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“I am the origin and the dissolution of the Universe. [That’s the line that flashed into Robert Oppenheimer’s mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion—the origin and dissolution of the Universe.] There is naught else existing higher than I. Like pearls on a thread, all of this universe is strung in Me.
“I am the taste in waters and the radiance in the sun and moon; I am the sacred soul, “Ohm” in all the Vedas—sound in the ether; self-consciousness in mankind; I’m the sacred fragrance in the earth and brilliance in fire; I am the life of all beings and austerity in ascetics.
“Know me as the eternal as seat of all beings, the intellect of the intelligent and the prowess of the powerful. Oh Arjuna, I know the past, present, and future of all beings, but no one knows Me.
Now I will remind you that what’s being expressed here is the nature of the Self--what the individual psyche can encounter. This is the way it talks about itself. This is its phenomenology—that the Self, which has as its only available manifestation of consciousness an individual incarnation. Each individual Self, to the extent that it comes into visibility, talks like that.
It has some similarity, the way Krishna describes himself, to the way Yahweh speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. But it is quite different too. You see the whole style is different. It’s much calmer; much more objective. There’s no whirlwind here. One might say more civilized here. It’s more psychological. The west is barbarian psychologically compared to the east.
What Krishna does then is explain to Arjuna, in this calm objective way, the difference between the Ego and the Self, thereby acquainting him with the nature of the Greater Personality. And this revelation happened because, like Job, Arjuna persevered in questioning the Greater Personality [Krishna].
Another example: Paul and Christ. Here again we return to the scriptures in another world religion. The relevant texts are found chiefly in the Book of Acts, and I’m going to read to you a compilation of the essential accounts. I think it’s better to hear it first hand rather than have it summarized. [41:47 of the audio.] This is Paul speaking:
“I once thought it was my duty to use every means to oppose the name of Jesus, the Nazarene. This I did in Jerusalem. I myself threw many of the saints into prison acting on authority from the Chief Priest. And when they were sentenced to death, I cast my vote against them. I often went around to synagogues inflicting penalties--trying in this way to get them to renounce their faith. My fury against them was so extreme that I often pursued them into foreign cities.
“On one such expedition I was going to Damascus armed with full powers and a commission from the Chief Priest. And at mid-day as I was on my way I saw a light bright as the sun come down from Heaven. It shown brilliantly around me and my fellow travelers. We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Hebrew,
“Saul Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you kicking like this against the goa.”
“And I said, “Who are you Lord?”
The Lord replied, “I am Jesus, and you are persecuting me. Now get up and stand on your feet, for I have come to you for this reason. To appoint you as my servant, and as witness to this vision, in which you have seen me, and of others in which I shall appear to you. Get up now and go into the city and you will be told what you have to do.”
“The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless, for though they heard the voice they could see no one. Saul got up from the ground, but even with his eyes wide open he could see nothing at all, and they had to lead him into Damascus by the hand. For three days he was without sight and took neither food nor drink.”
Paul was initially absolutely shattered by his encounter with the Greater Personality. He was blind for three days, and according to certain traditions and certain accounts, there’s reason to believe that he had to retreat for three years into Arabia. I think that’s very likely. I think it’s very likely indeed.
Paul’s encounter with the Greater Personality, he identified with Christ, you see, and that’s the origin of the Christian Church, as we know it anyway. May be violently resisted by the conscious Ego, as witness the persecutions of the Christians that Saul engaged in before his vision. This is a psychological phenomenon that is well documented. And certainly in Paul’s case it’s very understandable in view of the fact that the awareness that was brought to him by his encounter with the Greater Personality imposed very rigorous requirements on his life.
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You see in the case of Paul he was obliged to sacrifice his personal life totally. He had no personal life after his encounter with the greater personality. He was turned into a slave of Christ. He begins his letters to the Romans and to the Philippians by calling himself, “Paul the slave of Jesus Christ.” He begins his letter to Philemon, “From Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus.” At that’s what he was literally.
Paul’s experience gives us some of the clearest statements we possess as to how it feels to have had a major encounter the Great Personality. The state of being captive to the greater one is summed very well in the 2nd chapter of Galacians, where Paul says,
“I’ve been crucified with Christ and now I live now not with my own life, but with the life of Christ who lives in me.”
Jung made a statement that is not so far from that in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections. After his encounter with the unconscious and with the personification of the Greater Personality, which was called Philemon, he says, “It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone; ceased to have the right to do so. Ceased to have the right to do so. From then on my life belonged to the generality. It was then that I dedicated my life to the service of the Psyche.” The Psyche is analogous to Paul’s experience with Christ. They’re two different terms for the same phenomenon actually, that are appropriate to the contexts of their different cultural and collective Psyche faculties.
Alright there’s one more. I’m now going to make the leap of 2,000 years and talk about Nietzche and Zarathustra. Preceding Jung’s example, this is the outstanding modern example, which led to a literary production. We don’t know how many anonymous encounters of this nature there may have been, but the individual was never able to integrate sufficiently to give it formulation and transmit it larger audiences, and the experience died unseen. But Nietzche was able to do that.
Jung makes the remark that, “It is only the tragedies of Goethe’s Faust and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra which mark the first glimmerings of a breakthrough of total experience in our western hemisphere.” What he means by western hemisphere is western civilization. And “breakthrough of total experience” will be synonymous with the Greater Personality. Only Goethe’s Faust and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra bear witness in modern times to this encounter with the larger center of the Psyche. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is vastly more important, in my opinion, psychologically because the author lived it totally. Goethe did not. Goethe remained in an Olympian stance above the experience of Faust. Nietzsche lived out his experience totally to the bitter end. It’s the first real encounter of the modern Ego with the Greater Personality that left a record of the experience. He perished in that encounter.
But how could it have been otherwise, since he was the first to tread this unknown region—and of course to be ignorant of its dangers. You can’t know of dangers until they’ve compassed you about; until they’ve already got you. I think we owe a tremendous debt to Nietzche. Jung learned from his experience. He learned a tremendous amount. I’m convinced that without Nietzsche’s example, Jung might very likely have been a fatality.
In his memoirs Jung wrote about discovering Nietzsche in 1898. Here’s what he said,
“I was curious and finally resolved to read him. Thoughts Out of Season was the first volume that fell into my hands. I was carried away by enthusiasm, and soon after read Thus Spake Zarathustra. This like Goethe’s Faust was a tremendous experience for me. Zarathustra was Neitzche’s Faust. Number 2 personality, and my number 2 now corresponds to Zarathustra, and Zarathustra was morbid. Was my number 2 also morbid? This possibility filled me with a terror, which for a long time I refused to admit, but the idea cropped up again and again at inopportune moments, throwing me into a cold sweat, so that in the end I was forced to reflect on myself.
“Nietzche had discovered his No. 2 only late in life, when he was already past middle age, whereas I have known mine ever since boyhood. Nietzsche spoke naively and incautiously about this secret, this thing not to be named, as though it were quite in order, but I had noticed in time that this only leads to trouble. That I thought was his morbid misunderstanding; that he fearlessly and unsuspectingly let his No. 2 loosed upon a world that knew and understood nothing about such things. He was moved by the childish hope of finding people who could share his ecstasies and could grasp his trans-valuation of all values.
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“He did not understand himself, when he fell head first into the unutterable mystery and wanted to sing its praises to the dull god forsaken masses. That was the reason for the bombastic language, the piling up of metaphors, the hymn like raptures. All a vain attempt to catch the ear of a world, which had sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts.
“And he fell, tightrope walker that he proclaimed himself to be, to depths far beyond himself.”
[53:16 of the audio.]
Now actually we have data that demonstrates that Nietzche encountered the Greater Personality for the first time in early adolescence. But Jung was not familiar with this source. Not very many people are.
After Nietzsche had his breakdown in 1889, he was hospitalized in a mental hospital, and he was considered insane for the rest of his life--the next 11 years. He was unable to express himself in any kind of coherent way. However, his internal psychological function was much more intact than his outer appearance indicated.
He wrote a manuscript while in the hospital, and smuggled it out with another patient. He had to get it out past the watchful eyes of his sister, who would have destroyed it. This is a highly dramatic and significant event. He succeeded in smuggling it out, and it was eventually published, and its available in translation, but nobody knows about it; and the reason is that the Nietzsche scholars are involved in conspiracy of silence against it, because what he talks about are the psychological facts of his life.
The Nietzsche philosophers imagine that they belittle Nietzsche the philosopher. What they do is enlarge Nietzsche the human being. This work has been published under the unfortunate title of My Sister and I. It’s a very unfortunate title, but it wasn’t chosen by Nietzsche. It was chosen by his publishers to capitalize on the most scandalous aspect of this work, which talks about the incestuous relations between Nietzsche and his sister since childhood. So needless to say that did have to be smuggled out past the sister. [Laughter]
Anyway, it is a marvelous psychological document because Nietzsche has realizations, in his experience of total defeat, which apparent insanity of course would be for a person of such vast intellectual brilliance. He fulfilled as a human being, and this is all communicated in that book. Someday someone will do a full psychological case history of Nietzsche, and he’ll then take his place as the first depth psychologist.
Anyway, this is all a preface to a quote I’m going to read from this work. Here’s what he tells us:
“Of all of the books of the Bible, 1st Samuel made the profoundest impression on me. In a way it may be responsible for an important spiritual element in my life. It is where the Lord three times wakes the infant prophet in his sleep, and Samuel three times mistakes the heavenly voice for the voice of Eli asleep nearby in the temple. Convinced after the third time that his prodigy was being called to higher services than those available to him in the house of sacrifices, Eli proceeds to instruct him on the ways of prophecy.
“I had no Eli,” says Nietzche, “not even a Schopenhauer. When a similar visitation darkened the opening days of my adolescence. I was all of twelve when the Lord broke in on me in all his Glory—a glaring fusion of the portraits of Abraham, Moses and the young Jesus in our family Bible.
“In a second visitation he came to me not physically, but in a shudder of consciousness in which good and evil both clamored before the gates of my soul for equal mastery.
“The third time he seized me in front of my house in the grasp of a terrible wind. I recognized the agency of the divine force because it was in that moment that I conceived of the Trinity as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. We’re talking about an adolescent here you see.
This indicates that Nietzsche’s prophetic function was born at the age of 12. These particular revelations with their emphasis on the conflict of the opposites indicate that the Self in its modern phenomenology, the way we are acquainted with it had been constellated in him. So the core issue for him had been the polarity of Christ and the antichrist. If you read his works carefully, you can see that to be the basic underlying issue.
Consciously, Nietzsche sided with antichrist, he deliberately identified himself with antichrist. But unconsciously he identified as Christ, so that after his breakdown he signed some of his letters “The Crucified One.” But either way, he lived his life out of a profound religious attitude.
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The way Jung puts it, “the tragedy of Zarathustra is because his god died, Nietzsche became a god.” And this happened because he was no atheist. He was of too positive a nature to tolerate the neurosis of atheism. It’s dangerous for such a man to assert that “God is dead.” He instantly becomes the victim of an inflation.
Nietzsche was very important to Jung. If you need any further evidence on that, surely the fact that he conducted a lengthy seminar on Zarathustra over a period of five years the notes of which are accumulated in 10 volumes ought to suffice to demonstrate that he was seriously concerned with Nietzsche.
I want to read you just a couple of small excerpts from those notes from the Zarathustra seminar. He was born in 1844, and he began to write it in 1883, so he was 39 years old. The way he wrote it is most remarkable. He himself wrote a verse about it [in German]. Which means, “Then one became two and Zarathustra passed by me.”
That means that Zarathustra then became manifest as a second personality within himself. That would show that he had a pretty clear notion that he was not identical with Zarathustra. But how could he accept assuming such an identity in those days when there was no psychology. Nobody then would have dared taken the idea of a personification seriously. Or even of an independent and autonomous spiritual entity.
1883 was a time of a booming materialistic philosophy. So he had to identify with Zarathustra, in spite of the fact, as this verse proves, a definite difference between himself and the old wise man. Then the idea that Zarathustra had to come back and mend the faults of his former invention is psychologically most characteristic. He had an absolutely historical feeling about it. It filled him with a particular sense of destiny. Of course, such feeling is most uplifting and it was the Dionysian experience par excellence.
In one of his letters to his sister he gives the most impressive description of the ecstasis in which he wrote Zarathustra. He says about this way of writing, that it simply poured out of him, it was almost an autonomous production. With unfailing certainty the words presented themselves and the whole description gives us the impression of the quite extraordinary condition in which he must have been—a condition of possession. It was as if he was possessed by a creative genius that took his brain and produced this work out of absolute necessity.
I want to give you an example. This will do it much better than any talk can do of the kind of ecstasis that Neitzsche could fall into.
[1:04:37 of the audio.]
He describes it in this book, Ecce Homo. This is Nietzsche speaking:
“Has anyone at the end of the 19th Century had any idea of what poets have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one has the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation; merely mouthpiece; merely a medium of overpowering forces.
“The concept of revelation in the sense suddenly of indescribable certainty and subtlety; something becomes visible, audible; something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down; that really describes the facts. One hears one does not seek; one accepts; one does not ask ‘who gives’; like lightning a thought flashes up; from necessity without hesitation regarding its form. I never had a choice.
“A rapture, whose tremendous tension occasionally discharges itself in a flood of tears. Now the pace quickens involuntarily; now it becomes slow; one is altogether beside oneself with a distinct consciousness of subtle shudders and of ones skin creeping down to one’s toes; depth of happiness in which even what is most painful and gloomy does not seem something opposite but rather conditioned.
“Everything happens involuntarily to the highest degree and a gale of feeling of freedom; of absoluteness of power; of divinity; the involuntariness of image and metaphor the strangest of all. One no longer has no notion of what is an image or metaphor; everything offers itself as the nearest and most obvious simplest expression. Here all things come caressingly to your discourse, and flatter you, for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride to every truth.
“The words and word shrines of all beings open up before you; here all being wishes to become word; all becoming wishes to learn from you how to speak.”
Well, he’s describing the experience of the unconscious in this creative rush of meaningful image. Very few people can describe it so well, because he had such super powers of expression. Most of Thus Spake Zarathustra was written in this ecstatic state of mind. It poured directly out of the unconscious.
