anybody had spoken about such a trans-subjective experience ten or twenty years ago, he would have been declared a schizophrenic.
Dr. Jung: Naturally. It depends on how you tell it.
You might rouse the most terrible mistakes in a naive mind. For example, a girl of about
twenty-six once came to me and said: “Doctor, I have a black snake in my abdomen and it is asleep.”
I looked at her and thought, “Now, now!” Then she said: “I see you think I am crazy, but I am not; what I tell you is symbolic. I don’t think that there is really a black snake in my abdomen.”
Now, if she had omitted to tell me that she was only using a sort of metaphor, I would have been under the impression that she was mad, because she would have been stating something which was absolutely inadmissible.
Nobody has a black snake in the abdomen unless they are crazy.
Since she knows that this sounds crazy, I know she is not.
She conveys that idea to me, and then she can go on talking about it, and it is understood as being a subjective psychological phenomenon.
You see, a crazy person would talk about that snake as if it were a reality, disregarding the impression it makes upon the audience, while this girl tried to establish an understanding, or a feeling rapport with me about it.
So I always say to people on the borderline. “As long as you can explain yourself and feel the need of explaining yourself to a human being, and succeed more or less, you are not crazy.”
But it is characteristic of insane people that they go on talking without caring or knowing whether they are understood, disregarding the rapport, disregarding the impression they make.
If a woman declares to me that she is the queen of the world, it can be exceedingly witty if it is understood that she means her power complex; otherwise, it is a case of schizophrenia. Insane people never realize that anybody could be shocked by what they say.
People who disregard the effect they have on other people are on the way to insanity, even if they are still within the normal.
In other words, as soon as they become unconscious of what they do and what it means, they are on the way to insanity because they cut the human relation and then there is no guarantee that they won’t get lost.
Mr. Baumann: If Nicholas von der Flue had not tried to build his vision into his conscious in a symbolic form, might he have been insane?
Dr. Jung: Yes, because any trans-subjective experience is of such a nature that one can easily go crazy.
But he showed his humanity in the fact that he tried to translate the whole thing into the language of the church, into the Trinity conception; by that he established his rapport with people.
The vision itself had an absolutely segregating effect, however; it is said that he appeared terrifying to people.
He had been so frightened and had such a look of horror in his eyes that he infected them with it.
He realized that, or he would never have taken the trouble to establish a human rapport concerning it.
Otherwise he would have been just an ordinary schizophrenic, he would have degenerated because he had cut the human relation. That is the arch sin.
One often finds very basic trans-subjective experiences at the bottom of cases of insanity; they are of such an impressive nature that people are spellbound and forget all about humanity, they simply fall into the archetypal experience and disappear.
So any archetypal experience which is trans-subjective has that dangerous quality of segregation, separation, cutting the human relationship and isolating the individual, all the more when the experience is of a more or less inexplicable nature.
One could say it was also a characteristic of the trans-subjective experience that it offers the greatest difficulties to explanation-as a dream cannot be explained unless one knows a good deal.
Mrs. Brunner: Would you call the traditional animus also trans-subjective?
Dr. Jung: Not in itself, it is not a trans-subjective reality if you have not experienced it as such; you must criticize your experience and know what in the experience belongs to yourself.
Moreover, this should be not only an intellectual criticism, it should also be a feeling criticism; you should take the experience as a whole and react to it as a whole, because your mind will naturally make the attempt to assimilate that experience right away within the human sphere.
If Nicholas von der Flue had had a mind-which he had not-it would have told him that the vision was the Trinity, for instance, and so he would have assimilated it in spite of the trans-subjective character; it would have been extinguished, killed.
And the same thing might be done by feeling.
You see a feeling type can harmonize a trans-subjective experience by the power of his differentiated feeling, put it into a nice frame with other curious things which are also a part of himself, and create such a feeling soup about it that the thing can swim among the other pieces of meat or bread.
The more one-sided the type the more certain it is that the experience will be killed, because the superior function is then so powerful that it simply assimilates everything; whatever happens, such a person will declare it to be all in his world, and if it is something too extraordinary he simply says it is not true.
There are surely so called occult phenomena, those peculiar psychic phenomena, and they are strange, trans-subjective.
What can you do with them?
Well, you simply say they are not true and the case is settled.
It is like the famous story of the rabbi: When he was travelling he always drove four white horses, because he was the so-called Jewish pope.
And there was a very powerful count in the same country, who travelled with four black horses and who had a driver called Johann, because the driver is always called Johann.
Now unhappily enough they both approached a river at the same moment from opposite sides.
There was a narrow bridge over the river, and the great rabbi thought: I am the great rabbi, I go over the bridge first.
And the count thought: I am the great count, and I go over the bridge first.
So they both drove onto the bridge and then naturally there was not room for them to pass each other, and when the horses shot together the count jumped up and said: Johann, give me my pistol that I may kill the horses of this damned Jew.
And then the rabbi got up, and he simply spoke the magic word.
Thus the whole situation was no longer true. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 281-299
