Visions and altered states From: Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Towards the autumn of 1913 the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to be moving outwards, as though there were something in the air.
The atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had been.
It was as though the sense of oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. This feeling grew more and more intense.
In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an
overpowering vision:
I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps.
When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country.
I realised that a frightful catastrophe was in progress.
I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.
This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.
Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions,
even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized.
An inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it’.
That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future.
I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.
I asked myself whether these visions pointed to a revolution, but could not really imagine anything of the sort.
And so I drew the conclusion that they had to do with myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis.
The idea of war did not occur to me at all.
Soon afterwards, in the spring and early summer of 1914, I had a thricerepeated dream that in the middle of summer an Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice.
I saw, for example, the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings.
All living green things were killed by frost.
This dream came in April and May, and for the last time in June, of 1914.
In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos.
This dream, however, had an unexpected end.
There stood a leafbearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had
been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd.
At the end of July 1914 I was invited by the British Medical Association
to deliver a lecture, ‘On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology’, at a congress in Aberdeen.
I was prepared for something to happen, for such visions and dreams are fateful.
In my state of mind just then, with the fears that were pursuing me, it seemed fateful to me that I should have to talk on the importance of the unconscious at such a time!
On 1st August the world war broke out. Now my task was clear:
I had to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general.
Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche.
Even on the occasion of my first visit to Ravenna in 1913, the tomb of Galla
Placidia seemed to me significant and unusually fascinating. The second time, twenty years later, I had the same feeling.
Once more I fell into a strange mood in the tomb of Galla Placidia; once more I was deeply stirred.
I was there with an acquaintance, and we went directly from the tomb into the Baptistery of the Orthodox.
Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet
I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its source, and
so the wonder of this light without any visible source did not trouble me.
I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the windows I remembered having seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten.
I was vexed to find my memory so unreliable.
The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan; the second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea; the third, on the east, soon faded from my memory.
It might have shown Naaman being cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan; there was a picture on this theme in the old Merian Bible in my library, which was much like the mosaic.
The fourth mosaic on the west side of the baptistery, was the most impressive of all.
We looked at this one last.
It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves.
We stopped in front of this mosaic for at least twenty minutes and
discussed the original ritual of baptism, especially the curious archaic
conception of it as an initiation connected with real peril of death.
Such initiations were often connected with the peril of death and so served to express the archetypal idea of death and rebirth. Baptism had originally been a real immersion which at least suggested the danger of drowning.
I retained the most distinct memory of the mosaic of Peter sinking, and to
this day can see every detail before my eyes: the blue of the sea, individual
chips of the mosaic, the inscribed scrolls proceeding from the mouths of Peter and Christ, which I attempted to decipher.
After we left the baptistery, I went promptly to Alinari to buy photographs of the mosaics, but could not find any.
Time was pressing – this was only a short visit – and so I postponed the purchase until later. I thought I might order the pictures from Zurich.
When I was back home, I asked an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna
to obtain the pictures for me.
He could not locate them, for he discovered that the mosaics I had described did not exist.
Meanwhile, I had already spoken at a seminar about the original conception
of baptism, and on this occasion had also mentioned the mosaics that I had
seen in the Baptistery of the Orthodox.
The memory of those pictures is still vivid to me.
The lady who had been there with me long refused to believe that what she had ‘seen with her own eyes’ had not existed.
As we know, it is very difficult to determine whether, and to what extent, two persons simultaneously see the same thing.
In this case, however, I was able to ascertain that at least the main features of what we both saw had been the same.
This experience in Ravenna is among the most curious events in my life.
It can scarcely be explained. A certain light may possibly be cast on it by an
incident in the story of Empress Galla Placidia (d. 450).
During a stormy crossing from Byzantium to Ravenna in the worst of winter, she made a vow that if she came through safely, she would build a church and have the perils of the sea represented in it.
She kept this vow by building the basilica of San Giovanni in Ravenna and having it adorned with mosaics.
In the early Middle Ages, San Giovanni, together with its mosaics, was destroyed by fire; but in the Ambrosiana in Milan is still to be found a sketch representing Galla Placidia in a boat.
I had, from the first visit, been personally affected by the figure of Galla
Placidia, and had often wondered how it must have been for this highly
cultivated, fastidious woman to live at the side of a barbarian prince.
Her tomb seemed to me a final legacy through which I might reach her personality.
Her fate and her whole being were vivid presences to me; with her intense
nature, she was a suitable embodiment for my anima.2
The anima of a man has a strongly historical character.
As a personification of the unconscious she goes back into prehistory, and embodies the contents of the past.
She provides the individual with those elements that he ought to know about his prehistory.
To the individual, the anima is all life that has been in the past and is still alive in him.
In comparison to her I have always felt myself to be a barbarian who really has no history – like a creature just sprung out of nothingness, with neither a past nor a future.
In the course of my confrontation with the anima I had actually had a brush
with those perils which I saw represented in the mosaics.
I had come close to drowning. The same thing happened to me as to Peter, who cried for help and was rescued by Jesus.
What had been the fate of Pharaoh’s army could have been mine.
Like Peter and like Naaman, I came away unscathed, and the integration of the unconscious contents made an essential contribution to the completion of my personality.
What happens within oneself when one integrates previously unconscious contents with the consciousness is something which can scarcely be described in words.
It can only be experienced.
It is a subjective affair quite beyond discussion; we have a particular feeling about ourselves, about the way we are, and that is a fact which it is neither possible nor meaningful to doubt.
Similarly, we convey a particular feeling to others, and that too is a fact that
cannot be doubted.
So far as we know, there is no higher authority which could eliminate the probable discrepancies between all these impressions and opinions.
Whether a change has taken place as the result of integration, and what the nature of that change is, remains a matter of subjective conviction.
To be sure, it is not a fact which can be scientifically verified and therefore
finds no place in an official view of the world.
Yet it nevertheless remains a fact which is in practice uncommonly important and fraught with consequences.
Realistic psychotherapists, at any rate, and psychologists interested
in therapy, can scarcely afford to overlook facts of this sort.
Since my experience in the baptistery in Ravenna, I know with certainty
that something interior can seem to be exterior, and that something exterior can appear to be interior.
The actual walls of the baptistery, though they must have been seen by my physical eyes, were covered over by a vision of some altogether different sight which was as completely real as the unchanged baptismal font. Which was real at that moment?
My case is by no means the only one of its kind. But when that sort of
thing happens to oneself, one cannot help taking it more seriously than
something heard or read about.
In general, with anecdotes of that kind, one is quick to think of all sorts of explanations which dispose of the mystery.
I have come to the conclusion that before we settle upon any theories in regard to the unconscious, we require many, many more experiences of it.
At the beginning of 1944 I broke my foot, and this misadventure was followed by a heart attack.
In a state of unconsciousness I experienced deliriums and visions which must have begun when I hung on the edge of death and was being given oxygen and camphor injections.
The images were so tremendous that I myself concluded that I was close to death. My nurse afterwards told me, ‘It was as if you were surrounded by a bright glow’.
That was a phenomenon she had sometimes observed in the dying, she added. I had reached the outermost limit, and do not know whether I was in a dream or an ecstasy. At any rate, extremely strange things began to happen to me.
It seemed to me that I was high up in space.
Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light.
I saw the deep blue sea and the continents.
Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India.
My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light.
In many places the globe seemed coloured, or spotted dark green like oxydised silver.
Far away to the left lay a broad expanse – the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was as though the silver of the earth had there assumed a reddish-gold hue.
Then came the Red Sea, and far, far back – as if in the upper left of a map – I
could just make out a bit of the Mediterranean.
My gaze was directed chiefly towards that. Everything else appeared indistinct.
I could also see the snowcovered Himalayas, but in that direction it was foggy or cloudy.
I did not look to the right at all. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.
Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so
extensive a view – approximately one thousand miles!
The sight of the earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.
After contemplating it for a while, I turned round. I had been standing with
my back to the Indian Ocean, as it were, and my face to the north.
Then it seemed to me that I made a turn to the south.
Something new entered my field of vision.
A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It was about the size of my house, or even bigger.
It was floating in space, and I myself was floating in space.
I had seen similar stones on the coast of the Gulf of Bengal.
They were blocks of tawny granite, and some of them had been hollowed out into temples.
My stone was one such gigantic dark block. An entrance led into a small antechamber.
To the right of the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench.
He wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me.
Two steps led up to this antechamber, and inside, on the left, was the gate to the temple.
Innumerable tiny niches, each with a saucer-like concavity filled with coconut oil and small burning wicks, surrounded the door with a wreath of bright flames.
I had once actually seen this when I visited the Temple of the Holy Tooth at Kandy in Ceylon; the gate had been framed by several rows of burning oil lamps of this sort.
As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange
thing happened:
I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me – an extremely painful
process. Nevertheless, something remained; it was as if I now carried along
with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had
happened around me.
I might also say: it was with me, and I was it.
I consisted of all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history, and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. ‘I am this bundle of what has been, and what has been accomplished’.
This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time
of great fullness.
There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived.
At first the sense of annihilation predominated, of having been stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became of no consequence.
Everything seemed to be past; what remained was a fait accompli, without any reference back to what had been.
There was no longer any regret that something had dropped away or been taken away.
On the contrary:
I had everything that I was, and that was everything.
Something else engaged my attention: as I approached the temple I had the all those people to whom I belong in reality.
There I would at last understand – this too was a certainty – what historical nexus I or my life fitted into.
I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing.
My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end.
I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing.
My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many
questions had remained unanswered.
Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow?
I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all these questions as soon as I entered the rock temple.
There I would learn why everything had been thus and not otherwise.
There I would meet the people who knew the answer to my question about what had been before and what would come after.
While I was thinking over these matters, something happened that caught
my attention.
From below, from the direction of Europe, an image floated up.
It was my doctor, Dr H. – or, rather, his likeness – framed by a golden chain
or a golden laurel wreath. I knew at once:
‘Aha, this is my doctor, of course, he one who has been treating me. But now he is coming in his primal form,
as a basileus of Kos.3
In life he was an avatar of this basileus, the temporal embodiment of the primal form, which has existed from the beginning.
Now he is appearing in that primal form.’
Presumably I too was in my primal form, though this was something I did
not observe but simply took for granted.
As he stood before me, a mute exchange of thought took place between us.
Dr H. had been delegated by the earth to deliver a message to me, to tell me that there was a protest against my going away.
I had no right to leave the earth and must return. The moment I heard that, the vision ceased.
I was profoundly disappointed, for now it all seemed to have been for
nothing.
The painful process of defoliation had been in vain, and I was not to be allowed to enter the temple, to join the people in whose company I
belonged.
In reality, a good three weeks were still to pass before I could truly make
up my mind to live again.
I could not eat because all food repelled me.
The view of city and mountains from my sick-bed seemed to me like a painted curtain with black holes in it, or a tattered sheet of newspaper full of photographs that meant nothing.
Disappointed, I thought, ‘Now I must return to the “box system” again’.
For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box.
And now I should have to convince myself all over again that this was important!
Life and the whole world struck me as a prison, and it bothered me beyond measure that I should again be finding all that quite in order.
I had been so glad to shed it all, and now it had come about that I – along with everyone else – would again be hung up in a box by a thread.
While I floated in space, I had been weightless, and there had been nothing tugging at me.
And now all that was to be a thing of the past!
I felt violent resistance to my doctor because he had brought me back to
life. At the same time, I was worried about him.
‘His life is in danger, for heaven’s sake! He has appeared to me in his primal form!
When anybody attains this form it means he is going to die, for already he belongs to the “greater company”!’
Suddenly the terrifying thought came to me that Dr H. Would have to die in my stead. I tried my best to talk to him about it, but he did not understand me.
Then I became angry with him.
‘Why does he always pretend he doesn’t know he is a basileus of Kos? And that he has already assumed his primal form? He wants to make me believe that he doesn’t know!’
That irritated me.
My wife reproved me for being so unfriendly to him.
She was right; but at the time I was angry with him for stubbornly
refusing to speak of all that had passed between us in my vision. ‘Damn it
all, he ought to watch his step. He has no right to be so reckless!
I want to tell him to take care of himself. I was firmly convinced that his life was in jeopardy.
In actual fact I was his last patient. On 4 April 1944 – I still remember the exact date – I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the first time
since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day Dr H. took to his
bed and did not leave it again.
I heard that he was having intermittent attacks f fever.
Soon afterwards he died of septicaemia. He was a good doctor; there was something of the genius about him.
Otherwise he would not have appeared to me as a prince of Kos.
During those weeks I lived in a strange rhythm. By day I was usually depressed.
I felt weak and wretched, and scarcely dared to stir.
Gloomily, I thought, ‘Now I must go back to this drab world’. Towards evening I would fall asleep, and my sleep would last until about midnight.
Then I would come to myself and lie awake for about an hour, but in an utterly transformed state.
It was as if I were in an ecstasy.
I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were safe in the womb of the universe – in a tremendous void, but filled with the highest possible feeling of happiness.
‘This is eternal bliss’, I thought. ‘This cannot be described; it is far too wonderful!’
Everything around me seemed enchanted.
At this hour of the night the nurse brought me some food she had warmed – for only then was I able to take any, and I ate with appetite.
For a time it seemed to me that she was an old Jewish woman, much older than she actually was, and that she was preparing ritual kosher dishes for me.
When I looked at her, she seemed to have a blue halo around her head.
I myself was, so it seemed, in the Pardes Rimmonim, the garden of pomegranates, and the wedding of Tifereth with Malchuth was taking place.
Or else I was Rabbi Simon ben Jochai, whose wedding in the afterlife was being celebrated.
It was the mystic marriage as it appears in the Cabbalistic tradition. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was.
I could only think continually, ‘Now this is the garden of pomegranates!
Now this is the marriage of Malchuth with Tifereth!’
I do not know exactly what part I played in it. At bottom it was I myself; ) was the marriage. And my beatitude was that of a blissful wedding.
Gradually the garden of pomegranates faded away and changed.
There followed the Marriage of the Lamb, in a Jerusalem festively bedecked.
I cannot describe what it was like in detail. These were ineffable states of joy.
Angels were present, and light. I myself was the ‘Marriage of the Lamb’.
That, too, vanished, and there came a new image, the last vision.
I walked up a wide valley to the end, where a gentle chain of hills began.
The valley ended in a classical amphitheatre.
It was magnificently situated in the green landscape.
And there, in this theatre, the hierosgamos was being celebrated.
Men and women dancers came on stage, and upon a flower-decked couch Allfather Zeus and Hera consummated the mystic marriage, as it is described in the Iliad.
All these experiences were glorious.
Night after night I floated in a state of purest bliss, ‘thronged round with images of all creation’.
Gradually, the motifs mingled and paled. Usually the visions lasted for about an hour; then I would fall asleep again.
By the time morning drew near, I would feel:
Now grey morning is coming again; now comes the grey world with its boxes!
What idiocy, what hideous nonsense!
Those inner states were so fantastically beautiful that by comparison this world appeared downright ridiculous.
As I approached closer to life again, they grew fainter, and scarcely three weeks after the first vision they ceased altogether.
It is impossible to convey the beauty and intensity of emotion during those
visions.
They were the most tremendous things I have ever experienced. And
what a contrast the day was:
I was tormented and on edge; everything irritated me; everything was too material, too crude and clumsy, terribly limited both spatially and spiritually.
It was all an imprisonment, for reasons impossible to divine, and yet it had a kind of hypnotic power, a cogency, as if it were reality itself, for all that I had clearly perceived its emptiness.
Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.
There is something else I quite distinctly remember.
At the beginning, when I was having the vision of the garden of pomegranates, I asked the nurse to forgive me if she were harmed.
There was such sanctity in the room, I said, that it might be harmful to her.
Of course she did not understand me.
For me the presence of sanctity had a magical atmosphere; I feared it might be unendurable to others.
I understood then why one speaks of the odour of sanctity, of the ‘sweet smell’ of the Holy Ghost. This was it.
There was a pneuma of inexpressible sanctity in the room, whose manifestation was the mysterium coniunctionis.
I would never have imagined that any such experience was possible.
It was not a product of imagination. The visions and experiences were utterly real there was nothing subjective about them; they all had a quality of absolute objectivity.
We shy away from the word ‘eternal’, but I can describe the experience
only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past, and future are one. Everything that happens in time had been brought together into a. concrete whole.
Nothing was distributed over time, nothing could be measured by temporal concepts.
The experience might best be defined as a state of feeling, but one which cannot be produced by imagination.
How can I imagine that I exist simultaneously the day before yesterday, to-day and the day after to-morrow?
There would be things which would not yet have begun, other things which would be indubitably present, and others again which would already be finished – and yet all this would be one.
The only thing that feeling could grasp would be a sum, an iridescent whole, containing all at once expectation of a beginning, surprise at what is now happening, and satisfaction or disappointment with the result of what happened.
One is interwoven into an indescribable whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity.
After the illness a fruitful period of work began for me.
A good many of my principal works were written only then.
The insight I had had, or the vision of the end of all things, gave me the courage to undertake new formulations.
I no longer attempted to put forward my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts.
Thus one problem after the other revealed itself to me and took shape. ~Carl Jung, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, -Page 133 -141
From: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963), pp. 169-70, 265-8, 270-6, 276-7
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/
Carl Jung Depth Psychology on Instagram
vision vision vision vision vision vision
