CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

LECTURE 4
at least it would be thought that we were holding a revival meeting. So if
we are wise and live in reality, when we want to describe something we
always begin with everyday banal events, and with the practical and concrete.
In a word, we begin with the sthÖla aspect. To us the things that are
real beyond question are our professions, the places where we live, our
bank accounts, our families and our social connections. We are forced to
take these realities as our premises if we want to live at all. Without personal
life, without the here and now, we cannot attain to the suprapersonal.
Personal life must first be fulfilled in order that the process of the
suprapersonal side of the psyche can be introduced.
What is suprapersonal in us is shown us again and again in the visions
of our seminar: it is an event outside of the ego and of consciousness. In
the fantasies of our patient we are always dealing with symbols and experiences
which have nothing to do with her as Mrs. So-and-So but which
arise from the collective human soul in her and which are therefore collective
contents. In analysis the suprapersonal process can begin only
when all the personal life has been assimilated to consciousness. In this
way psychology opens up a standpoint and types of experience that lie
beyond ego consciousness. (The same thing happens in tantric philosophy,
but with this difference: there the ego plays no role at all.) This
standpoint and this experience answer the question as to how we can free
ourselves from the overwhelming realities of the world, that is, how to
disentangle our consciousness from the world. You remember, for example,
the symbol of water and fire, a picture in which the patient stood in
flames. 5 That represents the diving down into the unconscious, into the
baptismal font of svvdhiü°hvna, and the suffering of the fire of maõipÖra.
We now understand that the diving into the water and the enduring of
the flames is not a descent, not a fall into the lower levels, but an ascent.
It is a development beyond the conscious ego, an experience of the personal
way into the suprapersonal—a widening of the psychic horizons of
the individual so as to include what is common to all mankind. When we
assimilate the collective unconscious we are not dissolving but creating it.
Only after having reached this standpoint—only after having touched
the baptismal waters of svvdhiü°hvna—can we realize that our conscious
culture, despite all its heights, is still in mÖlvdhvra. We may have reached
vjñv in our personal consciousness, our race in general can still be in
anvhata, but that is all on the personal side still—it is still the sthÖla aspect,
because it is valid only for our consciousness. And as long as the ego
is identified with consciousness, it is caught up in this world, the world of
5 [Note to the 1932 edition: English seminar print no. 27.] Jung had commented on this
image earlier that day (The Visions Seminar vol. 7, 11).
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