CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

APPENDIX 2
image of the uprightly growing tree then placates his fear, which sees
something frightening in the unavoidable.
When the path has already been taken, however, and the conviction of
growth has been consolidated, then the Christian prejudice comes: what
grows has to grow upward. Then the image of the tree can appear with
the roots on top, showing that its growth does not go up into the sky but
downward into the depth.
There is also the tree with roots on top and at the bottom. Here it is
emphasized that one gets to roots wherever one goes. This is what someone
dreams who wishes or hopes for too much. He is being told, “Everything
around you is earth, and with the earth you are supposed to form
a union.”
Conversely, the tree can have crowns on top and at the bottom; here
everything is leaf and blossom and fruit—“heaven above, heaven below.”
Also, when the development apparently leads downward, the tree will
still bear blossoms and fruit. I could substantiate this for each of the
cases.
8 October 1932
Dr. Jung: Professor Zimmer has depicted the material as relatively simple
to us. 7 I find it highly complicated—an ocean of individual differences,
so ill defined that one cannot touch it anywhere! Individual problems
cannot be understood in uniqueness; thus one is thankful for all references,
such as Zimmer’s book Artistic Form and Yoga in the Sacred Images of
India, or the translation of the tantric texts by Avalon, which show that
there have always been people with such problems. The Indian conceptual
world was thus for me a means to clarify personal experiences.
In 1906 I found in a mentally ill patient for the first time the image of
a serpent, creeping up on her back, its head divided into a crotch. In
1909 I even gave a lecture on this case without being aware of its general
signification.
After the war a twenty-eight-year-old girl came to see me, wanting to be
cured within ten hours. She said that she had a black serpent in her belly.
She came to see me because of this serpent, for she thought that it
should be awakened. Her problem was that she was not on earth. She was
7 Zimmer had given an account of yoga practice as a process of self-transformation. Tantra
Yoga, 97–100.
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