CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

26 OCTOBER 1932
anvhata and viçuddha. So if one speaks of viçuddha, it is of course with a
certain hesitation. We are stepping into the slippery future right away
when we try to understand what that might mean. For in viçuddha we
reach beyond our actual conception of the world, in a way we reach the
ether region. We are trying something that would be more than Professor
Piccard achieved! 5 He was only in the stratosphere—he reached
something exceedingly thin, I admit, but it was not yet ether. So we have
to construct a sort of skyrocket of very large dimensions which shoots us
up into space. It is the world of abstract ideas and values, the world
where the psyche is in itself, where the psychical reality is the only reality,
or where matter is a thin skin around an enormous cosmos of psychical
realities, really the illusory fringe around the real existence, which is
psychical.
The concept of the atom, for instance, might be considered as corresponding
to the abstract thinking of the viçuddha center. Moreover, if
our experience should reach such a level, we would get an extraordinary
vista of the puruüa. For then the puruüa becomes really the center of
things; it is no longer a pale vision, it is the ultimate reality, as it were. You
see, that world will be reached when we succeed in finding a symbolical
bridge between the most abstract ideas of physics and the most abstract
ideas of analytical psychology. If we can construct that bridge then we
will have reached at least the outer gate of viçuddha. That is the condition.
I mean, we will then have reached it collectively; the way will then
be opened. But we are still a long distance from that goal. For viçuddha
means just what I said: a full recognition of the psychical essences or
substances as the fundamental essences of the world, and by virtue not of
speculation but of fact, namely as experience. It does not help to speculate
about vjñv and sahasrvra 6 and God knows what; you can reflect upon
those things, but you are not there if you have not had the experience.
I will give you an example of the transition from one state to another.
5 Auguste Piccard was a Swiss professor of physics at the University of Brussels. Commencing
on 27 May 1931, he ascended for the first time into the stratosphere by means of
a special balloon to make scientific observations. His second flight was from the Dübendorf
aerodrome near Zurich on 18 August 1932. See his Au dessus des nuages (Above the clouds)
(Paris, 1933) andBetween Earth and Sky, translated by C. Apcher (London, 1950).
6 Hauer stated that the sahasrvra cakra “is the thousand-spoked or the thousand-petaled
cakra” (HS, 69). Eliade noted that “it is here that the final union (unmanz)ofåiva and åakti,
the final goal of tantric svdhana, is realized, and here the kuõìalinz ends its journey after
traversing the six cakras. We should note that the sahasrvra no longer belongs to the plane
of the body, that it already designates the plane of transcendence—and this explains why
writers usually speak of the ‘six’ cakras.” In Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom,
translated by Willard R. Trask (Bollingen Series LVI; reprint, London, 1989), 243.
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