50321190-39264356-Von-Franz-Puer-Aeternus
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a wrong way, but if one lives it one is just impossible and reality<br />
hits one over the head all the time. That is the problem. People who<br />
have shelved their feelings, or their demands on other people, or<br />
their capacity for trust, always feel not quite real, not quite<br />
spontaneous or really themselves. They feel only half alive and they<br />
generally also do not take themselves as quite real. To shelve the<br />
divine child means not taking oneself completely seriously. One acts!<br />
One can adapt throughout life, but if one is honest with oneself, one<br />
knows that it is acting. Otherwise one would behave in such an<br />
infantile way that nobody could stand one. So what can one do?<br />
That is the problem of the divine child when it appears in this inbetween<br />
state.<br />
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One just does not know what to do. Theoretically the situation is<br />
clear: one should be able to cut away the childishness and leave the<br />
true personality. One should somehow be able to disentangle the two,<br />
and if an analysis goes right that is what slowly happens. One<br />
succeeds in disentangling and destroying what is really childish and<br />
in saving the creativity and the future life. But, practically, this<br />
is something which is immensely subtle and difficult to accomplish.<br />
The divine child, or star prince, whom Saint-Exupéry meets in the<br />
desert, asks for a sheep, and we learn that he has come down to fetch<br />
a sheep to take back with him. Later in the story it is said that on<br />
the planet there is an overgrowth of baobab trees which are<br />
continually sprouting. The star prince wants a sheep to eat the<br />
shoots as they appear so that he does not constantly have to work at<br />
cutting them off. But this he does not explain to Saint-Exupéry, and<br />
the real reason only comes out later.<br />
At first we have to look at the symbolism of the sheep in the<br />
personal life of Saint-Exupéry and then also in general mythology. In<br />
one of his books, Saint-Exupéry says himself:<br />
There is no bad outer fate, only an inner one. There comes a moment<br />
when you are vulnerable and your own mistakes seize you and pull you<br />
down like a sort of whirlpool. [He naturally must be speaking with<br />
reference to flying. He means that there is no such thing as a chance<br />
crash: the one day you have an accident is the result of a whole<br />
inner and outer process.] It is not the big obstacles that count so<br />
much, but the little ones: three orange trees on the edge of an<br />
airfield, or thirty sheep which you fail to see in the grass and<br />
which suddenly emerge between the wheels of your plane.<br />
You know that at one time in many places flocks of sheep were used to<br />
keep down the grass on the airfields, and it could happen that your<br />
plane by some mistake ran into them. One could say that he projects<br />
onto the sheep that fateful thing which one day kills the puer<br />
aeternus, or in this case himself. It is the fatal enemy.<br />
The sheep has a very revealing name in Greek. It is called probaton,<br />
which comes from the verb "to walk forward," so it would mean "the<br />
walking forward animal." This is a marvelous name: the animal has no<br />
other choice and no other function than the capacity to walk forward!<br />
That is all it can do! The Greeks are even more witty, for they make<br />
the animal neuter and call it "the walking forward thing.'' That<br />
illustrates the most negative aspect of the sheep, which always<br />
follows the leading ram wherever it goes. You can read again and<br />
again in the<br />
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papers that if a wolf or a dog chases the leading ram over a<br />
precipice, two or three hundred sheep will jump over after him. This<br />
happened about ten years ago at Lenzerheide on an Alp when a wolfhound<br />
chased the leading ram over the precipice and afterward men had