CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

LECTURE 3
not yourself—a being in which you are contained, which is greater and
more important than you but which has an entirely psychical existence.
You see, we could finish here; we could say that about covers the
growth of humanity. As we are all convinced that psychical things have a
certain weight, mankind as a whole has about reached anvhata. For instance,
the great war has taught practically everybody that the things that
have the greatest weight are the imponderabilia, the things you cannot
possibly weigh, like public opinion or psychical infection. The whole war
was a psychical phenomenon. If you are looking for the causal root of it,
it could not possibly be explained as arising out of the reason of man or
out of economic necessity. One could say that Germany needed a
greater expansion and had to go to war, or that France felt threatened
and had to crush Germany. But nobody was threatened—everybody had
enough money, the German exports were increasing from year to year,
Germany had all the expansion she needed. All the economic reasons
you mention are no good at all; they don’t explain that phenomenon. It
was simply the time when that thing had to happen from unknown psychical
reasons. Any great movement of man has always started from psychical
reasons; so it is our experience that has taught us to believe in the
psychical. Therefore we are rightly afraid of mob psychology, for instance.
Every man of today will take that into account. And formerly man
did not believe in the value of advertising; now look what is done with
it! Or would anybody have believed that the little sheets which appeared
every fortnight—gazettes, which we now call newspapers—would be
a world power? The press is recognized as a world power today; it is a
psychical fact.
So we can say that our civilization has reached the state of anvhata—we
have overcome the diaphragm. We no longer locate the mind in the diaphragm,
as the Old Greeks did in Homeric times. We are convinced that
the seat of consciousness must be somewhere up in the head. We already
have a more farsighted view in anvhata; we become aware of the puruüa.
But we do not yet trust the security of psychical existence, so we have not
reached viçuddha. We still believe in a material world built of matter and
psychical force. And we cannot connect the psychical existence or substance
with the idea of anything cosmic or physical. We have not yet
found the bridge between the ideas of physics and psychology. 4
Therefore collectively we have not crossed the distance between
4 Jung attempted such a bridge in his collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli in
The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (Bollingen Series LI, 1955). On this issue, see especially
Wolfgang Pauli und C. G. Jung: Ein Briefwechsel 1932–1958, edited by C. A. Meier (Berlin,
1992).
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