On November 22, 1955, I visited Dr. Jung at his home in Kusnacht.
Though I had met Jung and had listened to him speak, I looked forward to having a period with him alone.
When I came to Zurich in 1951 to study at the C. G. Jung Institute, Jung no longer lectured students, but he did grant some personal interviews.
I had in mind as I walked down the Seestrasse to his home to discuss with him a dream which I had had.
This was precious time allotted me and I wanted to waste no part of it.
I entered the house and sat awhile in a small room at the top of the stairs, waiting for Jung to invite me to his library.
It was at this time his wife Emma was very ill and Dr. Jung went first to see her, then took me to his study.
He put my coat on a rack near the doorway.
We sat at a window overlooking the Zurichsee.
Tapestries and books filled the background as Jung leaned back in his chair and looked at me thoughtfully.
I was the first Australian to come to the C. G. Jung Institute and I was probably the first to visit him, for he said, after we had spoken about his birthday celebrations at which I had taken a photo of him which he liked, "Coming from Australia as you do, should you not have some sort of accent as the Americans do?"
I told him then a yarn about the much maligned Australian accent and he laughed heartily.
Another time he spoke of Australia as Ultima Thule.
Then came the time for a more serious talk and Jung asked me if there was something I wanted to ask of him.
All thoughts of dreams left me and my question surprised me, appearing, as it seemed, of its own accord. "What," I said, "is the difference between me and that table?''
In the company of the great man it seemed as if I was aware on a different level of the oneness of all things.
Perhaps I was experiencing something grasped intellectually before.
Perhaps like the French writer Colette who, when she saw Walt Disney's Living Desert
said, "We are one creature."
Jung, however, leaned forward and tapped the table with his middle finger and said "We are of the same substance as that table.
Our discrimination, the 'I' awareness is the difference.
The difference is the consciousness God has spent millions of years to bring about.
Look how He experimented with the dinosaurus, for instance, after it came from the sea and had to develop a brain.
"Development continued. Primitive man, the anthropoid from which we sprang gradually acquired consciousness, though real consciousness, as we know it, commenced with the beginning of written history.
For all that, only a handful are conscious today.
Even people like Einstein did not believe the Creator played a game of chance, but that is exactly how it all happened-growth.
"Consciousness itself is a growing thing.
However conscious we seem, our abysmal unconsciousness is alarming.
Every day I know I am unconscious.
I see in people that which is not there-or the other way round.
It is a duty to withdraw and question ourselves.
It is a duty to say to ourselves, 'That is a table and how much of it do I perceive?
Do I perceive it wholly?'
Of people we have to say, 'This is a human being, how much do I see?'
And the same with our psyche-stand off and be critical of its contents.
It is only from our realizing unconsciousness that consciousness expands.
It gives meaning to life to know that everything added to consciousness is a step forward of the creator.
This is our human work.
I am not afraid of communism; I am afraid of unconsciousness and of modern science.
I am afraid of America which educates its children away from being individuals into being mass-educated people.
These are the Marxists without knowing it.
Russia is masculine and America feminine.
They are natural opposites.
With their so-called science, America plays into the hands of Marxism.
"You see, that is our real problem-the collective shadow.
The atom bomb is in the hands of unconscious people.
It is like giving a baby a kilo of gelignite, it eventually blows itself up.
"There is no science.
There is no cause.
There is a growing something in which the Creator seeks to become conscious.
If the Creator had had a causal idea,
He would have made man for this and animal for that in a certain way, and in their completeness, and things would have been sterile.
Nothing could have happened, life would have had no meaning.
It is the fact that consciousness grows which gives life its meaning.
When you rely on modern science, on cause and effect, and you take away individuality, you take God out of the world, that is the anti-Christ.
Take a riverbed, for instance, mark off a square of it after stopping the flow of the water, and then measure the stones.
Science will say this riverbed has stones of three inches in diameter.
Then the water flows over again, but some day there comes along someone who sees a boulder or a grain of sand and it does away with the whole concept.
Tell a modern scientist that his proposition is only so far true, and he laughs.
He says the boulder and the grain of sand are the exceptions, but just therein is the point.
There is not a rule.
"The Creator never meant it like that.
Somewhere evil has got in and put things into 'cause' and into 'science.'
But what scientists miss is that they themselves observe and we are so unconscious that what appears real we find is not as we thought.
That is why I say, 'Be conscious.'
That is the thing than can, if only sufficient are conscious, save us from sterility and this threat of complete destruction.
Destruction would be a pity.
Life is worth living.
Today's world has taken millions of years for its achievements and there is happiness and interest in living.
We have children and grandchildren and even if we don't believe in immortality for ourselves, we can believe in the right to live of future people.
This is today's calamity-the collective shadow, the general unconsciousness while those who are conscious are like a handful of salt in all this.
There are people who believe that the few who are conscious can hold the world against annihilation,but I am afraid of the terrific power of general unconsciousness.
People say to me: Alchemy is very interesting, but you give no proof.
Why the whole book is a proof!
It has been thought!
It is an example!
Thoughts are real, they are the consciousness.
People can't see that.
Einstein could not.
Take your realization into your daily life.
Test it and every test widens it.
That is indeed your contribution to this overwhelming unconsciousness we see all around us.
We can only hope it is the little leaven.
"It is said that the shadow is my [Jung's] concept.
I did not make the shadow, it is a fact. Man has a shadow, this is not a concept.
Nor are the archetypes concepts, they are facts which we can prove.
They have nothing to do with me, they were already there.
Once I met a normal man.
He had a home, a family, a practice.
He was interested in hypnosis and came to me for analysis.
Then to my horror he had a latent psychosis, which broke out immediately the unconscious was touched. I tell you I was scared.
I got him right in three weeks.
Then I said to that man: Now you have learned a lot, and you'd better leave it alone.
And he went back and has not touched psychology since.
What I fear greatly and suspect greatly is normality.
That is something people are trained to.
It is like a tight lid.
That is why I am afraid of the psychologists of today who have the idea of universal validity.
That which is paradoxical is sent underground, so they attempt a normality which is sterile.
People must know they are in conflict.
They must be able to carry the conflict.
That is consciousness.
They must stand between that which is in opposition.
You see I cannot sit on any stool.
The theologians think I attack God and the scientists think me unscientific.
I have no theory.
A theory kills and stultifies.
One has to look at things as they come.
Now let us look again at that table.
How conscious is one of it?
If you commence to begin to realize you are overwhelmed by your unconsciousness.
Do you know the pattern on the other side?
Do you know all of that table-the tree, the thoughts of workers (for it is also man's thoughts), the hopes, the aims etc.
Do you begin to know?
One has to say: When I hear, do I hear? When I see, do I see? When I touch, how much do I feel?
IfI touch this chair, it is not the touch in itself which tells me, it has to come back to me in order that I recognize.
Only then can I send out recognition.
Consciousness is seated in the brain. (Psychoid) It is subjective.
When I was in Africa and went alone to a place where there was a valley of wild animals which no-one knew about, I suddenly thought, 'Only I know.'
It is necessary in order that they exist for someone to know.
Each of these animals is of the Creator.
Each is the same stuff as I.
And yet I had to know it. You see it was a new world.
There are so many new worlds and only an extension of consciousness brings them into existence.
That table is a world.
"In a world which demands normality people are afraid of a vision.
These days it belongs to the lunatic asylum.
The production of 'mass' men kills life and obstructs consciousness.
As I said, if God had been conscious and had created the finished article, there would have been nothing more to do, there would have been no development, and people would be just that and nothing more.
But we see it is not so, and that every time we add to our own consciousness it is the growing consciousness of the Creator.
That gives real meaning to life, makes it interesting and worthwhile.
Life is worth while and that is why I do not want to see it destroyed by great masses of unconsciousness.
"I have a book here written by a chemical scientist on alchemy.
Not once does the word 'Conjunctionis' appear.
He has seen alchemy as the basis of chemistry, but because the conjunctionis appears symbolically as male and female, sun and moon, he missed the important point-the union, the fusion of substances which is the basis of chemistry, because it was put in a way which his actual thinking could not understand and so he cast it out as dross, thereby missing the essence.
People are profoundly unconscious.
"The body, mind, world, are all one substance, but consciousness demands of us: I am this.
I am of the whole God, but not the whole.
God exists in that we are conscious.
How would I know I am a man if I saw no other man.
Separateness is consciousness, but that separateness can only come after conscious recognition of the oneness, otherwise it is participation mystique and unconsciousness."
Jung was called away at that point and I waited quite a while.
When he returned there was a change.
He told me the doctor had just called and that his dear wife would not recover.
I offered to leave but he bade me stay.
He then sat a little longer to speak.
This time he said that life has to be lived fully.
One has to live what one is, utilize one's potential.
He spoke of his wife's life and its completeness, then added, "Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end.
We are the bridge."
I did not see Jung again until the funeral of Mrs. Jung.
Through the years those last words have stayed with me.
Surely we are the bridge in so many ways.
And as Jung had pointed out, it is necessary to strengthen that bridge by our own lives.
I believe it was largely that day's talk with Jung and a dream I had later in which he held up a stick and said, "Eternity stands upright," that led to my ultimate interest in microphysics-that discipline added to Jung's concepts opened for me doorways to deep understanding, even consciousness, to knowledge that was ancient and new and meaningful beyond words. ~M.I. Rix Weaver, J.E.T., Pages 90-95
http://www.jungwa.org/rix.html
Carl Jung across the web:
Blog: http: http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/
Google+: https://plus.google.com/102529939687199578205/posts
Facebook: Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/56536297291/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=4861719&sort=recent&trk=my_groups-tile-flipgrp
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Carl-Jung-326016020781946/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/purrington104/
Red Book: https://www.facebook.com/groups/792124710867966/
Scoop.It: http://www.scoop.it/u/maxwell-purrington
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MaxwellPurringt
WordPress: https://carljungdepthpsychology.wordpress.com/
Great Sites to visit:
1. Jenna Lilla's Path of the Soul http://jennalilla.org/
2. Steve Jung-Hearted Parker's Jung Currents http://jungcurrents.com/
3. Frith Luton's Jungian Dream Analysis and Psychotherapy: http://frithluton.com/articles/
4. Lance S. Owens The Gnosis Archives http://gnosis.org/welcome.html
