The body has to be spiritualized and the spirit has to be incarnated
Dr. von Franz: Certainly, that is why you have again to solidify the spirit! You have to do both.
It is what the Zen Master said: “At the beginning of the process water is water and mountains are mountains and streams are streams” that is the taste of a good steak, but for the ego, and that is no good.
You have to go into a state where mountains are no longer mountains, streams no longer streams, and water no longer water, which means you see them as similes. But at the end of the process mountains are again mountains and that would involve resolidifying the spirit.
To get stuck in the middle, this way or the other, is bad.
The process needs both movements so as not to become destructive, and that is so beautifully illustrated in alchemy.
The body has to be spiritualized and the spirit has to be incarnated, both things must take place.
You see here, in this document, an example of what Dr. Jung says, namely that alchemy compensates the one-sidedness of Christian spiritualization; it is that underlying movement which is not anti-Christian but completes it by bringing the opposites nearer together, by bringing physical life and such things more into the field of observation and attention.
Remark: I have often observed in Jungian analysis that there is a danger of intellectualizing the spirit.
Dr. von Franz: Yes, and then it becomes awfully thin! The spirit turns into intellectual concepts and loses its original emotional and gripping quality, and then there happens exactly what you say. That is the great danger, for then the spirit becomes thin and bottled.
“Question: Couldn’t one say that whenever there is a real spiritual experience it should become manifest?
Dr. von Franz: There is no ‘should’ about it. I think a real spiritual experience I don’t know exactly what you have in mind when you say that does become manifest.
Mythos means communication.
If you are overwhelmed by a spiritual experience it itself wants you to communicate it, i.e., manifest it; that is the meaning of the word mythos.
There is no religious experience where there is not the need to tell of it; that is natural, but one need not add the word ‘should.’
If it is true, it will become real, its natural flow will be into reality. — Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: Symbolism and the Psychology, Page 260-261
