CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

LECTURE 4
conscious. But now, among us, too, the background, or hinterland, of
the psyche has come to life, and since it is so obscure and so difficult to
access, we are at first forced to represent it symbolically. Thus, for example,
there comes to our notice the paradoxical situation in which mÖlvdhvra
is localized in the pelvis and at the same time represents our world,
and this paradox can be expressed only by a symbol. It is the same with
the apparent contradiction contained in the fact that we think of consciousness
as located in our heads, and nonetheless we live in the lowest
cakra, in mÖlvdhvra.
As we have seen in the first English seminar of this autumn, mÖlvdhvra
is the symbol of our present psychic situation, because we live entangled
in earthly causalities. 3 It represents the entanglement and dependence
of our conscious life as it actually is. mÖlvdhvra is not just the outer world
as we live in it; it is our total consciousness of all outer and inner personal
experiences. In our conscious life of everyday we are like highly developed
animals, tied down by our environment and entangled and conditioned
by it. But our Western consciousness does not look at it this way
at all. In our world, on the contrary, we are living in the upper centers.
Our consciousness is localized in the head; we feel it to be there; we
think and will in our heads. We are the lords of nature, and we have
command over the environmental conditions and the blind laws that
bind primitive man hand and foot. In our consciousness we sit enthroned
on high and look down upon nature and animals. To us archaic
man is Neanderthal man, little better than an animal. We do not see in
the very least that God appears as an animal also. To us animal means
“bestial.” What should really seem above us seems to be below us and is
taken as something regressive and degraded. Therefore we “go down
into” svvdhiü°hvna or “fall into” the emotionality of maõipÖra. Because we
are identified with the consciousness we talk about the subconscious.
When we go into the unconscious we descend to a lower level. Therefore
we can say that humanity in general has reached the level of the anvhata
cakra insofar as it feels itself bound by the suprapersonal values of
anvhata. All culture creates suprapersonal values. A thinker whose ideas
show an activity that is independent of the events of daily life could say
that he is in the viçuddha, or almost in the vjñv center.
But all that is only the sthÖla aspect of the problem. The sthÖla aspect
is the personal aspect. To us personally, it seems as if we were in the
higher centers. We think that because our consciousness and the collective
suprapersonal culture in which we live are in the anvhata center, we
3 The seminar on visions had resumed earlier the same day. For Jung’s comments on
mulvdhvra, see The Visions Seminar vol. 7, 10.
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