G.V.R. Sorge, Dreams and the East, Concluding Reflections
13. Concluding Reflections
The Berlin Seminar may be seen as a contribution to the ongoing epistemological debate over hermeneutic values in any discourse having to do with the psyche.
That is, it specifically supports a psychology (ψυχή λόγος, a discussion about the psyche or soul) embedded in a larger framework alongside Oriental meditative systems.
Yet this puzzling journey in a soul’s story somehow says more about analytical psychology than about the dreamer himself.
So, we are left wondering how the analysand brought his remarkable dreams to bear upon his situation.
We may also wonder to what extent his participation to the previous seminar, on dream analysis, influenced his oneiric life.
This question goes hand in hand with the perennial one of the suggestive
influence exerted, or even spell cast, upon the analysand by psychotherapeutic systems, along with their hermeneutics.
Jung was aware of the impact his publications would have on the genuineness of the symbolic unconscious manifestations of his patients, and frequently recalled the long period he had waited before first revealing his discoveries in his “Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower” (1929);257 while no more than two years after the present seminar, at the psychotherapy congress in Bad Nauheim, psychiatrist Fritz Kunkel would caution against the propensity of both psychotherapists and patients to get caught or “encapsulated” in semantic, conceptual, and imaginative automatisms.
He half-amusedly remarked, For example, if [the psychotherapist] is a Freudian, he and his followers will very often dream church towers and walking sticks as well as jewelry boxes and handbags.
But if he is a Jungian, you will find in his environment primarily dreams of snakes uncoiling from the interior of a lotus flower, or embryos that are still locked inside the earth.
There seem to be sanatoriums where dreams exclusively serve one or the other language.
This doesn’t depend in the first instance on race, blood, or the collective unconscious, but above all on positive academic transference.
Indeed, we cannot address these questions without first taking into account
a certain optical illusion created by the seminar situation, insofar as the extensive amplifications laid out for a public audience are set-pieces of demonstration, ill suited to the intimate relationship built up in a therapeutic dialogue.
With that distinction in mind, one can say that in both scenarios, Jung’s focus on the peculiar richness of dream language carries another kind of meaning still: one that discloses new perspectives and opens onto otherwise inaccessible horizons.
It is up to the individual to welcome and integrate such acquisitions with a responsible attitude toward the unconscious.
The same responsible attitude furthermore enjoins us, nowadays, to (re)consider cautiously the risks inherent in the extension of psychic dynamics to national(istic) and collective scenarios.
The present edition wishes to privilege the connection, as experienced
by the original participants, between Jung’s seminar and Zimmer’s lecture,
in the hope that this can contribute to promoting knowledge of the still largely “untranslated” or “not yet translated” German orientalist, of
whom there has long been, and remains, a “great need for a personal
and intellectual biography.”
The intensity of dialogue between the two is captured in an impalpable arabesque of subtle—whether or not deliberate—links between the lecture on yoga and the seminar sessions.
That is to say, approached from one side by Jung along heterogeneous
lines of resonance, and from the other by Zimmer in terms of the cosmic
dance of Shiva, creator and destroyer of worlds in his union with Shakti,
the Berlin Seminar affords a stereoscopic view not explicitly framed by
its protocols.
Near the end of his lecture, Zimmer evokes the state in which the yogi, at the apex of his ascetic path, recognizes himself as a yantra or mandala, and his own body as a cultic instrument (Kultgerät), in a culminating awareness of the coniunctio oppositorum.
One reaches behind the secret of the world process, to how the transcendental One (the supraworldly, auspicious Shiva, the Supreme God) becomes the manifoldly ephemeral, the world, due to the infinite agility of his creative force, Shakti, who is the Kundalini within us.
This evocation of the unity of opposites appears here as Shiva and Shakti: transcendence, resting in itself, and the immanence of the world that comes into play from and within itself, beckon toward two aspects of existence, resonating with the constitutive presence of Death in (every single) Life—and with the deep meaning of (not only Western) philosophy itself, as recalled at the incipit of the lecture.
Later in the seminar, Jung underlines the importance of Geschehenlassen,
or “letting-happen,” in observing fantasy processes.
This is not the meditative composure alluded to by Zimmer, but a non-interfering, non-prejudicial posture on the part of the rational mind toward
the products of fantasy, which constitutes a crucial (therapeutic) attitude for Jung: a “phenomenological stance” vis-à-vis the imaginal realm.
In the meantime, however, he accommodates that propensity within the historical-existential horizon of individual typology and the specific personal equation.
That complicates any hard and fast strictures about the appropriateness of “letting-happen,” for the latter must be coupled with (and integrated into) the compensating direction: one “must learn will-power.”
Such flexible learning must go on constantly if consciousness is to remain open to our higher, largely unknown aims, for the entire psychic disposition puts all of these things into play simultaneously, and [. . .] we stand in their midst.
This is something in which we are completely contained. We represent consciousness, and are surrounded by the unconscious.
We are the ball that is thrown back and forth. How, for instance, is the tennis ball supposed to decide the outcome of the game? That makes no sense whatsoever.
The key compass to navigate in life’s seas remains, Jung maintains, a responsible awareness of and toward the language of the unconscious; an
openness to the intermediate realm of images. Commenting upon the images—to conclude with a last “spoiler”—of the conclusive dream, Jung
finds in “the breath of the sea” the expression of a new, wider understanding of the rhythm of life that the psyche announces to the analysand.
This hint of such a natural, transforming pulse may find a resonance
with the Hindu myth of the Hamsa, or great swan, evoked in Zimmer’s lecture and elsewhere linked to “the condition of cosmic night, in which the world is dissolved once again in the primordial waters of the unconscious, in the formless body of cosmic being.”261
By referring to such ample “up-and-down movement,” Jung aligns this kindred harmonic in the dream with the corresponding rhythm in the Hindu mandala, which takes its rise from both the smallest within and the greatest
around it.
This rhythm articulates the paradoxical dimensions of the soul and at the same time unlocks an intimation of the primordial purusha.
And here Jung mentions the “personal and impersonal life of the
soul” of the dreamer, evoking the ineffable linkage within everyone
between temporality and timelessness, prakrti and purusha, and their interregnum: that “strange world of images” which, as pointless or even ridiculous as it might sometimes appear, “fills us with the sacred, brings us
healing.”
Yet behind the threatening power of the waves which alludes to
“a future that outgrows him,” also lies a danger, a potential “explosive effect.”
Thus Jung does not refrain from warning against the fundamental bipolarity at the bottom of each archetypal force—between
inflation and salvation, development and regression, new life and death.
Before and beyond a conclusive reference to the Promised Land (that in the eyes of posterity might be reworked with a sinister, involuntary predictive connotation), Jung points out that dreams in themselves can bring one nowhere.
They are only a glimpse, a working direction, one might say.
Therefore, after all, now “comes the detail work”: a grounded concluding note of humility that affirms the care necessary at every step of the analytical process. ~G.V.R. Sorge, Dreams and the East, Page 72-76
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