CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

APPENDIX 3
at all. So real life is very irregular, and many things live which should not
live—monasteries, nunneries—they all live, and quite productively,
though it is against the bourgeois rationalism of the nineteenth century.
And so that impersonal kind of experience, where you can experience
as if you were not yourself, as if you were a stage thing, is the intrinsic
element in all mystery plays, and that condition is artificially brought
about. I have often told you of the Mithraic mysteries, in which, in the
initiations, people were changed into milites, the soldiers of the god, and
lions, and the heliodromoi, the sun runners of the god. 6 These were simply
different stages of impersonal experience. For instance, a Roman innkeeper
who has been made a milxs is afterward not that alone. Of course
not—he is what he always has been, but he has experienced himself on
a higher level that was not identical with the three-dimensional world: an
impersonal level where he was allowed to look out the window into another
dimensional way, onto psychical reality.
The proof of that idea is that it works automatically—it drops upon us
like the fires of Sodom and Gomorrah and can destroy our lives, even.
You think you are quite all right and that the world is all right, and suddenly
you cannot cross the street any longer because you have agoraphobia.
You cannot have invented it, it simply takes you by the neck. And
who does it? We say it is merely a disease, but that is only a word. You can
just as well say that it is an evil spirit causing the fear. That is an example
of the autonomy of the psychic world, and the proof that such things can
live there. Therefore I advise all people who have such a neurosis: go
into it now, live it, and then you have it in your hands and it has not got
you any longer.
Now, the Kundalini yoga is a symbolic formulation of the impersonal
experience in the Eastern way. It would cause us a great deal of trouble
to understand in our Western way what the East tries to convey to us
through its symbolism. Professor Hauer would surely be the last to encourage
us in taking these things literally. It is only living when one understands
it in the Western way, where it is less simple and also less involved.
When you are not clear about things, you always say they are very
simple. The simplest people in the world are really the great world confusers.
These things are by no means simple, but it is as well if you have
some straight psychological analogy that will help you to see the connection
between the Eastern and the Western experience.
Miss Hannah: The Eastern way seems a trifle dogmatic.
Dr. Jung: Think of the thousands of years, the thousands of individuals,
6 Cf. Jung, Analytical Psychology, 98–99.
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