Miguel Serrano: I went to Montagnola to see Hermann Hesse, and upon my return I decided that I should try to see Dr. Jung again.

May 5, 1959: Second Interview On the following day, I went to Montagnola to see Hermann Hesse, and upon my return I decided that I should try to see Dr. Jung again.

I rang him up at his house in Küsnacht which is near Zürich, because I knew that by that time he had returned from his holidays.

There was a certain risk in that telephone call, because I knew that Dr. Jung was receiving no visitors; but if I had not made it, my relationship with Jung would undoubtedly have ceased.

His secretary, Aniela Jaffé, with whom I had corresponded from India, answered the phone.

She was very doubtful about my request and insisted that Professor Jung was receiving no one and that he was not in good health.

I then told her that I had been with him in Locarno and pleaded with her to ask whether I might come.

Mrs. Jaffé put down the phone, and a few moments later returned to tell me that Jung would receive me at four o’clock that very afternoon. I left immediately and arrived in time at his house in Küsnacht.

Over the doorway of his house was written an inscription in Latin: Vocatus adque non vocatus, Deus aderit. [Called or not called, God is present.]

The inside of the house seemed dark and shadowy.

I was greeted by the same woman I had seen with Jung in Locarno, and she introduced herself as Miss Bailey.

She asked me to go up, and as I climbed the stairs, I noticed that the walls were covered with ancient drawings of medieval and Renaissance scenes.

I then waited in a little room upstairs.

In due course, Dr. Jung appeared and greeted me cordially, asking me to go into his study, which had a window overlooking the lake.

In the center of the room was a desk covered with papers, and round about were many bookcases.

I noticed some bronze Buddhas and over his work table a large scroll showing Siva on top of Mount Kailas.

That painting forcibly reminded me of the many pilgrimages which I myself had taken into the Himalayas.

We sat down beside the window, and Dr. Jung made himself comfortable in a large armchair opposite me.

‘Your story about the Queen of Sheba is more like a poem than an ordinary tale,’ he said.

‘The affair of the King and the Queen of Sheba seems to contain everything; it has a truly noumenal quality.’

I listened quietly, and he continued: ‘But if you should ever meet the Queen of Sheba in the flesh, beware of marrying her. The Queen of Sheba is only for a magic kind of love, never for matrimony.

If you were to marry her, you would both be destroyed and your soul would disintegrate.’

‘I know,’ I answered.

‘In my long psychiatric experience I never came across a marriage that was entirely self-sufficient. Once I thought I had, because a German professor assured me that his was. I believed him until once, when I was visiting in Berlin, I discovered that his wife kept a secret apartment.

That seems to be the role.

Moreover, a marriage which is devoted entirely to mutual understanding is bad for the development of individual personality; it is a descent to the lowest common denominator, which is something like the collective stupidity of the masses.

Inevitably, one or the other will begin to penetrate the mysteries. Look, it’s like this.…’

Jung then picked up a box of matches and opened it. He separated the two halves and placed them on a table so that at a distance they looked the same.

He then brought them together until the drawer of the box entered the shell. ‘That’s how it is,’ he said; ‘the two halves appear equal, but in fact they are not.

Nor should they be, since one should always be able to include the other or, if you like, remain outside of the other. Ideally, the man should contain the woman and remain outside of her.

But it’s a question of degree, and the homosexual is fifty-five per cent feminine.

Basically speaking, however, man is polygamous.

The people of the Mussulman Empire knew that very well. Nevertheless, marrying several women at the same time is a primitive solution, and would be rather expensive today.’

Jung then laughed before continuing: ‘I think that the French have found the solution in the Number Three. Frequently this number occurs in magic marriages such as your encounter with the Queen of Sheba.

It is something quite different from Freud’s sexual interpretations or from D. H. Lawrence’s ideas.

Freud was wrong, for example, in his interpretation of incest which, in Egypt, was primarily religious and had to do with the process of individuation.

In reality, the King was the individual, and the people were merely an amorphous mass.

Thus the King had to marry his mother or his sister in order to protect and preserve individuality in the country.

Lawrence exaggerated the importance of sex because he was excessively influenced by his mother; he overemphasized women because he was still a child and was unable to integrate himself in the world.

People like him frequently suffer from respiratory illnesses which are primarily adolescent.

Another curious case is that of Saint-Exupéry: from his wife I learned many important details about him.

Flight, you see, is really an act of evasion, an attempt to escape from the earth. But the earth must be accepted and admitted, perhaps even sublimated.

That is frequently illustrated in myth and religion.

The dogma of the Ascension of Mary is in fact an acceptance of matter; indeed it is a sanctification of matter.

If you were to analyze dreams, you would understand this better.

But you can see it also in alchemy.

It’s a pity we have no alchemical texts written by women, for then we would know something essential about the visions of women, which are undoubtedly different from those of men.’

I then asked Dr. Jung whether he thought it was wise to analyze one’s own dreams and to pay attention to them.

I told him that I had begun to analyze my own again and that I’d found my vitality increasing, as though I were making use of some hidden sources of energy which otherwise would have been lost.

‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘I have talked with Krishnamurti, in India, and he told me that dreams have no real importance, and that the only important thing is to look, to be conscious and totally aware of the moment.

He told me that he never dreams.

He said that because he looks with both his conscious and unconscious mind, he has nothing left over for dreams, and that when he sleeps he gains complete rest.’

‘Yes, that is possible for a time,’ said Jung. ‘Some scientists have told me that when they were concentrating with all their attention on a particular problem, they no longer dreamed.

And then, for some unexplained reason, they began to dream again.

But to return to your question about the importance of analyzing your own dreams, it seems to me that the only important thing is to follow Nature.

A tiger should be a good tiger; a tree, a good tree.

So man should be man.

But to know what man is, one must follow Nature and go on alone, admitting the importance of the unexpected.

Still, nothing is possible without love, not even the processes of alchemy, for love puts one in a mood to risk everything and not to withhold important elements.’

Jung then rose and took a volume from the bookcase.

It was his own Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, and he opened it to a chapter called ‘Study of a Process of Individuation.’

He showed me the extraordinary colored plates that are reproduced there, some of Tibetan tankas.

‘These were made,’ he said, ‘by a woman with whom we planned a process of individuation for almost ten years. She was an American and had a Scandinavian mother.’

He pointed to one picture done in bright colors.

In the center was a flower, rather like a four-leaf clover, and above it were drawn a king and queen who were taking part in a mystic wedding, holding fire in their hands.

There were towers in the background.

‘The process of the mystic wedding involves various stages,’ Jung explained, ‘and is open to innumerable risks, like the Opus Alquimia. For this union is in reality a process of mutual individuation which occurs, in cases like this, in both the doctor and the patient.’

As he spoke of this magic love and alchemic wedding, I thought of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Christ and his Church, and of Siva and Parvati on the summit of Mount Kailas –all symbols of man and his soul and of the creation of the Androgynous.

Jung went on as though he were talking to himself: ‘Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean five thousand years ago.… Such is Love, the Mystic Flower of the Soul. This is the center, the Self.…’ Jung spoke as though he were in a trance. ‘Nobody understands what I mean,’ he said. ‘Only a poet could begin to understand.…’

‘You are a poet,’ I said, moved by what I had heard. ‘And that woman, is she still alive?’ I asked. ‘She died eight years ago.… I am very old.…’ I then realized that the interview should end.

I had brought Hermann Hesse’s book, Piktor’s Metamorphosis. I showed him the drawings and gave him greetings from Steppenwolf.

‘I met Hesse through a mutual friend who was interested in myths and symbols,’ said Jung. ‘His friend worked with me for a while, but he was unable to follow through to the end. The path is very difficult.…’

It was late when I left Jung’s house, and as I walked down towards the lake, I thought of our conversation and tried to put my feelings in order.
~Carl Jung, Jung and Hesse: A Diary of Two Friendships, Page 75

Carl Jung: My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says "No" to it.

To Miguel Serrano

Dear Sir, 14 September 1960
Your letter of May 7th, 1 960, is so vast that I don't know where to begin answering it.

The way towards a solution of our contemporary problems I seem to propose is in reality the process I have been
forced into as a modern individual confronted with the social, moral, intellectual, and religious insufficiencies of our time I recognize the fact that I can give only one answer, namely mine, which is certainly not valid universally, but may be sufficient for a restricted number of contemporary individuals inasmuch as my main tenet contains
nothing more than: Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e., the true expression of your individuality.

As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself.

He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare and from whom he is able to discriminate himself.

If somebody in supreme egoism should withdraw to the solitude of Mt. Everest, he would discover a good deal
about the amenities of his lofty abode but as good as nothing about himself, i.e., nothing he could not have known before.

Man in general is in such a situation in so far as he is an animal gifted with self-reflection but without the possibility of comparing himself to another species of animal equally equipped with consciousness.

He is a top animal exiled on a tiny speck of planet in the Milky Way.

That is the reason why he does not know himself; he is cosmically isolated.

He can only state with certainty that he is no monkey, no bird, no fish, and no tree.

But what he positively is, remains obscure. Mankind today is dreaming of interstellar communications.

Could we contact the population of another star, we might find a means to learn something essential about ourselves.

Incidentally we are just living in a time when homo homini lupus threatens to become
an awful reality, and when we are in dire need to know beyond ourselves.
.
The science fiction about travelling to the moon or to Venus and Mars and the lore about Flying Saucers are effects of our dimly felt but none the less intense need to reach a new physical as well as spiritual basis beyond our actual conscious world.

Philosophers and psychologists of the XIXth and XXth centuries have tried to provide a terra nova in ourselves, that is, the unconscious.

This is indeed a discovery which could give us a new orientation in many respects .

Whereas our fictions about Martians and Venusians are based upon nothing but mere speculations, the unconscious is within the reach of human experience.

It is almost tangible and thus more or less familiar to us, but on the other hand a strange existence difficult to understand.

If we may assume that what I call archetypes is a verifiable hypothesis, then we are confronted with autonomous
animalia gifted with a sort of consciousness and psychic life of their own, which we can observe, at least partially, not only in living men but also in the historic course of many centuries .

Whether we call them gods, demons, or illusions, they exist and function and are born anew with every generation.

They have an enormous influence on individual as well as collective life, and despite their familiarity they are curiously non-human.

This latter characteristic is the reason why they were called gods and demons in the past and why they are understood in our "scientific" age as the psychic manifestations of the instincts, inasmuch as they represent habitual and universally occurring attitudes and thought-forms.

They are basic forms, but not the manifest, personified, or otherwise concretized images.

They have a high degree of autonomy, which does not disappear when the manifest images change.

When f.i. the belief in the god Wotan vanishes and nobody thinks of him any more, the phenomenon, called Wotan originally, remains; nothing changes but its name, as National Socialism has demonstrated on a grand scale.

A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in reality never died but has retained his original vitality and autonomy.

Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force.

This condition is a situation in which a new orientation and adaptation are needed.

If this question is not clearly understood and no proper answer given, the archetype which expresses this situation steps in and brings back the reaction which has always characterized such times, in this case Wotan.

As only certain individuals are capable of listening and of accepting good advice, it is most unlikely that anybody would pay
attention to the statement of a warning voice that Wotan is here again.

They would rather fall headlong into the trap.

As we have largely lost our gods and the actual condition of our religion does not offer an efficacious answer to the world situation in general and to the "religion" of Communism in particular, we are very much in the same predicament as the pre-National-Socialistic Germany of the twenties, i.e., we are apt to undergo the risk of a further but this time worldwide Wotanistic experiment.

This means mental epidemics and war.

One does not realize yet that when an archetype is unconsciously constellated and not consciously understood, one is possessed by it and forced to its fatal goal.

Wotan then represents and formulates our ultimate principle of behaviour, but this obviously does not solve our problem.

The fact that an archaic god formulates and expresses the dominant of our behaviour means that we ought to find a new religious attitude, a new realization of our dependence upon superior dominants.

I don't know how this could be possible without a renewed self-understanding of man, which unavoidably has to begin with the individual.

We have the means to compare man with other psychic animalia and to give him a new setting which throws an objective
light upon his existence, namely as a being operated and manoeuvred by archetypal forces instead of his "free will," that is, his arbitrary egoism and his limited consciousness.

He should l earn that he is not the master in his own house and that he should carefully study the other side of his psychic world which seems to be the true ruler of his fate.

I know this is merely a "pious wish" the fulfillment of which demands centuries, but in each aeon there are at least a few individuals who understand what man's real task consists of, and keep its tradition for future generations and a time when insight has reached a deeper and more general level.

First the way of a few will be changed and in a few generations there will be more.

It is most unlikely that the general mind in this or even in the next generation will undergo a noticeable change, as at present man seems to be quite incapable of realizing that under a certain aspect he is a stranger to himself.

But whoever is capable of such insight, no matter how isolated he is, be aware of the law of synchronicity.

As the old Chinese saying goes: "The right man sitting in his house and thinking the right thought will be heard a 100 miles away."

Neither propaganda nor exhibitionist confessions are needed.

If the archetype, which is universal, i.e., identical with itself always and anywhere, is properly dealt with in one place only, it is influenced as a whole, i.e., simultaneously and everywhere.

Thus an old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: "No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."

It seems to me that nothing essential h a s ever been lost, because its matrix is ever-present within us and from this it can and will be reproduced if needed.

But only those can recover it who have learned the art of averting their eyes from the blinding light of current opinions,
and close their ears to the noise of ephemeral slogans.

You rightly say with Multatuli, the Dutch philosopher: "Nothing is quite true" and should add with him : "And even this is not quite true."

The intellect can make its profound statement that there is no absolute Truth.

But if somebody loses his money, his money is lost and this is as good as an absolute Truth, which means that he will
not be consoled by intellectual profundity.

There is a thing like convincing Truth but we have lost sight of it, owing the loss mostly to our gambling intellect, to which we sacrifice our moral certainty and gain thereby nothing but an inferiority-complex, which-by the way-characterizes Western politics.

To be is to do and to make.

But as our existence does not depend solely upon our ego-will, so our doing and making depend largely upon the dominants of the unconscious.

I am not only willing out of my ego, but I am also made to be creative and active, and to be quiet is only good for someone who has been too-or perversely-active.

Otherwise it is an unnatural artifice which unnecessarily interferes with our nature.

We grow up, we blossom and we wilt, and death is ultimate quietude-or so it seems.

But much depends upon the spirit, i.e., the meaning or significance, in which we do and make or-in another word-live.

This spirit expresses itself or manifests itself in a Truth, which is indubitably and absolutely convincing to the whole of my being in spite of the fact that the intellect in its endless ramblings will continue forever with its "But, ifs," which however
should not be suppressed but rather welcomed as occasions to improve the Truth.

You have chosen two good representatives of East and West.

Krishnamurti is all irrational, leaving solutions to quietude, i.e., to themselves as a part of Mother Nature.

Toynbee on the other hand believes in making and moulding opinions.

Neither believes in the blossoming and unfolding of the individual as the experimental, doubtful and bewildering work of the living God, to whom we have to lend our eyes and ears and our discriminating mind, to which end they were incubated for millions of years and brought to light about 6ooo years ago, viz . at the moment when the historical continuity of consciousness became visible through the invention of script.

We are sorely in need of a Truth or a self-understanding similar to that of Ancient Egypt, which I have found still living with the Taos Pueblos.

Their chief of ceremonies, old Ochwiah Biano (Mountain Lake) said to me : "We are the people who live on the roof of
the world, we are the sons of the Sun, who is our father.

We help him daily to rise and to cross over the sky.

We do this not only for ourselves, but for the Americans also.

Therefore they should not interfere with our religion.

But if they continue to do so [by missionaries J and hinder us, then they will see that in ten years the Sun will rise no more."

He correctly assumes that their day, their light, their consciousness, and their meaning will die when destroyed by the narrow-mindedness of American rationalism, and the same will happen to the whole world when subjected to such treatment.

That is the reason why I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to, and since I have reached my highest point I can't transcend any more, I am guarding my light and my treasure, convinced that nobody would gain and I myself would be badly, even hopelessly injured, if I should lose it.

It is most precious not only to me, but above all to the darkness of the creator, who needs man to illuminate His creation.

If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless machine and man's existence a useless freak.

My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says "No" to it.

Sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 592-597

Carl Jung on Toni Wolff

Jung went on as if talking to himself,

"Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island
Somewhere in the ocean five thousand years ago.. . . Such is Love, the Mys􀢢c Flower of the Soul.

This is the Center, the Self. . . ."

Jung spoke as if in a trance.

"Nobody understands what I mean" he said, "only a poet could begin to understand.". . .

"You are a poet," I said, moved by what I had heard.

"And that woman, is she s􀢢ll alive?" I asked.

"She died eight years ago. . . . I am very old. Miguel Serrano, Two Friendships, Pages 60-61.