CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

APPENDIX 3
ing and feeling life at this stage is not yet so conscious that it deserves to
be called consciousness, which probably accounts for the fact that the
self is only beginning to be visible from the anvhata.
The next stage is the purified condition. You see, the air belongs to
the earth. We are walking about here in the air, but above is the ether
region, which we do not reach, and that is abstract thought expressed in
human language. The ethereal region is the human larynx: speech
comes apparently from the throat, and speech is the life of the word. The
word that leaves one carries the meaning; it is doing things. We are often
tremendously astonished when people flare up and misunderstand what
one says—“and then I said, and she said”—one feels oneself to be entirely
innocent; one simply had a thought and cannot understand what
happened afterward. So man has slowly learned that the word has existence;
it is like a winged being that takes to the air and has magic effects,
an abstract being, absolutely purified from the admixture of the lower
regions.
Then the strange thing is, I have seen representations of the vjñv, the
highest thing you can imagine, something which is even beyond the
winged word. One can imagine that one could put oneself into a word
and become a word, like Jesus, who became the Logos. He detached himself
from God the Creator and took a flight into the world, shining like
a light. One could become such an impossible detached thing that one
no longer touches the earth. One would be as creative as a being with
golden wings in a globe or an egg—completely detached. I have really
seen such a representation. You remember, the vjñv cakra is the mandala
with the two petals, which looks like the winged seed of certain
trees. It is quite purified from any earthly admixture; it has almost no
substance and is quite purely white light. So one gets the impression of
something that really has taken to wings. And I think that the idea of the
winged egg, or the homunculus in the second part of Faust, the artificial
little man that flies about in his retort, is really the anticipation of such
a possibility—a man who has created himself again in a new form, as the
old alchemist produced a little man in his retort. That, again, I take as a
symbol for the vjñv center.
Now this is, of course, an entirely empirical approach. In our Western
symbolism it sounds banal or grotesque, far from the absolute perfection
of the East, with its specific style, its specific beauty. We are at this stage in
the rough experience and the raw ordinary material; we are far from any
differentiation—we are only just beginning to see that we also have certain
experiences that approach that kind of symbolism. We also know
something about color symbolism—for instance, that the different stages
are always symbolized by different colors. We know all those red things
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