CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

LECTURE 2
always far down in mÖlvdhvra and suddenly becomes aware of something
up above in the fourth story, in anvhata, and that is the self.
Now, if anybody makes the mistake of thinking that he lives at the
same time in the basement and on the fourth story, that he is the puruüa
himself, he is crazy. He is what the German very aptly call verrückt, carried
off his feet up to somewhere else. He just sits up there and spins. We are
allowed to behold only the puruüa, to behold his feet up there. But we are
not the puruüa; that is a symbol that expresses the impersonal process.
The self is something exceedingly impersonal, exceedingly objective. If
you function in your self you are not yourself—that is what you feel. You
have to do it as if you were a stranger: you will buy as if you did not buy;
you will sell as if you did not sell. Or, as St. Paul expresses it, “But it is not
I that lives, it is Christ that liveth in me,” meaning that his life had become
an objective life, not his own life but the life of a greater one, the
puruüa.
All the primitive tribes that are on a somewhat higher level of civilization
usually have discovered anvhata. That is, they begin to reason, and
to judge; they are no longer quite wild. They have elaborate ceremonies—the
more primitive they are the more elaborate are the ceremonies.
They need them in order to prevent maõipÖra psychology. They
have invented all sorts of things, magic circles, forms for the palavers, for
the intercourse of people; all those peculiar ceremonials are special psychological
techniques to prevent an explosion of maõipÖra. In a palaver
with primitives it is simply de rigueur that you do certain things—to us,
perfectly superfluous things—but you can do nothing with the primitives
unless you observe the rules.
For instance, there must be an unmistakable hierarchy; therefore the
man who calls the palaver must be a man of power. If I call a palaver, I
must have a stool, and the other people are on the ground; they must sit
down immediately. The chief has men with whips who whip everybody
down if they don’t sit down at once. And then one does not begin to talk.
One first hands around presents—matches, cigarettes—and the chief
necessarily must have many more cigarettes than his subjects, because
the hierarchy of that moment must be emphasized to show that there is
authority on top. 14 That is all ceremony against maõipÖra, and only when
that is silently done can the man who calls the palaver begin to speak. I
say that I have a shauri, a business. That is the beginning. You see, I must
speak a mantra by which everybody is caught—nobody is allowed to talk;
everybody listens. Then I say my shauri, after which my partner, with
14 For Jung’s account of his palavers among the Elgonyi in Kenya in 1925–26, which
overlaps with his description here, see MDR, 293–97.
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