CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

APPENDIX 3
admitted as much as that. I thought very well of myself that I was able to
express myself like that: my marvelous center here, and I am right in my
heart.
Then I had a dream. 12 I was in Liverpool, where I have never been,
actually. It was very dark and dirty; it rained dirt; and I was walking up a
street with certain other Swiss fellows in raincoats. We were talking together,
but it was very disagreeable, and I was thinking of a place where
I could get shelter from the rain and the cold. 13 We came to a sort of
plateau, a level part of town, where there was a huge and beautiful park.
I did not recognize it at first, but it was the mandala which I demonstrated
yesterday. There were intersecting paths, and in the center was a
little lake, in the center of that was an island, and upon the island was a
magnolia tree of that rosy hue, a beautiful tree. And the tree was standing
in full sunshine—it was a most glorious picture on a dark rainy night,
that marvelous tree in full bloom; I was fascinated by it. Then suddenly
I discovered that my companions did not notice it; they just walked on
and began to talk about another Swiss who was living at the corner of a
street in Liverpool on the left side of the park. I pictured the place: there
was one single street lamp at that corner, and he was living there in an
apartment house. They said: “He must be a damned fool to live in Liverpool
in such a dirty place.” But I thought he must be a tremendously
intelligent fellow, and I knew why he was living there—he knew the secret
of that island; he had found the right place. 14 Now, Liverpool is the
center of life—liver is the center of life—and I am not the center, I am
the fool who lives in a dark place somewhere, I am one of those little side
lights. In that way my Western prejudice that I was the center of the mandala
was corrected—that I am everything, the whole show, the king, the
god. We have come down from that notion. The Hindu, being a primitive
man, has no such idea. He never imagines he is not a man to begin
with; therefore in the end he can never become a god. But we have anticipated
the divinity, so we have to come down.
12 An account of this dream is found in MDR, 223–24. There it is dated 1927. Additional
details from this account are in the notes that follow.
13 “I had the feeling that we were coming from the harbour, and that the real city was
actually up above, on the cliffs. We climbed up there. It reminded me of Basel, where the
market is down below and then you go up through the Totengässchen (“Alley of the
Dead”), which leads to a plateau above and so to the Petersplatz and the Peterskirche”
(MDR, 223).
14 “On one detail of the dream I must add a supplementary comment: the individual
quarters of the city were themselves arranged radially around a central point. This point
formed a small open square illuminated by a larger street lamp, and constituted a small
replica of the island. I knew that the ‘other Swiss’ lived in the vicinity of one of these secondary
centres” (MDR, 223–24).
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