Carl Jung: It is so important to keep close to the earth
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
To Henry A. Murray
My dear Murray, 2 May 1925
Thank you for your nice letter!
Don’t say too many good things, as I have to be careful not to be swayed away by megalomania.
It is so important to keep close to the earth, as the spirit is always soaring up to heaven like a flame as much destructive as enlightening.
I appreciate your genuine reactions and I sympathize with your enthusiasm, because I am deeply convinced that those ideas that came to me are really quite wonderful things.
I can easily say that (without blushing) because I know how resistant and how foolishly obstinate I was when they first visited me, and what a trouble it was until I could read this symbolic language, so much superior to my dull conscious mind.
Your visit has been a joy and a refreshment to me as there are so few people capable of understanding the clarity of the profunda coeli.
I just spent about 3 weeks in the tower where I finished the 3rd edition of a little book of mine [CW 7], much inspired by the peculiar atmosphere of the place . . .
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 42.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
- Muladhara Root Chakra – Earth element – Elephant
The square in the middle is the symbol of the Earth, and the Elephant is the supporting power of the surface, the psychic energy of the libido. The elephant is the most powerful land animal on Earth. The name Muladhara which means root-support, shows us that we are in the area of the roots of our existence, which would be our personality on Earth. The gods are asleep.
We are but a seed, it’s of the utmost importance to be born – to realize that your situation is the best you could desire or you will not release from Muladhara – You were supposed to come into this world, otherwise you can not realize the ‘self’ (the trans-personal) and the goal of this world is missed.
You have to leave some trace or other in this world, show the world you were here, otherwise you have not realized yourself. If one succeeds in awakening Kundalini (energy of consciousness), so that she can release her pure potentiality, then you set into motion a world that completely differs from ours: it is an eternal world. The personal side is in fact completely negligible in comparison with Kundalini’s visions. Because her visions could be the visions of whoever, because they are impersonal. They correspond with the world of Kundalini, and not with the Muladhara world.
First of all, if the Yogin, or a western person, or anyone, succeeds in awakening the Kundalini then what sets into motion is NOT a personal development (however the impersonal development can influence the personal one, as that so often and beneficially happens). What starts are impersonal events, with which one would do good to NOT to identify with.
If you do, you will receive ‘inflation’, you will be completely WRONG. Observe objectively what happens, you’ll then see that all events that happen in the impersonal, non-human order of things, have the very unpleasant quality of grasping on to us. It’s as though Kundalini pulls us in her upward motion, especially in the beginning. We are seeds in us, seeds in Muladhara that when come into motion have the effect of an earthquake, that shocks us naturally – sometimes so severely that our house breaks down.
The image of an impersonal, mental/psychic experience is so strange to us, and extraordinarily hard to accept that we have severe difficulty to dis-identify with it. ~Carl Jung; Kundalini Yoga