Consciousness is not only the conditio sine qua non of realization.
LECTURE VI 28 February 1934
I want to show you a new book about Chinese mandalas to which Mrs. Schlegel has just called my attention.
It is written by Emperor Wilhelm.
It is really amazing.
You see, he is exceedingly intuitive.
He smelt a rat.
He knew this thing was in the air.
Unfortunately, he did not know Wilhelm’s and Zimmer’s books on the subject.
But he got the gist of it all right.
He is a dear old fellow.
Now here is a question by Mrs. Baumann:
“There is a good deal of confusion about the meaning of your definition of being in the body as ‘here and now.’
Would you say it was a conscious realization of the present moment, being ‘all there,’ and including a responsible attitude, as opposed to the astonished awareness of floating on the river of life?
Primitives and animals who go through extraordinary experiences are in their bodies and are surely aware of the present moment in the ordinary meaning of the words.
But they lack the responsible focus which would give any lasting meaning to these experiences.”
Yes, there is just that little difference between conscious life and unconscious life.
I think you have answered this question yourself.
I could not do it any better.
Animals and very low primitives, inasmuch as they have no consciousness worth speaking of, are surely on the spot.
They are here and now and nothing else.
But there is no realization.
Of course, inasmuch as there is consciousness at all, there is a certain realization.
Consciousness is realization essentially.
Consciousness is not only the conditio sine qua non of realization.
It is realization in itself, because it mirrors the here and now.
So a primitive is entirely under the spell of the here and now.
But inasmuch as he has already a certain imaginative power, inasmuch as his consciousness is not only capable of mirroring the objective world but is also creative, he creates a possibility of deviation.
Even the primitive has the remarkable faculty of jumping out of the here and now, or even of denying it.
The most serious attempts are made to combat and overcome the here and now.
A certain tribe of Brazilian Indians, for example, assert that they are red parrots.
A German explorer argued with them that they had no feathers and were unable to fly, so they could not be birds.
But they persisted that that was accidental and unessential—what was called accidens in old scholasticism.
To suggest such an idea—the sameness of two things so utterly and obviously different—is a tremendous accomplishment.
It is like the belief that the totem animal, which was killed and eaten each year, was a certain bird.
There might be twenty-five villages in a tribe, and each one holds that they have killed and eaten that one particular totem bird.
They are not primitive in the sense of being nearly unconscious.
They are already highly civilized and quite capable of knowing that there are really twenty-five birds.
Yet they assert it is one and the same.
It is like our Father Christmas, who is everywhere at the same time.
Only lately have people begun to puzzle and bother that Christ can be present in the Host everywhere at the same time if he chooses—the so-called volipraesentia, the willed presence.
This attempt of the most unlikely assertion is still continued today.
This is really the secret way by which the detachment of human thought has been brought about.
We are able to think abstractly.
As long as consciousness is primitive, the thought is absolutely identical with its object and cannot be detached from it—deconcretized.
Such attempts are educational and aim at producing differentiated thinking.
This is impossible unless it can be detached and abstracted from the object.
Otherwise, it remains merely representative and does not attain to the quality of thought.
Inasmuch as consciousness is not merely a mirroring and not merely creative, inasmuch as it is a complete realization, it must have the element of responsibility.
That is, the ethos must be connected with it—a certain attitude.
It is impossible to realize a thing without a certain attitude to which one can refer.
To realize a thing needs the existence of two points.
Not only an all-seeing eye, or an absolutely indifferent cup or vessel, so to speak, into which to pour the contents of the world.
That cup must in a way react to the contents.
It must have its own point of view, its own attitude.
You should know the two things: the object itself or the situation, and yourself in that situation.
You can only formulate or perceive your realization if you know your own role—if you know how to react to it.
To have a certain attitude is an ethical problem.
It is the one most important ethical problem, because an attitude is always based on a certain principle.
It is the standpoint you maintain against the flux of things.
A constant movement of events suggests a continuous, almost sinuous movement of your own attitude.
If you follow a long river of facts or events, you change as the river changes, and you never have a standpoint.
To have a standpoint is to have an attitude.
That is ethos.
That is a moral question—not in the sense of traditional morality.
It is the question of a certain attitude or a certain principle, without which you cannot value a situation in every detail.
You may be able to think it in detail, even nose up all the possibilities in the situation, and you still have not valued it.
It is incomplete.
A most essential item is lacking in it.
It is an absolutely amoral realization.
It might be a sort of aesthetic realization, for instance, without putting yourself into the picture.
It is absolutely necessary that you should come into it in a responsible way.
Without valuing a situation, you simply are not in it.
You could be a particularly good photographic apparatus just as well.
You really answered your own question, Mrs. Baumann.
Naturally, when you are sitting here and thinking of skiing or the movies or what the soup is doing at home, you are not here and now.
The person who comes into analysis with one foot only, always standing on the other, has obviously no realization.
Nor the one who with one hand says: “Here you have everything I possess,” while the other hand hides something behind his back.
That is not being in a situation.
It is not here and now.
It is here and there, or now and any other time.
We will go on to Mrs. Baumann’s next annotation:
“With the red pyramid and the blue and white rays we have the colors of the American flag, which must emphasize the patient’s American nationality—and yet it has been turned upside down.
In the flag, the blue represents the sky and the red probably blood.
Here the red and blue colors are changing places.
The airy spiritual qualities come down to earth and even turn into marble, while the earth is cracking and rising—but this may also be negative.
It reminds me of the column in the black city, where the little figure of Neptune told her: ‘By that pillar you shall lose yourself.’” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1523 – 1525
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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