Carl Jung: The organs are divided though close together, so there is the possibility of a conflict.

Mrs. Baumann: I thought she was healed by the water from the blue rock.

Dr. Jung: That is true, but also by the fire; she identifies now with the idol that was made strong in the fire.

It refers here to the fire that produces the pure gold; therefore she asks: "Is there no healing fire in the city?"

And those animi are sitting round a fire.

Here we can again bring in the Tantric symbolism.

The animus and the birds are air beings, they belong to the anahata center, above the diaphragm, and below is manipura, the emotional fire center.

Now in anahata there is a peculiar division of thought and feeling.

Thought would be practically identical with the air, the pneuma, the breath of life, with the lungs, in other words, while feeling would mean the heart.

The organs are divided though close together, so there is the possibility of a conflict.

And consciousness begins there, and wherever there is objective consciousness, discernment, there is division.

Therefore you discover in anahata for the first time the possibility of conflict, that you can have a conflict in yourself.

There is no conflict in manipura because you are the conflict itself, you simply flow along like water or fire.

You may be exploded in ten thousand pieces yet you are one with yourself because there is no center from which to judge, there is nothing in between the pairs of opposites.

You are everything, in a strong emotion you are also the pairs of opposites, you are both this and that.

It is not you who realize, it is the emotion that realizes.

There are people who are always in search of emotions; they have almost a mania to arouse emotions, because without them they feel dead.

Such people must always have a sensation or cause a sensation, have an emotion or cause an emotion, or they simply don't exist.

I have known women like that: they say disagreeable things just in order to rouse one's emotions, and if they don't succeed they are disappointed, lifeless, they have missed the goal.

The fire here, then, has the meaning of the manipura center, and that has a healing effect because the things which were separate and contradictory are there fused together; it is like the idea of the alchemical pot in which substances are mixed or melted together.

So you can either descend into the abysmal water to be healed, the baptismal water being the uterus resurrectionis where you are made whole again; or you can pass through the fire.

Therefore John the Baptist said of Christ: "He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire."

The two forms of baptism refer to the two lower centers; in the fire you can be made whole, and the water is still more efficacious because it is deeper down.

To go further would mean getting into the earth and there you would be practically dead.

Death has been understood as the absolute cure; when Socrates was about to die, for example, he said a cock should be sacrificed to Aesculepius, the god of the doctors, for curing him.

But the figurative death in the water, and death or being burnt in the fire also mean regeneration, because in going back into any state where there is no ego consciousness, there is regeneration. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1143-1144