Carl Jung: Insanity is such an explosion, for instance.

Dr: Jung: That is perfectly true.

The unconscious has no chance of coming into the conscious unless the conscious makes a hole for it to come through.

Prof Demos: Well, how does consciousness first appear?

Dr: Jung: By an explosion-that is the only thing I can imagine.

Insanity is such an explosion, for instance.

The walls of the cave burst and one is overcome by the unconscious.

I assume that through pressure, cracks are made in the walls of the cave through which volcanic vapors from the unconscious well up; that was probably the origin of consciousness.

But that is not the condition here.

Therefore the bird is shut in and cannot escape, although one might have expected her to be far enough advanced to allow the bird to escape.

Here her vision is centered upon the fire and she says: "I saw the fire create small snakes which disappeared."


Now that is why the Hindus call that coiled-up Kundalini snake the serpent fire; it is because of such facts, they have observed such visions.

And that woman, not knowing of Tantric philosophy at all, produces exactly the same mythology.

It is interesting that the phoenix comes out of the fire as well as the snakes, for snakes are decidedly lower, they belong to the earth, they are the opposite of the phoenix.

But we have evidence of that in the Persian version of the phoenix myth.

The bird Semenda was said to burn itself up, but out of the ashes a worm came forth which transformed itself into a bird again.

It is a sort of enantiodromia.

The bird and the snake are natural enemies, but out of the creature which is most unlike a bird, a bird develops.

That the bird cannot come up into consciousness is perhaps due to the fact that her conscious assumes that only snakes are down there, and snakes are supposed to be dangerous and venomous.

But you see the fire produces both; the snakes would be a counterbalance to the harmless bird.

Then she says about the fire: "It also created men and women."

It is an extraordinarily creative fire, it seems to be the creator of the world.

And that agrees exactly with the idea in Tantric philosophy that fire is the creator; out of the first living germ of fire came man and woman. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 410-411