Miss Hannah: How much would it help the patient if she should get back into the body? Would she be able to understand it or would she have to begin all over?
Dr. Jung:
Anything experienced outside of the body has the quality of being without body; so you must experience the whole thing over again, it must come in a new way.
Then whatever you learn in analysis will happen to you in reality.
It must be like that, because you are the point of identity, you are the one that experiences analysis and the one that experiences life.
Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now.
If you just have a dream and let it pass by you, nothing has happened at all, even if it is the most amazing dream; but if you look at it with the purpose of trying to understand it, and succeed in understanding it, then you have taken it into the here and now, the body being a visible expression of the here and now.
For instance, if you had not taken your body into this room, nobody would know you were here; though even if you seem to be in the body, it is by no means sure that you are, because your mind might be wandering without your realizing it.
Then whatever is going on here would not be realized; it would be like a vague dream that floats in and out, and nothing has happened. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316.
Dr. : Jung:
Yes, the energy has passed out of the Indian again.
One could say that the generative power was exhausted at the end of the vision.
You should think of this series of visions as sort of spiritualistic seances.
The patient herself called her condition when seeing these images a trance.
Dhyana is the word applied to that state in the East, it has exactly thesame meaning.
You notice in spiritualistic seances that there is always a great deal of talk about a certain power created by thought, which is stored up and used by the spirits to manifest in moving physical bodies through space, as tables are lifted into the air, for instance.
That is all done by a strange power of an almost physical nature, which is supposed to be part of the medium as well as of other participants of the seance.
Very interesting experiments have been made in order to find out the nature of the power, but it is most mysterious, most elusive; though we have very definite facts, we are still far from understanding it.
We would say it was libido, a form of psychological energy.
Of course, psychological energy does not exist, it is a concept, but in the physical or phenomenal equivalent of energy in these conditions we find the same peculiarity,
namely, that this creative power is after a while exhausted, and then everything sinks back into the condition it was in before.
So only for a time can the Indian assume human form, say, or creative, autonomous activity, and then it dissolves.
At the end of the vision before, the bowing down to the ground might be just as well the disappearance into the ground, which means into the body; that generative power is again dissolved into the physiological process, as if it had never existed.
And then in the next dhyana or trance condition it comes up again in its animal form, as it was in the ram.
The ram is chthonic; it symbolizes the fertility of the earth.
The ram appears also in the Hindu system as the lord of the fire zone.
And according to old astrological tradition, it is associated with the planet Mars, which is supposed to be fiery and impulsive, manifesting suddenly.
That form was checked by the animus, but here the creative force is again appearing in the animal form.
This time it is a bird. What would that denote? ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 118-119
From now on the visions will be rather more like real experiences.
She will be more active in them, she is part of the mystery play, and this happens in the moment when the Indian comes down the hill and drinks the water.
Before, he was high up on the rock, but now he descends into the deeper layers of the unconscious until he comes to the spring of life, one could say.
He leaves the divine-mystery sphere and comes down to the sources of the libido, which are deep in the body.
He becomes almost physical and in that way he wakes her up; there he catches her-that was the key he inserted in drinking the water.
That is an old symbol: drinking from the magic well has a transforming effect; it bestows all sorts of magic qualities upon one.
By drinking from a certain well women became pregnant.
And you remember the symbolism of the well where the woman of Samaria came to draw water, and where Jesus offered the living water.
In this case, by going down toward the earth, down into the body, and drinking the water, the Indian establishes a moment of communication between the sources of life and himself, and so he brings her in.
You see, that would again be something like bringing the egg to the mother, and also like the grain that comes from the earth. For she now enters the mystery play, and apparently she is veiled. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 147
No comments:
Post a Comment