CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

2 NOVEMBER 1932
material thrown together, which we, as the expression shows, take as a
whole. We could translate the word symbol as “something viewed as a totality,”
or as “the vision of things brought into a whole.” We must always have
recourse to a symbol when we are dealing with a great variety of aspects or
with a multiplicity of things which form a connected unit and which are so
closely woven together in all their separate parts that we cannot separate
or take away any parts without destroying the connections and losing the
meaning of the totality. Modern philosophy has formulated this way of
looking at things under what is known as Gestalt theory. 2 A symbol, then,
is a living Gestalt, or form—the sum total of a highly complex set of facts
which our intellect cannot master conceptually, and which therefore cannot
be expressed in any way other than by the use of an image.
Take, for example, the problem of knowledge, which has presented
difficulties so great and so manifold as to occupy thinkers from the time
when philosophy first developed down to the present moment. Plato, for
instance, never got as far as formulating an adequate theory of the problem
of knowledge; he could not go beyond the image of the cave, and
had to describe the problem in terms of a vision or concrete image. Two
thousand years had to pass before Kant could formulate a theory of
knowledge.
So, too, the cakras are symbols. They symbolize highly complex psychic
facts which at the present moment we could not possibly express
except in images. The cakras are therefore of great value to us because
they represent a real effort to give a symbolic theory of the psyche. The
psyche is something so highly complicated, so vast in extent, and so rich
in elements unknown to us, and its aspects overlap and interweave with
one another in such an amazing degree, that we always turn to symbols
in order to try to represent what we know about it. Any theory about it
would be premature because it would become entangled in particularities
and would lose sight of the totality we set out to envisage.
You have seen from my attempt at an analysis of the cakras how difficult
it is to reach their content, and with what complex conditions we
have to deal when we are studying not just consciousness but the totality
of the psyche. The cakras, then, become a valuable guide for us in this
obscure field because the East, and India especially, has always tried to
understand the psyche as a whole. It has an intuition of the self, and
therefore it sees the ego and consciousness as only more or less unessential
parts of the self. All this seems very strange to us: it appears to us as
though India were fascinated by the background of consciousness, because
we ourselves are entirely identified with our foreground, with the
2 See Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York, 1935).
61