CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

LECTURE 3
through the cakras means that each time you have reached a new center
you have to return to mÖlvdhvra?
Dr. Jung: As long as you live you are in mÖlvdhvra naturally. It is quite
self-evident that you cannot always live in meditation, or in a trance condition.
You have to go about in this world; you have to be conscious and
let the gods sleep.
Mrs. Sawyer: Yes, but you could think of it in two ways: as doing all these
things together, or as making a trip up and down.
Dr. Jung: The cakra symbolism has the same meaning that is expressed
in our metaphors of the night sea-journey, or climbing a sacred mountain,
or initiation. It is really a continuous development. It is not leaping
up and down, for what you have arrived at is never lost. Say you have
been in mÖlvdhvra and then you reach the water center, and afterward
you return apparently. But you do not return; it is an illusion that you
return—you have left something of yourself in the unconscious. Nobody
touches the unconscious without leaving something of himself there.
You may forget or repress it, but then you are no longer whole. When
you have learned that two times two makes four, it will be so in all eternity—it
will never be five. Only those people return who thought they
touched it but were only full of illusions about it. If you have really experienced
it, you cannot lose this experience. It is as if so much of your
substance had remained, so much of your blood and weight. You can
return to the previous condition, forgetting that you have lost a leg, but
your leg has been bitten off by the leviathan. Many people who got into
the water say, “Never shall I go there again!” But they left something,
something has stayed there. And if you get through the water and into
the fire of passion, you never can really turn back, because you cannot
lose the connection with your passion that you have gained in maõipÖra.
Question: Is it like Wotan, who loses one eye?
Dr. Jung: Exactly. And like Osiris, the god of the underworld, who also
loses one eye. Wotan has to sacrifice his one eye to the well of Mimir, the
well of wisdom, which is the unconscious. You see, one eye will remain in
the depths or turned toward it. 11 Thus Jakob Boehme, when he was “enchanted
into the center of nature,” as he says, wrote his book about the
“reversed eye.” One of his eyes was turned inward; it kept on looking into
the underworld—which amounts to the loss of one eye. He had no
longer two eyes for this world. So when you have actually entered a
higher cakra you never really turn back; you remain there. Part of you
11 For Jung’s analysis of Wotan, in which he does not specifically deal with this motif, see
“Wotan” (1936), in CW, vol. 10.
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