CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

HAUER'S ENGLISH LECTURE
of tantric yoga. We are grateful to tantric yoga because it gives us the
most differentiated forms and concepts by which we are able to express
the chaotic experiences that we are actually undergoing. As Professor
Hauer rightly puts it, we are at the beginning of something, and in the
beginning things are exceedingly individual and chaotic. Only after centuries
do they begin to settle down and crystallize into certain aspects;
and then, of course, dogma inevitably follows.
Mr. Baumann: Dr. Jung mentioned yesterday receiving a mandala in a
letter from a patient in which there were fish around the center. It made
a great impression on me when she said: “I hope I may find a state where
I am like a center, with the fishes whirling around me.” 10
Dr. Jung: No, it was to find a way a center around which she could move
like those fish in harmonious order; she would not be the center. That
is our Western idea. It is a mistake to think that we are the center. We
think we are gods of our world, and therefore the tantric yoga idea that
one becomes a god is dangerous for us. We start with that prejudice. But
we are really devilish, awful things; we simply do not see ourselves from
the outside. We think we are very wonderful people, highly respectable
and moral, and so on, but in reality we are bloody pirates. What the European
thinks of himself is a lie. I learned my lesson from the Red Indian
and from the Negro. Look at our world, and you see what we are. But our
prejudice being that we are gods, when anybody dreams of a center he
quietly and instinctively puts himself in it. You remember, possibly, the
picture that I showed you last evening—the central stone and the little
jewels round it. It is perhaps interesting if I tell you about the dream in
connection with it. I was the perpetrator of that mandala at a time when
I had not the slightest idea what a mandala was, and in my extreme modesty
I thought, I am the jewel in the center, and those little lights are
surely very nice people who believe that they are also jewels, but smaller
ones. That is what we do—we are always following the example given
by Anatole France in L’Isle des Pingouins (The island of penguins). 11
St. Malo had baptized the penguins in the heavenly concilium, and when
they asked St. Catharine what they should do about the penguins’ souls,
she said to God: “Donnez-leur une âme mais une petite” [Give them a
soul, but a small one]. That is our principle. I gave them a little soul; I
10 It is likely that Jung showed the mandala by a woman, with fish radiating out from a
central circle, reproduced in “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower,’” in CW,
vol. 13, figure A2. The remarks that Baumann cited are not contained in the report of
Jung’s lecture in Tantra Yoga.
11 Anatole France, Penguin Island, translated by E. W. Evans (London, 1948).
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