CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

19 OCTOBER 1932
which I myself have experienced. We were taught the ABCs with a whip.
We were eight boys sitting on one bench, and the schoolmaster had a
whip of three willow wands, just long enough to touch all the backs at
once. He said, “This is A” (bang), “This is B” (bang). You see, causing a
physical sensation was the old method of teaching. It was not very painful,
because when he beat on eight backs at the same time you just
cringed and didn’t feel it very much. But it makes an impression; the
boys were actually sitting up and listening. That was instead of “Will you
be kind enough to pay attention, please?” Then nobody listens; they
think he is a damned fool. But when he cracks the whip over them and
says, “That is A,” then they get it.
It is for the same reason that primitives inflict wounds in initiations
when they hand over the secrets, the mystical teaching of the tribe. At
the same time they cause intense pain: they make cuts and rub ashes into
them, or they starve the initiants, they don’t let them sleep, or frighten
them out of their wits. Then they give the teaching, and it catches hold
of them because it has gone in with physical discomfort or pain.
Now, as I said, the first psychical localization that is conscious to us is
the abdomen; we are not conscious of anything deeper. I don’t know of
a trace in primitive psychology where people would locate their psyche
in their bladder. Then the next is the heart, which is a very definite center
that still functions with us. For instance we say, “You know it in the
head, but you don’t know it in the heart.” There is an extraordinary distance
from the head to the heart, a distance of ten, twenty, thirty years,
or a whole lifetime. For you can know something in the head for forty
years and it may never have touched the heart. But only when you have
realized it in the heart do you begin to take notice of it. And from the
heart it is an equally long distance down to the plexus solaris, andthen
you are caught. For there you have no freedom at all. There is no air
substance: you are just bones and blood and muscles; you are in the intestines;
you are functioning there like a worm with no head. But in the
heart you are on the surface. The diaphragm would be about the surface
oftheearth.AslongasyouareinmaõipÖra you are in the terrible heat
of the center of the earth, as it were. There is only the fire of passion, of
wishes, of illusions. It is the fire of which Buddha speaks in his sermon in
Benares where he says, The whole world is in flames, your ears, your eyes,
everywhere you pour out the fire of desire, and that is the fire of illusion
because you desire things which are futile. Yet there is the great treasure
of the released emotional energy.
So when people become acquainted with the unconscious they often
get into an extraordinary state—they flare up, they explode, old buried
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