CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

LECTURE 3
their meat for two or three hours in papaya leaves instead of cooking
it—it thus becomes partially digested; it is predigested. And so the whole
art of cooking is predigestion. We have transferred part of our digestive
ability into the kitchen, so the kitchen is the stomach of every house, and
the labor of preparing the food is then taken away from our stomachs.
Our mouth is also a predigestive organ, because the saliva contains a
digestive substance. The mechanical action of the teeth is predigestive,
because we cut up the food, which is what we also do in the kitchen in
cutting up the vegetables, and so on. So you could really say that the
kitchen is a digestive tract projected from the human body. And it is the
alchemistic place where things are transformed.
Therefore maõipÖra would be a center in which substances are digested,
transformed. The next thing one would expect would be the
transformation shown as completed. As a matter of fact, this center is
right below the diaphragm, which marks the dividing line between
anvhata and the centers of the abdomen.
For after maõipÖra follows anvhata, 3 in which entirely new things
occur; a new element is there, air, no longer gross matter. Even fire is
understood to be in a way gross matter. It is thicker, denser than air, and
it is quite visible, whereas air is invisible. Fire is exceedingly movable, yet
perfectly well defined, and also in a way tangible, whereas air is exceedingly
light and almost intangible—unless you feel it as a wind. It is relatively
gentle in comparison with fire, which moves and burns.
So at the diaphragm you cross the threshold from the visible tangible
things to the almost invisible intangible things. And these invisible things
in anvhata are the psychical things, for this is the region of what is called
feeling and mind. The heart is characteristic of feeling, and air is characteristic
of thought. It is the breath-being; therefore one has always identified
the soul and thought with breath.
For instance, it is the custom in India, when the father dies, that the
oldest son must watch during the last moments in order to inhale the last
breath of his father, which is the soul, in order to continue his life. The
Swahili word roho means the stertorous breathing of a dying man, which
we call in German röcheln; androho also means the soul. It is no doubt
taken from the Arabic word ruch, which means wind, breath, spirit, with
probably the same original idea of stertorous breathing. So the original
idea of spirit or of psychical things is the idea of breath or air. And I told
you that the mind in Latin is animus, which is identical with the Greek
word ánemos meaning wind.
3 Hauer stated of the anvhata cakra: “This heart lotus is the cakra of the fundamental
insights into life; it is what we call the creative life in the highest sense” (HS, 90–91).
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