LECTURE III 21 May 1930
We will continue our discussion of the dream. Do you remember where we left off, Dr. Draper?
Dr. Draper: We were talking about the participation mystique, that cross-transference.
Dr. Jung: That was not quite it. You asked something very awkward why those two children were dead.
Dr. Deady: Miss Wolff asked a question concerning the woman having come into the Trinity.
Miss Wolff' It was not a question, just a remark.
Dr. Jung: Just a remark!
That is exactly the point, we must establish the connection, otherwise we talk in the air.
You see, in the dream before, the whole Trinity came down to earth, and in the next dream came the birth of triplets, obviously referring to the Trinity, which was reborn in a very peculiar way.
We made the hypothesis that the three had to do with functions, which would mean that of the three functions of the Trinity, two are dead and
only one is alive.
And then came your question, why should two of them be dead if they are supposed to be living elements in the Trinity.
Now I call that a very awkward question. Is there an answer?
The associations are very important, that the children represent the three stages in the dreamer's mental development, two of those stages still-born.
Moreover, the importance of that is emphasized by the fact that the midwife, whom he associates with me, is doing away with those dead children.
So Dr. Draper's question is really very awkward, for how can a thing that is reborn be dead, and what is the use of being reborn when it is a miscarriage?
Mrs. Crowley: There was the point that his wife had borne the triplets.
Dr. Jung: But there was no question about the paternity; we must assume that the dreamer has something to do with his own children.
We have not heard of a secret lover.
Miss Sergeant: If they represented his theosophy and other occult interests, why should they not die when analysis is born?
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is what the dreamer clutches at, and there evidently would be the loophole to escape Dr. Draper's question.
But in our interpretation we assumed that the Trinity meant the three functions in the unconscious.
That was hypothesis, it is not guaranteed by the dream; the dream and its associative material does not speak of functions.
We were discussing the Trinity in a very general way and not entirely in connection with the dream, where we had only to do with the three stages which the dreamer mentioned.
But we left that point of view and spoke of the peculiar fact that we find these trinities of gods all over the earth, from which we may assume that that symbol must be based upon a universal psychological condition.
And concerning such a psychological condition, we know that there was a time in the dawn of all history, in the beginning of civilization, when man first detached one function from the collective unconscious; that is, he succeeded in making a part of the unconscious psyche serviceable for his own
purpose.
The moment when man could say he had a purpose or the will to do so-and-so marked the birth of that detachment.
Naturally, when one studies the psychology of the functions, one finds that it is not fully detached, that, in a differentiated type, there is a part, a root of the most differentiated function which is embedded entangled in the collective unconscious.
That is the most difficult thing for people to realize in themselves the thing they will admit last.
Take a thinking type, for instance, who is completely identical with his conscious function.
If you tell him that a certain part of his thinking is absolutely primitive, he jumps at your throat.
He will not admit it, he must cling to the idea that somewhere he is divine and free.
You can tell him that his feeling life is far below the mark, that his sensation is not good, or that his intuition is rotten, and he will admit all that.
But never say that his thinking is impure.
Yet even his thinking is at some point impure.
One sees the same thing in a differentiated feeling type.
He is apparently quite able to feel hypothetically, as a thinker can think hypothetically.
Most people can only think concretely.
I remember saying to such a person: Let us assume that Sydney is in Canada and not in Australia.
Whereupon he immediately replied: That cannot be, Sydney is in Australia.
Now, that is not a thinking type, for a thinking type is able to think that Sydney is in the moon; he can think anything.
Just as a feeling type is free in his own function: he can assume that we are all perfectly happy, he can conjure up happiness for everybody for a while, the most wonderful atmosphere which everybody thinks is marvellous, but then comes the catastrophe.
After a while the whole thing collapses.
For even such a highly developed feeling type, who seems free from conditions within, has certain feelings somewhere in the background which are absolute slaves, the effects of dark causes, and he seems to be free of them only because he wants to believe in his divinity, his freedom.
And it is true that in so far as you have succeeded in detaching a function you are free, free from conditions, beyond causes.
But as a whole, you are never quite free.
What I said, then, about the Trinity being the three functions in the unconscious is a universal consideration not mentioned in the dream.
And in such cases, where people ask awkward questions, one had better return to the actual text of the dream, which is that the Trinity has descended, three children are born, and the dreamer associates with them the three stages of his mental or spiritual development.
For further explanation of the dead children, we have to refer to his associations.
So in the very first place, even if we connect it up with the Trinity in the previous dream, before discussing the Trinity as three functions we must look at it in a different way, namely, as three successive stages.
And we find that in reality the historical Trinity is also in three stages: the Father, the Creator; then the Son; and then the Holy Ghost.
The Paraclete, the Comforter, is left by the Son. So we see that even in the dogma the Trinity is a succession, yet it is in eternity.
What is to us separated is together in eternity because there is no time.
In the light of the dreamer's associations, then, the Trinity is to be understood in this case as three existing not at once but in succession.
His three stages are representations, so to speak, of his three successive conditions spiritualism, the Father; theosophy, the Son; and psychology, the
Holy Ghost.
Now, the fact that two are dead would refer to the first ones.
The Father is dead, the Son is dead, and the Holy Ghost is alive.
Spiritualism is dead, theosophy is dead, and psychology is alive.
That would be the parallel, and it would be subjectively true in his case.
You have heard enough about his attitude to the Church to know that his convictions in that respect are very definite; he can no longer believe in the traditional Church, Christianity is dead for him.
Also he is probably aware through his theosophical studies of the belief, widespread in our days, that there are three stages of spiritual development, namely, the Old Testament, the Father; the New Testament, the Son; and the present time, the Holy Ghost, which is the new thing to come.
That idea probably comes from the East, it is reminiscent of the successive incarnations of the Buddha.
Mrs. Fierz: The Cistercian monks of the twelfth or thirteenth century were the first to speak of it.
Mr. Schmitz: I think it was in the eleventh or twelfth century. If I am not mistaken it was a current assumption in the time of Frederick the Second.
Dr. Jung: I think you may be right, and it is quite remarkable that it came up so early.
Question: What was the idea?
Dr. Jung: The idea was of the three successive conditions in the evolution of truth: the Old Testament was the Kingdom of the Father; the New Testament was the Kingdom of the Son and so of Christianity in general; and the third would be the Empire or Kingdom of the Holy Ghost, that is the thing to come.
This idea of successive revelations, or periodical manifestations, has an Eastern character, and it is of course a fact that there were Eastern influences in the early Church.
In the second century before Christ there were already Buddhist monasteries in Persia; it is quite certain that there were Persian influences in early Christianity and probably Buddhist as well.
At all events, the Catholic Church was influenced by the East. The rosary is an Eastern yantra, for instance.
Thus it is possible that the idea of the successive manifestations of the Bodhisattvas penetrated early Christianity.
Mr. Schmitz: The Russian Church has accepted the idea of the three elements.
Dr. Jung: Yes, it is a general idea. In theosophical circles these three stages have also been widely discussed.
And now, people think that the coming of the new age-Aquarius-will be the third condition, the new revelation of the Trinity.
1 don't know in how far my dreamer has been influenced by such ideas, but I found that he knew about the three successive stages in human development, which coincide with, or are symbolized by, the successive stages of the Trinity.
You see, this idea would rather bear out what we were discussing in the last seminar, namely, the successive incarnations, one could almost say, of the three different functions, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and if that should be completed we would have the complete individual.
At all events, when the Trinity comes down to earth we may expect a tremendous change, transformations not only in our own psychology but also in our psychological concept of the divine.
It will make a great psychological difference because we shall no longer possess the necessary unconscious conditions for our conception of the divine factor.
The necessary material was the three unconscious functions that formed a body of considerable energy, which was the basis for a conception
of an all-powerful Trinity.
Now, if that factor gets dissolved by conscious realization, or the detachment of these functions, it would follow that the psychological material already in our unconscious would be the sole structure for a new concept of the divine.
So it would be an entirely different way.
To finish this argument, have you an idea what the psychological material in the unconscious would be?
If the three functions of the Trinity were assimilated, what would remain?
That would again throw an interesting light on the dream.
You see, as long as man has but one function, he is just aware that he can do something, but he is always up against an overwhelming psychological condition, the three in the unconscious, the majority, on top of him.
Then he acquires a second function and becomes more complete.
He gains more balance and acquires something like a philosophical consciousness.
He can be aware of himself as such a psychological being.
He can say: I want to do this or that, and he can also say: I see how foolish that is.
While with-only one function that is impossible, there is no reflection; it is only with the acquisition of the two functions that he has acquired a mirror.
The left hand can then judge the right hand, and he has thereby gained a sort of divinity, a superior point of view.
The third function makes a second mirror.
He can say: I see this fellow here who is watching that chap down there, and I see how he thinks and that he makes a wrong conclusion.
With a fourth function there would be still more consciousness.
Obviously, it is a tremendous thing in the growth of consciousness that one can get behind oneself, that one can as a spectator again and again mirror oneself.
Probably one can actually do it only to a limited extent, there are presumably certain restrictions to our consciousness, but one can see the possibility of infinite mirroring~ and of infinite judgment.
In that case, one would arrive naturally at a being who was so fabulously superior to conditions that it would be an almost limitless freedom, like the complete freedom of God that has not to obey conditions because it is the only condition that is.
Therefore the more functions one acquires, the more one deprives the divinity, or the magical factor, the mana factor, of its efficiency.
It is as if one were undermining it, or hollowing it out, because one takes away from it and adds to oneself with every new point of view.
So one lifts oneself up above conditions.
That is the path of redemption in the East, the attainment of successive conditions of consciousness which gradually liberate man from the pairs of opposites, from the qualities, from concupiscentia, from the wheel of death and rebirth, as they express it.
Now, one would conclude that, through this detachment of the functions, we would arrive at a complete assimilation of the Trinity, in other words, a complete assimilation of the divine factor within ourselves.
But then nothing would be left apparently. Or is that a wrong conclusion?
Mrs. Fierz: The devil.
Dr. Jung: Oh no, we would assimilate the devil. We could even check God. We could say: I see this is God and he thinks so and so, but I am going to play a trick on him, I am the devil.
Or the reverse: I see the devil and I will play a trick on him.
Our question is: suppose one arrives at the complete assimilation of the Trinity, would one still be only an inferior being?
We are naturally of the devil, from the very beginning our hearts were black, we arose from the slime, and we would be perfectly convinced that we were bringing into the Trinity something terribly inferior.
But with the acquisition of the Trinity we obviously rise to a higher level, to complete freedom from conditions, and if that is the case we would assume that God would not be objective any longer because he is clearly one with us.
We would be in a way divine, which is of course the Eastern idea.
Do you think that such a thing is psychologically possible?-that the divine object could disappear from man's conscious?
Suggestion: I think there would be a sort of entropy.
Dr. Jung: Then it would be a sort of desinteressement such as one sees in the East.
That Eastern quietism is a kind of desinteressement so that people vanish practically.
But we cannot say what that condition is inside, because nobody is inside such a condition-unless he is dead.
It is like expecting a man to say how he feels when he is dead.
Mr. Schmitz: The tension of polarity would cease, and therefore it would be the same as death. At the moment when he reached his goal he would no longer be living.
Dr. Jung: Yes, one might assume that when he has reached the complete assimilation of all projections, he will have reached the stage of divinity, and then he is necessarily dead, because every thinkable form of energy has been turned in, assembled in the field of the square inch, or the house of the square foot, as Chinese Yoga puts it, and there it is held in a form of duration where nothing happens at all.
But as long as we live we are obviously incapable of withdrawing all energy from the world, of withdrawing all projections.
We keep on eating things, smelling things, moving, and all that is psychology in projection.
It is projection, it is giving out, something is constantly leaving us-as long as we live we are projecting.
We are incarnating energy, and so energy is not completely withdrawn, it is not completely within ourselves, which means that an ideal condition of complete awareness cannot be reached as long as we live.
But we may say that we can reach it approximately, so that one could imagine how it would be.
We can assume such a condition, in which one has withdrawn the maximum projection.
We can assume that the maximum energy is now within, gathered up in the so-called diamond body.
Then what about the divine object? Is that still divine?-or is it depleted? What form would it take if there were one? Or is that a perfectly unintelligible
question?
I would not ask it if there were not a doubt in my mind.
Naturally in analysis I have observed patients and have seen these things so often that I have formed certain ideas.
Now, there is still one important point in that dream which we have to clear up, namely, why his wife is bringing forth at all why, when the Trinity comes to earth, does it not go into him?
Yet the dream says it is his wife who brings forth-as if his wife were a sort of modern Mary, the Holy Ghost having come down with wings and fertilized her.
Dr. Draper: It is possible that notwithstanding his complete assimilation of his projections, he reaches the stage where there still remains in him the fact that he does go back to the mudfish. That forms a sort of matrix from which he cannot possibly escape. He still has something of the amoeba in him.
Dr. Jung: There you are on the right track.
For the fact is, if we succeed in assimilating other functions, or in bringing our projections back to ourself, we do acquire a sort of divinity and that has a peculiar effect upon our psychology, it removes us from the inferior man.
People often get quite inflated and think they are acquiring a wonderful superiority because they are identifying with the next mirror.
The more mirrors one acquires, the more divine one becomes, and the more also one becomes inflated-identical with the next mirror, that is, and again taken away from the apeman, from everything that is low and weak, perhaps even dirty, that still is wet from the original waters, covered with primeval slime.
We get away from all that, farther and farther away, the more awareness we acquire, but then a very peculiar fact happens.
What would that be?
Prof Hooke: Are assimilation and detachment the same thing?
Dr. Jung: The psychological consequence of the assimilation would be detachment, because only when one gets a superior point of view does one say, I am so-and-so. One doesn't identify with the fact that one is incapable or wrong, but with the superior point of view naturally.
We all identify with our one differentiated function I am myself, and then I find myself in my thinking. A great musician would naturally think himself a great musician.
Do you think that Wagner suspected that he was anything else?
He never thought that he was-I won't tell you what, I leave it to your imagination.
Mrs. Baynes: But I thought you were presupposing that you were taking all four functions together, and if you do that you could not forget that primordial slime.
Dr. Jung: You may not forget, but with each mirror you get a higher point of view and you naturally identify with it.
In actual fact you are getting away, you won't stay on the level of the amoeba.
Mr. Schmitz: And then comes the revenge of the inferior man?
Dr. Jung: Exactly.
The more we get away from our roots, the more we identify with mirrors, the more inefficient we become, because the mirror has no feet, it has no hands.
It is complete awareness, perhaps, yet no effect except the effect which we can give to it.
What is inside it means exceedingly little.
I can tell a person that things are so-and-so, but he simply cannot make it true, because insight counts for little unless it is given hands and feet.
The further we get away the less we are efficient.
Prof Hooke: And yet we are the more divine!
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is a terrible paradox, but you must not mix it up with philosophy.
This is psychology, where we really move in paradoxes.
The more divine, the farther from earth-speaking psychologically, and from that you may conclude that God is a most inefficient being.
But that is of course metaphysical. It may be true and it may not be true.
Mr. Schmitz: That is the reason why God incarnated himself in the Son. Empirically, he is not, he is incapable, and that is why he has created this terrible world. He must be not only in potentia but in actu.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is why man is indispensable to God.
Without man, God could do nothing.
That is not metaphysical.
I don't believe in metaphysics, I only own to psychology, and in our psychology it is surely so-that God finds himself in a very helpless condition.
We find that idea in old legends, in that cabalistic legend, for instance, that I have told you, that God in the beginning was all alone, there was nothing except himself, and his loneliness grew and grew to such an extent that he got a terrible headache from it, and realized that there should be something that was not himself.
In the beginning everything was in the form of a vaporous coud, so he drew that together till it became more and more condensed, and suddenly a light burnt through, and that was the Son, the first ray of Light. (Cf. The Gospel of St. John.)
Dr. Baynes: It is like Prajapati.
Dr. Jung: Exactly the same idea-the extraordinary loneliness of God and his helplessness in that condition.
Well then, we make the statement that the more we increase our awareness, the more we draw back our projections and gather up our energy in ourselves, the more we remove ourselves from actual efficiency.
The idea that God was perfectly helpless and lost in his loneliness and had to create man in order to become or to be is expressed in many myths or philosophical parabola, and thus is explained how man is in a way the indispensable means of God's becoming.
That is beautifully expressed by Meister Eckhart where he says that God in his very divinity is not God, he must be born through the soul of man again and again. "Without me God cannot live."
So the condition of divine awareness is really a condition of infinite mirroring, and the more one lives in the mirroring, the more one is removed from the substance, whatever that is.
One cannot help having a too superior point of view.
Suppose one has a tremendous universal insight into things.
Once shrugs one’s shoulders and says: better that I know nothing at all, for then I could do something.
Knowing so much would keep one out of existence, one wouldn't know whether one was alive or dead, one would be simply universal.
So through that awareness one would be aware of functions, but the interesting thing is that when one is mfrroring a thing one does not possess it.
It is like an old magic idea that mirroring a thing means possessing it.
That is not true.
One gets the illusion that when one is able to mirror that fellow there, and from here to decide about him, that one possesses him.
But he is not possessed, he keeps his original substance.
He is there and one cannot take him in.
One can only take in the images of things, but the things remain and one is removed from them.
One doesn't keep the world in one when one takes away one's energy; the world remains there, one only removes oneself; and so it comes about
that through a superior awareness one is peculiarly separated from the substance.
Then something happens.
And here we come to our original argument, namely, what will happen when we assimilate the Trinity?
Obviously we get an almost universal or complete awareness, mirrors after mirrors, and we apparently acquire divinity.
Well, something in us, some remote vista, is divine, one ray of light is divine, but we have not undone our reality, this world.
We have only removed ourselves from the world through that awareness, and we apparently have lost the divine object, the divine object from the regions of light, where it was before.
All illumination came to us from above, and it was light which revealed itself to us as truth.
But when we are identified with the mirroring, the divine factor changes its form altogether. In what form would it reappear?
Mr. Schmitz: The first thing is that the collective unconscious will take its revenge.
The higher man climbs, and the more he identifies himself with those heights, the more he will get into a mess of ridiculous and childish casualties.
Dr. Jung: One knows everything with one's universal awareness, but that does not hinder matter from acting. It doesn't influence the substance in the least.
Mr. Schmitz: But is it not possible, if the sensation function, for instance, works well, if it is quite differentiated and free, that one might have a certain connection with matter in that situation of divine solitude?
Dr. Jung: It is more than possible, it is inevitable.
You perceive reality, yet the superior insight removes you, and you are in solitude.
Mr. Schmitz: The insight through the four functions?
Dr. Jung: Yes, because what the mirrors reflect is not substance, only the image.
Also, sensation is not what one usually understands having sensations of touch, light, etc.-it is simply an awareness of things as they are, what the French psychologist Janet calls "la fonction du reel," a psychological point of view, an attitude.
Mr. Schmitz: If one has this "fonction du reel," is it conceivable that one would be as remote from matter?
Dr. Jung: Oh yes, one can see things as they actually are through one's awareness, and yet be absolutely removed from them.
That is the great tragedy. The more one is aware, the more one is removed.
Mr. Schmitz: Then the conclusion would be not to be so aware!
Dr. Jung: If one can afford it. But we cannot afford not to be aware. Everything in us forces us to higher consciousness.
We have to follow up that way, but on that way we lose connection.
Mr. Schmitz: The happy end is death!
Dr. Jung: That is the Eastern idea, Nirvana.
The more one is removed-not that you are actually taken away into cosmic distances, it is the psychological situation-the more one says, what is the use of bothering.
In two years or fifty years one will be dead and then one will disappear anyhow.
Other people will come, other illusions will come, it does not matter.
That is universal awareness, and it removes one. It is a psychological condition.
One is here, seeing, shaking hands with people, saying how do you do, and yet one is ten thousand miles away, anywhere in the cosmos, but not here.
Now if that is the case-and that will be the case with more complete awareness-then compensation will take place.
Then as the Chinese say, the lead of the water region will react.
One rebels against that removal, and then God, the divine factor, the overwhelming factor, appears in things. Do you understand?
It is very interesting to look at the development of thought psychologically in the nineteenth century, after the French Revolution, after the rational era of natural science.
Then people began to believe in ghosts, in moving tables, materializations, etc.
These are most primitive ideas, yet they had at that time the value of almost divine revelations.
And, mind you, they were not altogether idiotic people, and there are many people today who believe in a valid origin for these things.
It was the time when that famous book Force and Matter by Buchner appeared, and was received with such extraordinary enthusiasm.
It designates the height of materialism, just in the fact that in it matter becomes spirit.
Look at the most modern facts in science and what is matter after all?
Thought is matter, and matter is thought; there is no difference any longer.
That is the Einstein theory.
The latest truth about matter is that it is like thought, that it even behaves like a psychical something, that it is a psychical phenomenon.
The whole concept of matter is dissolving into these abstractions.
It is changing altogether, which has much to do with an entirely different consideration, a tremendous revolution in our whole outlook.
Mr. Holdsworth: When you spoke about God being unable to get along without man, did you differentiate man from the other animals?
Dr. Jung: Oh, I would include the whole tribe of animals.
That is not an original idea.
You may have heard of Jaworski, who thinks that all the parts of the human being are derived from animals.
He says that each organ of the human body is really a sort of conglomeration of all the different animal principles.
There is a picture in one of his books which shows what part of the animal is associated with the various parts of man.
The idea is, roughly, that all animals are contained in man.
Then there is a German book by Dacque, who says that animals all come from that block which was hewn out to make man, that animals are particles split off from man.
We are not derived from the ape-man, but the apeman is derived from us-and went on making apes.
There really might be something in it.
Our idea about the descent of man is most peculiar. It might just as well be that a certain old gorilla was a by-product of man; that is perfectly feasible from a biological point of view.
Such ideas are in the air nowadays, I cannot decide!
You remember what Eckhart says: "All grain meaneth wheat, all metal meaneth gold, and all nature meaneth man."
So when I speak of man I mean creation, because in a way man is creation, for he only is aware of creation.
If nobody is aware of it, it is as if it were not.
That is Schopenhauer's idea-that the world does not exist if man is not aware of it, and therefore man should extinguish himself in order to bring suffering to an end.
It is also the Eastern point of view.
And lunatics have the same idea that the world is chiefly a projection, that it exists only when they create it.
They say: I make those people; if I don't look there is nothing there.
Such tremendous exaggeration is, of course, due to the fact that their connection with reality has been severed, a fact which also occurs in the highest condition of Yoga, where a man feels the whole world as an enormous illusion, an hallucination.
He speaks to a person as if there were nobody there, as if it were just a voice he has heard, and he feels it like that.
These are peculiarities of people who have concentrated their thought within.
I told you that anecdote of old man Schopenhauer standing in the flower bed.
When one is removed to a higher level of consciousness, reality appears as a sort of illusion.
Well now, we must return again to the original problem-what takes place in the Trinity when it comes down to earth?
The dream gives us the simple answer that it is reborn in the shape of triplets, two of them dead and one living.
That is a pretty sad rebirth, I should say, not very complete.
The only thing that remains from that whole process of transformation is a little baby, one perhaps divine but very human baby that should be taken care of.
Mr. Crowley: In a way it is the same, because it contains all the possibilities.
Dr. Jung: Well, yes, but from the point of view of Christian possibilities it is not even a very modest Saviour.
Dr. Baynes: Is it not that the depotentiation of the Trinity is bringing the action down from the abstract to the normal sphere of relationship, the human embodiment?
Dr. Jung: Yes. When we go back to the actual associations of the dreamer, which one must always do, mind you, we come to that theoretical conclusion.
To him these three children are spiritual efforts, and his most recent preoccupation, psychology, is the only remaining child of the Trinity.
So that would be the divine child. And what is the divine child?
The honest attempt of man.
The last remnant of something divine is the honest attempt of man, made through that derivation to a sort of God.
You will laugh that I bring in H. G. Wells, but in his book God the Invisible King, God is a youth, and I know that figure from innumerable dreams.
We have often spoken of it, the Puer Aeternus who represents the more or less heroic attempt of man, which becomes or, in a way,
takes the place of a deity.
A peculiar kind of deity, for what is weaker than a human attempt? What is more miserable, more helpless?
It is an exceedingly small seed in the beginning.
It has to grow, and one has to take care of it to enable it to grow, and that is, of course, not one's idea of the divine-a thing so helpless and weak.
But if it is true, as Eckhart says, that God has to be born in the soul again and again, then God is born necessarily as-well, an embryo, a little child, absolutely inefficient, that has to become.
So it shouldn't shock our religious feelings too much when we attribute the divine quality to the human attempt.
But apparently it shocks us from the standpoint of rationalism or from our intellectual point of view. Why should it have the quality of the divine?
One cannot see that, and I don't know why one should. I strongly advise you not to.
To assume that your attempt is necessarily divine would be a terrible assumption.
I say that your attempt has the divine quality because, if you study these attempts of man, you will discover that they are not so much conscious decisions, not so much his own free will, as that they are forced upon him.
He has to make the attempt, he cannot escape it. It may be the thing he is perhaps most afraid of, the thing about which he has always thought:
For heaven's sake, I hope that does not come to mel-and afterwards he says: Oh, I wanted it!
But he funked it for years.
He may even think that it is his worst foolishness, his most miserable folly, and that he is a damned fool to try.
Why expose himself to these things? It is because he has to do it, he cannot keep his fingers off it.
A superior factor in himself, Deus ex machina, the divine thing in him, that tremendous power, is forcing his hand, and he is the victim of his own attempt-though he says his attempt was just his purpose.
Not in the least!
Therefore, when you talk to people like Mr. Goethe or Mr. Napoleon, they will frankly tell you that it was not so much their own choice, that they had the feeling of fate in it, that they were following a sort of guidance.
And all people who have really done something in the world have that feeling that there is much behind the screen, some real incentive in their choice and in what they have done.
For, if told to do something important, one is terribly afraid and would give anything in the world if one had not to do it.
Now, the dream says to this man, you are without a God, you have dropped out of the Church and there is no God; the only thing divine is your honest attempt at this psychological business.
I don't mean that analytical psychology is in any way divine, but it is the only way that he can make; it is his boat, his water, his sail,
everything, and it is of miserable human make.
There is no divine revelation in it but the fact is that he cannot leave it.
There was once a time when I said to him, "You are not forced to do this kind of analysis, you can do what you please.
It is an interesting intellectual game for you, and I admit it need not be anything more.
And now, if you want to know how much the thing is worth to you, just give it up." I always say that to my patients as if it were a matter
of belief.
If you do not need clothes, give them up, go about naked, and if you feel better, so much to the good.
But he can't give up analysis.
Later on he will say that he clung to it with tremendous energy, made himself do it every day; yet in reality he could not give it up.
There is the power, there is the mana, and it is wise to see it.
That is why the dream speaks in such a way.
It is extraordinary that these dreams look so simple and yet we have to talk for hours to find out what they really mean.
It is so simple to say that the Trinity comes down and a child is born, and yet it makes a, tremendous transformation in his whole system that he inadvertently gets into a divine presence.
He is suddenly confronted with that tremendous factor, and how does it appear to him? As a little child.
Those of you who were in a former seminar will remember Meister Eckhart's beautiful story of the dream of Brother Eustachius, a monk of a Paris order, about the little naked boy whom he had to feed with bread, and no bread was good enough, and only afterwards he discovered that this little boy who had been with him was the Lord himself.
So my dreamer had not the faintest idea that his honest attempt, that little boy, was the God to come.
Mr. Schmitz: Would you say that the divine in analysis might be the method of removing resistances against this honest attempt?
Dr. Jung: Yes, one could say that. For most people's attempt is not honest, it is an illusion.
They make heroic attempts to escape the real attempt, because that is the thing of which people are most afraid. The honest attempt is the worst danger.
Mr. Schmitz: Why danger?
Dr. Jung: Oh, danger because one is afraid of it.
lt is a risk, one dies by living.
There was a French soldier who was a very fine man, I mean a real man, and his principle was that he always followed his fear; wherever he was afraid, there he would go because he felt it to be his duty.
Not foolishly, like climbing a chimney; one doesn't do that-it is too foolish.
He was an officer in some garrison in France, and he met there a man who had been in the Foreign Legion on the border between Algeria and Morocco, who told him all kinds of terrible things about it, quite gruesome details, and this officer said to himself, you are afraid!-so he went into that African army.
Later on, travelling on leave in the South of France, he visited a Trappist monastery.
He knew nothing about that order, nothing about the rules of the monks, he only knew that they did not speak, that they only lived in order to die.
Suddenly it struck him as a most fearful thing to do, it got him, and he said to himself: These fellows do it, go and be a Trappist.
So he went; and as a Trappist he again had an experience.
He heard of certain Trappist monks who had gone alone to Morocco to do missionary work among those tribes, and that some of them had been cruelly murdered.
Again he felt fear, so he became a missionary and went to Morocco, and he was murdered. That was the end of it.
There was a man who obviously had found out that, for him, following the fear was the honest attempt.
I don't know how to value such a life, I have no means of knowing if it was wonderful or beautiful.
I only tell you the story to show you how that man followed the thing he was afraid of.
Whether that was right for him is not to be judged by us.
I suppose if I had seen that man, if he had come for analysis, it is just possible that that might have turned out to be his life.
I have seen many cases where people said: Do you really think that I have to go through this or that?
I say: I don't know, we must find out.
Mr. Schmitz: In a female dreamer, would the symbol be a girl, or also a boy? Women very often dream of little girls.
Dr. Jung: That is a specific problem, and here it is a universal problem, because this man has really a philosophical mind.
I have explained before that his wife doesn't think at all; therefore one could say that her mind is in the depths of the cosmos, and he gets that from her. It is just that which is so interesting, that it is his wife who brings forth his honest attempt, the triplets. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 603-620
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