The Vision Seminars (1930-1934)

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The Alchemical Core of C. G. Jung's Work (1916-1956) Presentation 5 of 13 The Vision Seminars (1930-1934) Presented by Roger Weir Thursday, July 30, 1987 Transcript: The date is July 30 1987. This is a fifth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir at the Philosophical Research Society on the alchemical core of Jung's work. Tonight's lecture is entitled The Vision Seminars 1932-1934. Just to, a little more in-depth material. The, the ongoing Tuesday night series which I have well in the next two months be looking into the archetype of the self in Western civilization. And if you if you get interested in that area and the only way you could not be interested in that area is not to be aware that that's the ball game. But I imagine if you've gotten this far without advertising or promotion you're quite aware that that is the situation. At any rate. From audience: Is that for two months? That's for August and September in that series. We have been developing the mythology and the developments in the Old Testament. And now we're up to the the incarnation of the archetype of the self. And this would be a, a in-depth look. So if you're interested. There's also I don't like to promote anything very much because that always is a negative. If you don't, if you're not searching then it's best not to know that there's anything to find. Because to know that there's something to find when you're not searching is just the worst. It makes you complacent. And no one should be complacent. This is a perilous universe. Not dangerous but perilous. And on Saturdays I'm in a long going two year teaching program. I guess you could call it self-development. But we're, we're in some very interesting areas there. So if if there are some of you who are into it and various meaningfulness here, it's at the same address. But the Tuesday series may be a may be of interest to you. From audience: What time it is at? Saturday is 9:30 in the morning till about noon. Yeah. We have two more lectures here before we technically get to alchemy. We're still doing groundwork. Still doing basics. I have some slides which I'll show you after the break today. In Jung's work, many of you are acquainted with the fact that there were three techniques that he developed. And probably to the degree that they'll always remain developed at their optimum. The first technique was word association tests. Which he took over from several other psychologists around the turn of the century. But developed them very, very far. And was able by establishing his typology based on functions. And their central version and introversion and extraversion modifications. He was able to develop the word association techniques quite far beyond what they were originally. The second technique was dream analysis. Which he called the row...road to the psyche. And we're ongoing with that. The third technique was active imagination or visioning. Which is somewhat distinct. Is differentiable from dreams or dream analysis. And in the active imagination one has an amplification which goes very clearly in a double motion. It goes in an amplification to your larger life and to the deeper realms of the psyche at the same time. And of course the classic strategy here is to try and see that there is a connection. There's an ecology. But these are not rod-like polarities on a disparate measurement scale. But that they are arcs of meaning on a cycle of cosmic experience. That they touch. And that the farthest reaches of amplification in the physical world in the historical realm touch the deepest levels within. I guess the classic presentation of it in Western experience, Western mystical experience, is in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite around 500 A.D. And he is very explicit about how in mystical experience one discovers in the vast interior night whirling beings of deep luminosity pervading the darkness. And the description of Dionysius the Areopagite is very much the same description that one runs across and the writings of the early 20th century astronomers who discovered that in fact there are galactic structures in deep space. That beyond all of the stars which we see are whole systems of stars in integrated bodies. And that all the stars that we see are in fact a part of one integrated system, our galaxy the Milky Way. And in Dionysius the Areopagite one has the the acme of the via negativa. The mystical theology. The celestial hierarchy. That the interior realm universally somehow comes out again in the farthest reaches of the physical universe. So that there is a mysteriousness to this progressive realization. But that the realization cannot be on the basis of any mundane imagery. It cannot be on the basis of a limited association. It cannot be on the basis of some mental program projected upon it. There are no real diagrams which will do. That one has to learn. I think the phrase was first introduced by Alfred North Whitehead, one has to learn to have a an accumulated penetration of insight. And that this accumulated penetration, like digging a very deep well by having the bit turned constantly and constantly. And that over the many months or years or sometimes decades, one finally reaches new strata. That were unknown before. and that there are at long last and the farther ranges are experience strata whose nature is clearly universal. Belong to everyone for all time. And belong in this universe where we find ourselves. So that there are something archetypal about the human being who looks up at the night sky and feels at home in this universe. Feels that circulation of constellations is familiar. But in order to experience the constellated reality takes a great sophistication not an intellectual sophistication so much. Although that is part of it. but takes a sophistication in terms of accumulated penetration. Sensitizing oneself to the way in which the progressive amplification seemed to occur in, in bunches or in stages. In stadia. And these steps of realization or revelation begin to mount into a pattern which one recognizes. And that in order to progress, if one can use that term. Or in order to proceed at all there is a liaison which is necessary. A liaison with that aspect of ourselves that has always been known. And the various words for it have come to mean what we would understand colloqally as the soul. not the spirit but the shaped spiritual person within. That finally the guide for the mysteriousness is an interior personage. Who we are in our most deepest, if you like, most mystical. Or even if you like most empirical realization. Thou art that. And that this this figure. This interior personage. This soul. this anima or this animus needs to be discovered. It is not at all apparent in a common colloquial life. And so tonight we come to The Vision Seminars. And we're working our way towards Jung's great series of statements which were collected in his book Modern Man in Search of his Soul, in which we will come to next week. which is the last stage before we go into the great ocean of alchemy. And Jung by this time, these seminars are 1929-1930-1928. Around in that era. 1930 really is a a watershed very much in Jung's life. Although it doesn't begin to occur. The watershed does not express itself in terms of his life until a couple of years later. What happens in 1930 is that Richard Wilhelm dies. And for Jung he realizes that Wilhelm died a very peculiar psychological circumstances. Very peculiar. And being a very great doctor. Not just a great psychologist or psychiatrist but a very great doctor. Jung begins to rum innate in the massive way in which he did to try and assimilate that there was some mysterious process East and West in the 20th century. But the East and the West have something to do with each other in the 20th century. A task which no one realized. No one even thought of. It wasn't even mooted as a task when he was a young boy. And yet the task looms larger and larger. And he realizes that the immense carelessness of the task is that when it is shirked you die. That if you go so far and you've sensitize yourself so much, it's perilous to attempt to turn back. To ignore it. One must go on. And yet if you put too much emphasis on the must, the accumulated resistances has become awesome. And so the key, the key to it all. The key to alchemy. The key to self-development in its largest application. Its largest amplification is simply to get the taste for continuity. For always doing it. You work on yourself every day. You don't make a big thing out of it. You just do it. And you build the taste for what used to be called spiritual work. Or the taste for what we call today psychological reflection or consciousness. You build a taste for consciousness. That it becomes the familiar intelligence of your everyday life. So that the everyday life begins to be a disclosure medium that the patterns, the images, the symbols, the sigils, the visions become intelligible in terms of one's everyday life. Then the arena is spread out like snowshoes over a perilous ground. It's much easier to deal with. In this kind of milieu the continuity of just making it an everyday livingness. This this kind of milieu then is amenable to this accumulated penetration of vision one builds power without realizing one has power. The Greek term for this kind of power was Dynamis. Dynamis. And the Dynamis is like the amperage, tremendous amperage, is developed. And if one sought to construct some expression of, according to that amperage in the external world one then turns to God like inflation's. Because there's nothing that's large enough to carry the amperage so one will make something world size. And of course this kind of inflation is self-defeating. And so the essential quality that's there. The wisdom of the ages, is just develop a taste for the everydayness. Because the the fantastic realms are there. Like I'm there. I'm going to start off not directly with Jung but with a couple of quotations from a contemporary of Jung. A woman because we need a balance here. And the woman that I'm going to use tonight is Evelyn Underhill. Who was born the same year as Jung, 1875. And she lived until I think 1941. And she wrote I don't know upwards of 20-25 maybe 30 books. Most of them centered around mysticism. And her book on mysticism that first came out about 1911. And was revised extensively by her in 1930. The twelfth edition. And Evelyn Underhill is enormously learned in terms of an ancient technique which was always known and was known again in the 20th century as the contemplative life. Not the meditational life but the contemplative life. The difference there being a difference of directiveness. That meditation is bringing in to register. That contemplation is a sending back out. And the technique in contemplation is to send everything back out. To empty oneself. And of course to experience then that once everything has sent out. Once one is emptied and one is still there who is that? What is that that is there? That thou art. And so the contemplative life is different. Quite extraordinary. And Evelyn Underhill was one of the 20th century masters of the contemplative life. of the techniques. And towards the end of the 1920's when Jung was doing The Vision Seminars, The Dream Analysis Seminars, she wrote a little book called Man and the Supernatural. Man and the Supernatural. And what I'm doing here is I'm trying to alert you to the fact that we're not studying a subject matter. We're not just studying Jung. Yes we are studying Jung. We're looking at him. But that he is expressing in his work and in the very kinds of languages and images that he's using. He's expressing, if I can use this term, a manifestation that was occurring at this time everywhere in the world in the 20th century. And that it comes as a surprise to us to look up for a moment and to see that there are contemporaries of Jung at the very same time talking about similarities in the same way. And so we look here. Man in the Supernatural. And she has a series of chapters in here. And I just want to read you a couple of quotations. These chapters run in a sequence. The Supernatural, a Self Given in Process. Sub entitled History and Eternity. And following that, The Supernatural Self Given in Personality. And the subtitle Incarnation. And the third, The Supernatural Self Given in Things. Sub entitled Symbols and Sacraments. Then The Supernatural in Human Life. Sub entitled Prayer. And then finally the supernatural in human life. Sub entitled Sanctification. And so there is a accumulated penetration what she is delivering here. In 1927 she was in her early 50's and very, very capable. Not capable just as someone who is learned. Though she was a professor I think in in Edinburgh. But she was someone who in her own life had these experiences. Knew what she was talking about. Knew how to search for the words to express what she herself had experienced. The practicing contemplative. Quite different. She writes, "If we allow that at least for our human ways of thinking there are two levels of reality. Two distinct worlds. Then it surely falls within the province of religion to discover those ways and degrees in which the supernatural world, that bathes and supports us." Notice the syntax there. "That bathes and supports us. And which is its special subject matter is revealed to human consciousness and enters into relation with men. Although it is from the mystics that we get the most vivid and personal accounts of such experience relationship. We cannot limit the workings of the transcendent in human life to special contacts with God. It is essential. If only as a check on subjectivism that the special experience and declarations of these individuals be supported and corrected in our understanding by some more general conception. And some more general imitations. That we should be able to think of them as somehow deeply connected with and even supported by the common life of average human beings. The spiritual Peaks, however great the distance that separates them from the ordinary levels. However strange, remote and lonely they may seem. They must still rise from the earth and form part of it. They must not hang like cloud mountains in the air." And this desire that somehow there be some transcendental realm severed from the earth is an invitation for fantasy. It's an invitation for the dreams, the act of imagination, the association not to be grounded. And finally not to be grounded in the person. She also writes towards the end of this particular chapter. "History gets its real character from the often abrupt and inexplicable appearance of particular individuals and unique actions and events. Person's actions and events which contribute to no utilitarian purposes and seem to require for their explanation something other than the orderly unpacking of the world's portmanteau. It lies before us like some closely woven fabric. In which now and again in defiance of the apparent pattern of ordinariness there comes a golden thread. Some single perfect act never to be repeated. Some single perfect work of art. And more rarely the texture of the fabric itself. Sometimes is abruptly broken for the emergence of a wonderful gold flower. A sudden burst of Beauty, heroism or vision involving many devoted lives. These separate inspired moments of beautiful or heroic action, these great flowerings of faith sacrifice or art give the little race of men their chief means of Gissing the existence of a secret and in violet rose within." And of course her illusion to the golden flower comes exactly at the same time as Jung and Wilhelm's The Secret of the Golden Flower. The same time period. The late 1920's. And I'll show you some slides later of how this **inaudible word** turn out. The, the golden flower. The, the a manifestation of a perfection for within. That suddenly bursts out and discloses itself entirely appears not only in Evelyn Underhill and Wilhelm and Jung. But I'll show you some slides of Marxisilt(?) and Wassily Kandinsky. And you can see at the same time period because it was being seen in the psyche of mankind at that time. And we're not used to understanding. We're not used to appreciating the exactness of the spirit. We are brought up in a materialist bias and we think that it's ambiguous. And in fact it's powerful because of its ambiguity. But it's not ambiguous at all. It is precise. It's exacting. And when the images come they come chiseled cut in their specificity. There's no vagueness whatsoever. The vagueness is in the undisciplined slovenly consciousness which is not used to the real. Is used only to fantasies which are ambiguous. Which are misty. And there's quite a difference between a spiritual image and just a speculative visualization. So let's come to The Vision seminars. These were delivered in English in Zurich. And they are the visions. They start off with some dreams and then they progressively go into the visions of a young woman. Who was in her 30's at that time. Extremely intelligent. Who came to Jung in the unfortunately ordinary expectation that the doctor is going to solve the problem. He's gonna make me well. What shall I do doctor? And Jung know being very, very good physician says I don't know what to do. So we'll have to talk about this. And we'll have to see what it is. He uses the term in here that this was a benevolent happening for her. That she faced a crisis in her life at this time. In her 30's. Because usually his face in the late 40's or in the 50's. And he says that it is a fortunate thing that she could not get rid of the problem. Classically this is known as the paradox of the fortunate fall. That your psyche is so healthy it will not let you live a bogus life. Will not let you be half an egg. Refuses to let you live in a crippled state. In a flattened out state. And presents the challenge but directly and immediately relentlessly. It's only when one gains a kind of a cribbed mastery through pills or techniques or so forth. And able to hold at bay this urge towards wholeness and one can make do. And this is unfortunate, Jung says. This woman's thinking function was enormously developed. She was a rationalistic. She was mathematical in her training. A natural scientist. Very capable woman in many regards. But who's feeling function was not developed very much at all. These vision seminars took place over quite a period of time from 1930 to about 1934. And when the identity of the woman was in inadvertently disclosed Jung cut them off. So that in the cycle in the vision seminars there's no completion. It's broken off enigmatically at a point where there's no way whatsoever to see what the outcome is. Or should be. Or could be. The object of preserving the vision seminars. And they were preserved on typed pages for many many years. I think there was something like eleven volumes of, of notes. And many years later a woman named Mary Foote redid these notes. Condensed them and then showed them to Jung who revised them. The whole purpose of this is to desensitize not to resolve but desensitize. To get used to dealing in this way with this material. What is the way? The way is not through work association, word association. It's not through dreams per se but specifically through vision. Through active imagination. Through this technique. Becomes a technique. The dreams are person-centered. You have those dreams. And the dream content may from time to time be trans personal or subconscious but it comes to you. But in the vision, in the active imagination. One goes out. One goes out on an in scape, on an inner landscape. As Kandinsky used to say one learns to move around in the work of art. You go out to it. And in this experience then one leaves oneself like Dante taking a guide. And you get acquainted with the larger ground outside your backyard. Outside your person. But the guide is powerful and not easy to address. And we'll see that in here. Here's the first dream. And The Vision Seminars start with a couple of dreams. It's like there's no preset way by which the needle goes on to the record and starts playing. Always a couple of weeks or sometimes a couple of months. Sometimes a couple of years before the track of of development yes is touched. And here the first dream, "I was trying to play some music. And all the different members of my family tried to interfere. I was on a terrace looking out over the sea. And still play. When a very rich Jew at the next table began to play also. And the music that he played was so beautiful that I stopped playing for a minute myself to listen to him." Jung writes, What is this music feeling? It's like the feeling function which she tries to use and her family discouraged this. Use your thinking function. Be rational. Be mature. And yet there's something in her kin. Something which she sees in her dream as a rich Jew but is an inner figure for her. And Jung says that this is very related to her Protestant Christian background. That an Old Testament figure is very often the obverse of a Protestant consciousness. Very often he uses the example in here of how many high-level Protestant Christian scholars assume, believe that the language spoken in heaven is Hebrew. So one learns Hebrew. And Jung said in his own one family that his great-grandfather was a Hebrew scholar, biblical scholar, because of this. But that the Protestant and the Jewish aspects are two sides of the same coin. That for the Protestant consciousness, the Jewish unconsciousness is very applicable. And so here it's the feeling of this inner figure, the wealthy Jew. Not so much wealthy in money but well comfortable in the world. Comfortable and well off. Successful. Able to play music so beautiful, so captivating that she herself stops playing and just listens. "That Jew simply means this woman's unconscious mind. The unconscious man in her. Now what is the unconscious man? I suppose nearly everyone here knows about it. It is the animus. so the animus is a figure personifying the opinionating of a woman. I cannot put it better. Unrealized, ready-made opinions and spoken with authority. I know women who have an opinion about everything. They know it all. But when I say yes that is so they are disappointed. They want me to say no. But if I said no that unconscious man would come up and have a terrible row with me. Because such opinion in a woman is a man who wants to fight. This thing in a woman makes enemies. And very often a woman is a victim of this unconscious figure. it is the animus." And then he develops the motif that the patient, the person, the woman who is dreaming this. The visioner to be attempts to connect this figure with the doctor. It must be you Dr. Jung. It must be you. And so she has the dream a couple of weeks later. Jung is selecting out dreams to show the, the development here. So she has this dream. "I was going to see a doctor who lived in a house beside the sea. I lost my way and desperately asked people to put me on the right path so that I could get to him." And Jung in here says that this is extremely important. Not to accept that identification. He is not the doctor. He is not the helper. He's not the healer. For if he were able to be objectified. If he were able to to be identified and have projected upon him then all the expectations for success. There are also underneath all the waiting triggers for failure. The success belongs to the doctor. But the failures would also belong to the doctor. And the person would be only an observer. Ultimately not responsible for their own development at all. Whether successful or disappointing. So that there would be no growth. There would be just the thinking function having won out in this game of parentheses. Here's yet another diagram which one can understand and master and still no change. And so Jung rejecting it and telling the audience here that he, he rejects this. "You see this dreamer who now speaks of the quest to seek the great healer would make a great mistake to see the great healer in me. Naturally her first leap was at me and I said no thank you. Because otherwise she would hang on me later when things began to go wrong. For that doctor will most certainly be hard. Very difficult." And yet there's another aspect that the doctor in the dream lives by an ocean. He lives by a sea. Jung lives by a lake. This doctor is a healer on a deeper level then that personal level. She's coming to see a doctor who lives on a lake but the doctor in the dream wherever he lives. He doesn't have the Vista of a lakeside view. He has an oceanic front. And she must find her way to that healer. That physician within. So that in a way Jung is prismatic in his function. He is just helping to focus temporarily a whole spectrum of material to create a situation of, of light by which one can see. But that the the individual must see that this light, this light does not come from the prism so much. Just filtered through the prism. But that there's a whole spectrum behind it which is from her. She is the source of the spectrum. And she must acquaint herself with the whole spectrum. The whole litany as it were of the image base within. This she cannot do. Why can't she not do this? She cannot do this because she would address it first of all by her, by her thinking function. It's her right hand. But the thinking function by itself cannot go into these realms. Only the whole person. All of the functions playing together can go there. Sometimes is difficult to to understand. Let me use a classical analogy. In Hellenistic times it was understood that sound travelled in a sphere of concussion. And that the sphere of concussion was what carried the sound. And when that sphere of concussion touched your ear it released the sound within. Almost graphically like that. Remember now that the Hellenistic mind is dominated by a Greek idose typology and phenomenology. But the basic notion there was that by hearing one hears out of a wholeness. A spiricality wholeness. And the same was true of vision and all of the senses that there was a spiricality there. So that the deepest communication is in terms of sensitizing oneself not to the sounds but to the carriers of the sounds. Not to the sights, the images but to the carriers of the images. And that these are wholenesses. These are like spheres of reverberation. But if the communication comes from oneself on a deeper level then the key is not so much in what is said but in the surrounding resonances of this communication. If that's what has to be sensitized. That is not amenable to just one function but only the whole person working with all the functions together, best one can. After that dream and after Jung's refusal to be identified as the center of the dream. As the figure in the dream. As the purpose for that seeking energy in the dream. She experiences a letdown. Please turn your cassette now. Mr. Weir continues on the other side without a break in the continuity. END OF SIDE 1 **inaudible word** And this is when she has her first vision. in this let down. The letting down of the guard. Letting down the expectation. Letting down realizing that the ploy is not going to work. She has a first vision. It is distinct from a dream. This is the vision she has. The very first vision. it's not a key vision yet in any sense. But it's the beginning of the process. The vision, she saw a beautiful peacock perched on the back of a man. And the beak of the peacock was pointed at the neck of the man. I guess we have to take a break and we'll come back to this. I'll go right now before I get back into it. We had the...We had the quotation from Evelyn Underhill about the gold flower. We have the Wilhelm and Jung conjunction over the The Secret of the Golden Flower. At this very same time Mocks Ernst began to do a series of paintings which had odd configurations on the canvas. And when he first started to do them he called them snow flowers. And then he began to call them shell flowers. And developed a whole technique with this. Which I'll read a little something about him. that instead of using the brush on the canvas which would have mixed the paints so that the flowers then would have been peterly. He used a palette knife so that the colors became unmixed so that the flowers as they were, were indications of a conjunction of opposites. They're not a blend at all. They're not a part of the same level as the rest of the canvas. They came from beneath the canvas and existed above the canvas. And all of this was a long developed technique but reached its apex at this time. Through a technique which he had started which was called collage. Which took various aspects from the physical world and put them together in very strange ways. And sometimes he put a human head on them and so forth. That this assemblage art...and having a principle to it. And a method to it. later on was developed into frottage. A different corollary to it. Here's a little something about this. in 1925 the collage principle was still at work in that assist no ties incongruity was the mark of nearly every plate and every canvas which Ernst was turning out at this time. But the collage method had been abandoned altogether. Instead of renaming the debris of mass-producing society. That is renaming the compositions made from the debris of mass produced society. The artist relied for the most part on inert vegetable matter for the sources of his imagery. Surfaces which had long sunk into anonymity were strongly and plausibly characterized as a human head, a standing column, a bird in flight, the towers of a distant city. nameless areas of wood, plaster, stone, leaves, canvas shells, lace and plastic were magicked into producing images which were entirely free from any kind of art school taint. **inaudible name** has said that automatic writing was just the thing to clear out the literary stables for once and for all. And of course this whole development of automatic writing was a rage at this time. And even W.B. Yeats went into this when he discovered that his wife was able to engender automatic writing. And the figure in the automatic writing they learned his name was Michael Robards. And Jung, or Yeats being like Jung being, one of these universal geniuses. who felt that there there is an order in man psyche. That it's just that we're not able to see the pattern but that one can learn to see the pattern. And so the Yeats took dictation from his wife's automatic writing for years on end. And just spent hours and hours every night with the magnifying glass of his genius piecing it together. And finally towards the end of his life he wrote a magnificent book called A Vision. It's like our vision seminars here. A vision. Which he showed that the chaotic utterances of his wife's automatic writing were from a personality and made a universal pattern of wisdom. Correlated to the ancient druidic and hermetic phases of the Moon cycle. Twenty-eight phase cycle. It's, it's like an incredible patience that man psyche is not a junkyard. That it has an integrity which is beyond what the conscious mind at first thinks it's capable of discerning. that we have to educate ourselves to see we're able to discern wholeness and a pattern on a cosmic scale. And what stops us from this is the very first step. The first step of thinking well because I can't understand myself, how can I ever expect to understand anything larger than just the basic problem of why I can't do this. Or why I'm afraid of this. And it's this hedge that one has to get over. It's this hedge that the ancient hermetic guide is always holding a hand out. to help. That whatever spiritual education is it's always that basic helping of crossing that basic threshold of self doubt. Of assuring the individual you have the capacity, you have the confidence in you to do this. Even though you deny it. And especially because when you're pushed hard enough you deny it most vociferously. So we're going to push you to the nth degree so that your denial will come full circle round and be a very small yes. demons don't like that because that's when man becomes free. That's what he that's what a human being realizes that if they can live their life. And whatever amplification or scope they're capable that no one stops us. I have some slides which I want to show but I want to come back here for just a moment. And because of time I'm going to skip a little bit here. The first vision she felt very sleepy. And she lay down thinking she would fall asleep, instead she merely got into a very drowsy condition and saw with her inner eyes a hypnagogic vision. And when, she saw she saw this man and perched on his back was a beautiful peacock and its bill was pointed towards the neck of the man. The back of ones self. The unknown part of ones self. The peacock as will see, like in alchemy, the **inaudible 2-3 words**. The indication of the full spectrum that it's there. It may be hidden in every stage of the process except the last but it also indicates itself right away at the beginning. The wholeness indicates itself. It's like a flash, I am there. And all you have to go on is the confidence that that was real. That is true. Because then it's gone. It's invisible. It's not there. And one goes through the machinations, the transformations, the complications. And not another indication until the wholeness rises as the ancient Egyptians used to say it's that the rising of the Sun above the horizon. The clearing of the horizon by the whole disk. It's like that moment where it leaps free of the horizon. If you've ever seen that sort of thing. It happens with the moon too. If you've ever seen the sunrise or moonrise under those kinds of conditions there's a point where it leaps above the horizon. It was touching and now it seems to get a little extra push. It leaps out. And that moment is extraordinary. And if approached in an equanimitis state what it evokes is a very pervasive, very subtle, very complete revelation. It's like the truthfulness that this is not only true here for that sunrise but somewhere in me. that rings a bell. That some integrated wholeness in me is able to jump above the horizon of this world. And be in its freedom. it belongs there. And we'll see the some of the images of this. Especially some of the paintings of Max Ernst about this time. Because he tried to struggle with the basic challenging of himself. Always challenging himself to try and scramble his everyday consciousness to let the integrals of subterranean levels spring through instantaneously. And trained himself to try to catch in glimpses and expressions those spontaneous wholenesses. Is in one sees about this time not only does he paint flowers occurring on canvases which are actually like seashells. They're like fossils. They're flowers from another realm. An ancient time. An ancient sea. They're, they're the flowers of an organic life level in that ancient sea. So these shell flowers are there. At the same time is also painting enormous surrealistic forests. Not forests so much of trees but if intrusions of forests, of massive corrosive objects which screen and so forth. And in between the flowers and the forest always there's this interplay that there is a lurking fullness. Some circle. And finally, and I'll have one of the slides here, about the time in The Vision Seminars we're completed Max Ernst will paint of one of those greatest paintings which is called The Entire City. Where the forest like intrusions have suddenly laid on their side like strata and mounded up and look for all the world like a massive city. The unconscious intrusions as a forest become the layers of a city. And full above that is the full moon. And the title of The Entire City. you'll see. In her vision she begins to see not only in dreams but increasingly in visions. And she finally will come to these two visions. The first one which is like a presage. Or sometimes the way I was educated about these thing it's like it's like the trigger. This was the vision. She sees another figure. Not in a dream in a vision. She sees another figure. A human head which is dark like a shadow. And around it is a halo with spokes like a wheel. A nimbus. We used to have a Buddhist figure in here that had the light spokes behind him. Hidden behind the blackboards. Then comes a very powerful dream. That little trigger vision, then a very powerful dream. And that's a dream, a big dream. "I found myself in a graveyard in a devastated area of France. The graves were made of red sandstone. I saw people walking over a large grave where many soldiers were buried. Someone said look at this gravestone. I looked and saw carved on it the statue of a saint. A bull was eating one of the Saints fingers." The note here by Jung, "The patient's account is a bit short here. It was a large tombstone and on it were carved the figure of a saint and beside it the figure of a bull. And in spite of the fact that both figures were carved in stone they were alive." Half dead and half alive. "Seeing that the bull was gnawing the fingers of the saint I felt nauseated with horror. And walked away shaking my own hand as though to free it from the bull." And she will go as the powerful dream that's there. So when she is talking to Jung about this dream and he's bringing this particular dream out. Then she goes into a profound vision. Then she sees this. "I beheld the head of a ram. Swiftly with fearful strength the ram charged. And was met full on the forehead by the spear of an Indian." And Jung goes into disgust the ram is an unconscious image symbol. The astrological sign of Aries. Spring. The the energy coming out met but immediately as it built up energy killed by the spirit of a male animus figure who is now an Indian. And Jung makes it quite a note that in fact this is an American woman. And he in several places writes about the different psychology between Europeans and Americans. And how very much like in European psyches it's like there is a door which you can open and the stairs that goes down to the unconscious. But that in American patients it's like there's no door but there's like this hole. This abyss. And one falls for quite some distance before landing, before touching. And as we go on in the series we'll let's talk about this. because it's important. There is a real history that in deep truth affects us. And the land is real. We live on a land where the Indians are real and they're in our psyches. Not just because we have one one-hundreds of the blood of a Cherokee or whatever. That's, that's not it. the effectivness that it's there in the psyche on a deep collective level. It's come into our psyches. And in her vision then, "in that moment when the forehead of the ram was met by the spear of the Indian, the ram vanished. Then the Indian lay down beside his spear. Then suddenly he leapt onto his horse which was black. And galloped over plains and hills until he came to a black pond surrounded by black mountains. Here the horse refused to go further and laid down and died. The hor..the Indian stayed on the shore and looked for the Sun but it was no longer to be seen. For the Sun had set. It was twilight." This is not a dream. It is a vision. "Suddenly the Indian turned into a Chinese man. He knelt down at the pond and bowed his forehead to the ground three times." We're going to come back to some of this next week. And we'll bring this back in. What's important here is to realize that in the energies that are coming up there is both life and death. There's not only just positive and negative but life and death. That the wholeness that is there includes life and death. And that while some aspects of it can engender the life-giving images there are other aspects which kill those images immediately. And one needs to develop a mitigating, differentiating consciousness to help preserve life in this. And we'll will go into that next week. And I'll come right back to this very spot. And we'll take it on. But we have to do these slides otherwise we won't have **inaudible few words**. The slides are relevant to what we're talking about. Are they working at all? Yes. Can we use it backwards? Is that alright. **inaudible chatter in the background** No this is...well we'll just. They're all backwards. I can turn this one... Notice that what's familiar to most events but what may not be familiar is that the arms are in-balanced here. One is up when the other is down. There's a diagonal. And at the correlate to that diagonal is that the symbols, the four sets of symbols, are a collection on the table. They are not arranged. They're there but they're not arranged. So there is no, there's no balance. This is the ancient Egyptian image of the balance of the soul. This is, the Greek term for this which is used as psycho station. The weighing of soul. And here the important aspect is that all of the symbols are brought together in terms of the balance. They're not to be accumulated on a table in front of oneself. But they're to be put into operation to balance. Here's the balance of the psychic helper Philomen. This is from Jung's Red book. And the balance is maintained here by the wings. And if you can see this in iconagraphical terms, the wings are in fact the wings of hearts. Philomen is an Alexandrian teacher. He is from Egypt. The Hellenistic hermeticism is fully integrated into the ancient Egyptian. All the way back to the second station. The golden flower here has a visually a two-part presentation. One the golden temple, a golden dome. And a golden nimbus above it. Which is like a projection of the dome or the continuation of the dome. So that the the spiritual teacher Philomen is a, is like a column extending the dome. The golden flowers coming out of that. This is a painting by Jung done about 1902 or 1903. I think that's....clear. This kind of a bucolic twilight liminal ambulance. This is a early photograph of the kind of forest that was around Walden. This is the kind of forest which came in Max Ernt's paintings about the time of the Second World War. So one can see that there are different styles, different presentations of nature here. This is recognizably Stonehenge. But in a trick of proportion if you look at this just right it's like a city scape. It's like a ruined city scape. And if one were to take a bird's-eye view of this one would come out with a circle of course. How do we have this? This is a mandala in a city form from Jung. And in the city in the center is the golden temple surrounded by various moats. And then finally there are sixteen battlements on the outside. Sixteen is a double eight. you might be interested to know that in the in the particular physics of Mahayana Buddhism there are sixteen parts to a thought moment. Sheeta(sp?). The first eight are delineated specifically and the last eight occurr together as a trill. So there's a sixteen or sixteen spokes of a wheel is a very accurate nodic(?) form. This is a Hermetic mandala looking back through time in terms of primordial images. Arranged in terms of the Hermetic development of man throughout his actually history as reported in the completely exfolliated(?) cycle. This is the first mandala that Jung ever drew. And this was 1916. Incidentally the style of this drawing is very much in keeping with the style of some of the sketches and diagrams of J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien and Charles Williams and so forth were all friends of Evelyn Underhill. And Evelyn Underhill when she was the young woman was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. And so a lot of this imagery at this time, symbolism, is shared. Not just the individual but collective. is shared. This is a alchemical mandala showing all the stages and the process. Can be lower that a little bit? I'm gonna see those top images. We're going to come back to this. This is from the **inaudible words 2 or 3** Salomon Trismosin. Yes that's fine. And we have this completely on slide so we get into the alchemical material I will bring this out in full. This figure here. I think we have a detail. Yes. There it is. And this is her **inaudible few words** This is an illustration by Jung from the Red Book. This is a encounter with a shadow. The figure is a harmonic of the context in which it occurs. It's not a shadow in a sense of being a nothing or a negative purely. That's a skewed polarized illusion of the egotistical perspective. When in fact it is, as all of the occurrences in the unconscious, it's an integrated harmony. Another illustration of Jung. Confrontation with the unconscious. And our Max Ernst version of this done in a few years. Can when you raise that just a little bit so we can see the figure in the painting? Yeah. The painting was...that's it. The painting was called the Dark Gods. So let's look at Jung. **inaudible few words** Hertz is one of the most underestimated artists of our time. Now let's come down. This is, this is the mandala raised above the landscape. This is from Jung's Red Book. Can we lower that? There we go. Here is the figure. **inaudible few words** did this. But the figure of Philomen, who is able to stand on the dome and have the nimbus running. This figure is separated from the city. And so the nimbus is also separated from the city. Now a couple of paintings by Max Ernst. This was done when he was 17 years old. It's a first surviving painting. And this is a painting from about 16 years later. You can see the golden flower, the yellow unfoldment above the bodhi(?). This is that painting I was talking about, The Entire City. These are archetypal images from the late 20's and early 30's. This mandala occurs in The Secret of the Golden Flower. And also occurs in some of Jung's other material. These are like photoplasmic(?) seeds floating. And here are the various keys to the quaternary. The same quaternary only in different modulations. Sixteen of them arranged around the circle. And then a double interfacing area where some of it relates to an exfoliation from within. And interspersed with it is an explanation for without. As Parker(?) points out, man and woman. And woman is the positive and negative. And man is positive and negative. This is Kandinsky's Weighty Circles done about the same time as Evelyn Underhill's Man the Supernatural and Jung's The Secret Of The Golden Flower. I particularly chose this one out of a number that could have been used. This was made at the very same time, 1927. But it also is available. The original painting is in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. And you can go and see it for yourself. **a few inaudible words** Some research for you. This involves movement and transmutation in a context of strangeness. Kandinsky wrote relative to this painting. Circle relates to cosmic. It's captivating. It has these features. It's the most modest form yet recklessly affirming itself. Two, its precise yet inexhaustibly variable. Three, it's stable and unstable at the same time. Four, it's quiet and noisy at the same time. Five, there's of tenseness embodying innumerable energies. So that the circle then is a synthesis of greatest contrasts. It combines in one balanced form concentric and eccentric movement. It's the clearest indication Kandinsky said of a fourth dimension. And by fourth dimension he meant time. So that movement and time and circles related. And a writer Hans(?) wrote on Kandinsky not that recently but about this painting and at this time. This concept of movement is intimately related to his indefinable new form of space. And consequently to his new principles of composition. As in counterpoint music there is no one thing formally speaking to which the other forms are subordinated. But all the elements have an independent life of their own. An autonomy. All the elements have autonomy. How are they held together? They are held together not by a principle theme but by the constellation of all of them together. That both movement and emotion become evident as a result. So it's the constellation. Of course this is that at the same time the Jung is developing an understanding that psyche contents constantly. This is how they they come together and we have to understand their composition in this way. Not taking some ego based theme and try to thread them together in terms of that. But to see them in their numinous constellation as they are. To understand them as they are not as we would wish them to be. and then...I hope this **inaudible word** And this being done at the same time. This was to his wife at Christmas. And it contains 13 circles, two triangles and five ruler light volumes. And two crescents. He wrote about this that it looks like enameled implements for a religious service. Almost as if the one on the right there as a monstrance or something. Yet the opaque enameled like color appears to become de-substantive and advanced by transit lucidity in corporeal nature. So they become magical, luminous circles over a deep black background. And this of course is very much the way in which the psychic contents of the unconscious disclose their structure. Not in terms of someone's diagram but in terms of their magical independence. And it comes constellational quality. This is an illustration from Jung's Red Book. A serpent and a tree coming out and **inaudible word**. And this is a contemporaneous painting by Max Ernst, The Wind Bride. The fantastic bull horse shaped Dynamis of the unknown occurring next to the circular golden hoof. And both of them occurring together. What links them together? The wind. The spirit. The pneuma. Here in Kandinsky's painting of 1930, one sees like an ultimate refinement into fading geometricity. And the circle there has become a dark blind. A spot as it were. And we'll see it's like that the veils where one becomes a definite, the other the context of it becomes in substantial or de-substantiated and so on so. This is the Red Book. this is a photo. It's not ever been published, translated and published. I think it's locked up for another generation. Just a couple of slides showing now the mandala. Simple coming down into a stone cube. Which occurs there and the garden in Bollingen. That's the house there. Here's one of the facades. And one sees a figure in the center of the circle. One sees the quaternary not arranged in a geometric rulered way. The quaternary is there courtesy of a lightning like differentiation in terms of obliques. Remember the magician card with the arms **inaudible few words** And a big final slide of Grandpa Karl reading in front of not a stone. All of this mysteriousness somehow belongs in human life. We'll come back next week. END OF RECORDING