Dream Analysis Seminar

LECTURE VI 26 February 1930

Today we will continue our discussion of the dream. Are there no questions?

Mrs. Sigg: I could not find anything about the yantra in the library.

Dr. Jung: I can well believe that.

Yantra is a term from Tantric philosophy, designating any kind of device or symbol that serves the purpose of transforming or centering the libido of the one who is concentrating upon it.

It has been explained by a German scholar by the term “machine.”

The word is used for mandalas and for other ritual symbols instrumental in the transformation.

To speak of transforming energy through a rite may seem strange to you, but this is an exceedingly primitive idea.

The most original form of yantra is the churinga used by the central Australian natives.

That is either a stone slab or oblong board which is given to a man after his initiation.

Each man has his individual churinga, which he keeps concealed in some hiding place.

Then from time to time, when his libido gets rotten or wrong, his health power exhausted, he takes it out, places it on his knees and rubs it with his hands for a long time.

Through that procedure the bad health is supposed to be absorbed by the churinga, which releases at the same time its good health power, its good mana, and that enters the man’s body; then, the ceremonial being accomplished, he conceals his churinga and goes away.

After a couple of weeks or a couple of months, according to his need, he returns to again renew himself.

This is perhaps the most primitive form of worship and the most primitive form of yantra.

Naturally, in subsequent ages and stages of civilization, ·it has become far more differentiated and meaningful, although even today there is an example of a similar nature at the shrine of St. Anthony in Italy.

The pilgrims there press their whole bodies against his marble sarcophagus and rub it with their hands in order to get the good health power.

We call it grace, a release from the suffering of the soul as well as the body.

Later on this rubbing was replaced by a sort of mental rubbing against a thing.

In my book Psychology of the Unconscious you will find the development of this idea of the transformation of symbols and libido in etymology and history.

I speak there of Prometheus, the fire-bringer (from the Sanskrit root-word manthami, from which is derived the word mathematics and also the word thinking).

That was the original rubbing, shaking it to and fro in one’s mind, constant movement, rhythmical movement; but translated now into the needed spiritual form, meditation.

So when the believer is meditating on the yantra, it is the same as rubbing the churinga.

I must again point out that when I call the mandala a yantra, as it is in the East, it means something quite different from its meaning to us.

The mandala has to us the meaning of a product, an expression, and its specific value is that it is an expression, and not that one uses it as a finished instrument, a traditional dogmatic form sanctioned by time, and serving as a ritual symbol or yantra.

Its importance to us is just the reverse.

There is a tremendous difference between the symbols of the East and the West.

To produce them is all-important for us, it is a means of expression; and it would be poisonous for us to use the finished products of the East to bring about a transformation of our libido.

If it works at all it is not for the good and it has a sterilizing effect, because first of all we have to build our unconscious up to symbolic expression.

Perhaps in two thousand years or so we shall use these symbols when they are in a finished condition as yantras, but there is no possibility of that for the present.

Mr. Holdsworth: I should like to know whether this rubbing of the skin is a deep-rooted thing, because animals do it such a lot.

Does a sick soul produce an irritation of the skin?

A cow rubs herself until an irritation is produced sometimes, and it seems to me that it is all connected up and a cow is practicing this symbol when she rubs herself quietly and happily against a tree.

Dr. Jung: That is perfectly true.

It is certainly an original form of worship when they rub up against a stone.

We have the same idea in the lingam symbols; they take butter for the purpose of rubbing them.

It had its origin in animal instincts, which surely could take on a spiritual meaning.

We don’t know what ecstatic feelings a cow may have!

Dr. Baynes: In England they used to erect the rubbing stones in a ceremonial way for the cattle to rub against. There are any amount in Cornwall.

Dr. Jung: Exactly. Those menhirs were no doubt for that purpose and for nothing else.

Mrs. Crowley: Would the rubbing of beads by Orientals be like it?

Dr. Jung: No, that is really different, that comes from a kind of nervousness.

You lose the traces when you follow it up. For instance, the handling of the rosary is extremely primitive and it is almost habitual, that rubbing of the little beads.

Or the peculiar custom that certain people have of always holding something in their fingers; or when you are thinking hard, you are apt to scratch yourself behind the ear.

It means something which seems to have to do with sexuality, that rubbing produces courage.

I saw a peculiar scene once when I was travelling in North Africa.

A Bedouin mother came down to the train with a little boy about two years old

I had a spare piece of bread which I tried to give to the child, but he was afraid to take it from a white man.

The mother smiled and said he was too frightened.

Then suddenly she took his penis and rubbed that little thing, and then the boy got up his courage and took the bread with a smile.

That was one means to produce courage, which is the same mechanism.

Of course we could talk about these things at length, many things would deserve attention from this point of view.

Mr. Holdsworth: Does alcohol irritate the intestines?

Dr. Jung: I wouldn’t say that alcohol rubbed the intestinal tract.

After a fall we rub the place with ointment, but it is not the ointment which is effective, it is the rubbing.

In German we speak of “Behandlung,” the putting on of hands.

The Old Testament is full of it. Magnetism, hypnosis, however one explains it, one can at least say that it increases the circulation.

Mothers have very nice little charms or mantras when children hurt themselves; she takes the child’s hand and rubs it and says a little verse.

Dr. Schlegel: I think the effect consists to a certain extent in the fact that you centre the attention upon something else, you take away the morbid attention from the spot that is painful. As when
one is dealing with a delicate business affair, one often smiles and it relieves the tension of the situation.

Dr. Jung: That is true.

Dr. Deady: Does the Westerner, in making a mandala, ever use the Eastern form?

Dr. Jung: They seem to quite instinctively concentrate upon a form that is more or less an analogy of the Eastern form, but only more or less.

The number four is an example. I must say that I have seen by now many mandalas and the number four is by far the most common.

I have seen it with five, and some with six, and only one with three as far as I can remember, but in that case, it was perfectly obvious that the man who made it was lacking in one function, that of sensation.

The Greek mandala cross, for instance, the swastika, is the four-footed sun rolling on four feet.

The original form of it was really the disc of the sun with four little legs, as among the red Indians.

But on pre-Christian Greek coins we find a three-legged symbol, which is called a triskelos.

Miss Pollitzer: Which function did the Greeks leave out?

Dr. Jung: I don’t know. Speaking of it in those terms it is difficult to say. Greece is altogether a puzzle psychologically.

Our ideas about Greece have undergone great changes.

We used to think of it in terms of pure beauty, wonderful temples gleaming against blue skies, splendid gods, Olympians living a courageous sort of life. Old Greece seemed to be absolutely on the surface in blazing sunshine.

But that is all wrong.

There is a very dark, tragic, mystical Greece hidden in the past, an entirely different aspect that was discovered only in the time of Nietzsche.

Before that, people thought only of Attic beauty and paid no attention to the dark side.

Especially in reference to Greek mentality we are not quite clear, at least I am not.

It was a very peculiar mentality, and you may have noticed that when you read Greek authors at different periods of your life, you get quite different impressions.

For instance, I read the classical Greek tragedies when I was in school, and then I read them again twenty years later and was tremendously impressed with their extraordinary primitivity-murder, incest, and blood all over the place, which did not impress me at all when I was in school.

It is perhaps that Greece is too close to us-it is specifically Western.

Well, we began to discuss this dream and did not finish it. It is a pretty involved situation.

You remember we spoke of the fact that after the dream before, one could expect something to happen, and one assumed that now things were ready, now the machine could function.

But instead comes an entirely new situation.

Evidently the dreamer has begun to function more or less, and then an obstacle-an obstacle in the church to which he went as a little boy.

He has gone back from the present moment to his eleventh or twelfth year, so we may expect that there is a reason why he cannot move on, why the machine, despite the fact that it is ready, will not function yet; there seems to be something in his path which prevents it.

Sure enough, there is a certain attitude which probably originated in about his eleventh or twelfth year.

There is a detail in that church to which I call your attention, namely, that the benches are so arranged that they surround the pulpit on three sides, and thus the parson, in delivering his sermon, would have the whole community assembled rectangularly around him, with his back against the wall of the church.

It is an unusual arrangement, but I should not pay much attention to it, as it is a detail certainly derived from the church of his childhood, if it were not that it is again mentioned when the singer turns up.

He is on a bench around the corner at right angles to his own, so, as it is a detail that goes right through the dream, it must have a certain symbolic importance.

One must always keep in mind the psychological situation of the dreamer, which is very complex.

You would probably be inclined to assume that he is exclusively concerned with his own problem-what he is going to do with his machine.

But that is not true.

He is of course concerned with his specific problem, but he is concerned with it looked at from the angle of the analytical situation.

A patient never dreams absolutely apart from that.

It may happen in the beginning perhaps, where there is no rapport and the patient is entirely within his shell, looking into himself in a sort of autoerotic way, but this man has done a
lot of analytical work and has a good rapport with me, so we can assume that whatever the solution of the problem may be, that will always be included.

The dreams must always be in a certain rapport with the analyst. Looked at with that in mind, then, what about the benches?

Mrs. Deady: In his first dream, the benches were arranged in such a way that there was no communion. Here there would seem to be.

Dr. Jung: Quite so.

You refer to that early dream, but there it was not a church, it was really the jeu de paume, and there the benches were arranged in such a way that the backs were all turned to the centre, where the preacher or any central Figure would have been. In that dream there was practically no rapport, you see.

That was a very early dream, and he was still in himself.

But here we have an entirely different situation.

The audience is turned towards the speaker. Now who or what is the audience? There is a whole community in that church.

Mr. Holdsworth: He is making a demonstration, he is showing some attitude to the rest of the world; and the audience consists simply of the people who receive the demonstration.

Dr. Jung: Well, he doesn’t demonstrate in the right way, he is as one among many.

That is a motif which often occurs in analysis.

Patients dream that they come to me for consultation and when they enter my office, somebody is already there or people are continually passing through my room.

They are never alone, so they never say what they mean to say because they are all the time occupied by other people.

Or they are told that a patient is with me and I cannot see them.

Now all these dreams mean that the patient does not come alone.

He comes in the form of many people; his point of view is not one, it is many. Under what circumstances do you think that would happen?

Dr. Schlegel: When a person is identified with other people.

Dr. Jung: Of course.

That happens very often, particularly with women.

When we are speaking of a certain problem, there is no question of what she is doing, but what one is doing and what they are doing.

I always call that the problem of the eleven thousand virgins because it usually has to do with a discreet problem.

But if any discreet solution would recommend itself, she begins to talk about what the 10,999 virgins should do, but carefully avoids discussing what she, the patient herself, might do or think.

She appears as an overwhelming host and that kills all possibility of an individual solution.

The animus has the peculiarity of thinking gregariously.

He thinks how that problem would be solved if ten thousand other people had the same problem.

But social problems are always individual problems.

Five thousand people may be actually sick with typhoid fever, but each patient has his own specific typhoid fever.

So these people in all modesty identify themselves with legions, and naturally there is then no solution.

I cannot solve the problems of the eleven thousand virgins in one heap-I can perhaps do something for one, but not for a legion, it is impossible.

So the dream says: you cannot solve your problem when you are dealing with so many people-the father, the mother, the grandparents, friends-they all interfere, this one saying so-and-so and that one something else.

Therefore I say to such a person: leave all that stuff alone, appear on the stage and say I, and not as they opinionate.

That is the dreamer’s case.

His attitude is as if he were one of a battalion, as if he were just like the whole community in that little respectable church, where they all have the problem of being married and don’t know what to do with it.

Mind you, there are people who are not married yet, people who have been divorced, very old people of every social stratum, and he assumes that all have the same problem.

But that is impossible, that is participation mystique.

He-projects-his own problem into the crowd and therefore it becomes impracticable and he cannot manage it.

Many of those people would firmly deny that they had such a problem, but he naively assumes that everybody has it and takes the whole community as an expression of himself.

He tries to handle it from the standpoint of the many, as if it could be answered by legislation, as if a law had been passed in Parliament that each person should do this or that.

Now, all this gregarious thinking is centred around the parson.

What does that mean?

Answer: The parson means the analyst.

Dr. Jung: Yes, I would be the parson.

He is nonexistent here, but it is obvious that I would be he, and our dreamer’s gregarious thinking is now perfectly willing to listen to the enlightened words of the parson.

Here again is a mistake. What would that be?

Answer: The parson does not say anything.

Dr. Jung: First of all he says nothing, there is no sermon, so they would listen in vain. And besides that?

Suggestion: He is projecting his problem into the parson?

Dr. Jung: He assumes that he would say suitable words, and as he heard it in church it must be all right; he would surely carry the advice out because they were the words of the parson.

That is a very characteristic and specific attitude-that one listens attentively and takes the words of the parson, and dismisses one’s own individual attempt, thereby hindering one’s own advance.

Then you remember his saying that he was forced to go to church as a child, which he disliked extremely, and he never went later for that reason.

So the dream seems to suggest, since he hates to go to church, why then does he go? Why does he have that attitude?

It takes the negative example as a symbol for his attitude.

Then comes the singing.

It has been pointed out that there was no sermon, but the community was singing. Of course singing is an expression of feeling, so he is now using his inferior function.

Here we get a light.

You see, whenever one is unable to deal with a complicated psychological situation, then very often, on account of the lack of one function, one tries to deal with that situation using functions
that are simply not applicable.

There are certain predicaments in life which one cannot intelligently deal with by means of thinking.

This very delicate erotic situation demands feeling.

He has thought about it-to his complete dissatisfaction-and obviously he should bring out his feelings.

That has been the case in former dreams already.

Now when that expression comes in a dream, what would you conclude from the fact? What has been the omission of the dreamer?

The dream points out a singer.

Mrs. Sigg: He omitted to express his feelings to his wife.

Dr .Jung: How can he express his feeling to his wife in company with the whole community?

Suggestion: His feeling for the analyst?

Dr. Jung: That is right, but he expresses it in a peculiar way a Protestant is a peculiar thing.

They all sing some hymn to God and turn their faces to the parson thinking that is the way of God.

His relation to me has been chiefly technical, I am the intellectual mechanic, and feeling in connection with me has played no part in his dreams.

His feeling is entirely collective, so he certainly cannot apply it to his wife. How can a whole battalion love Mrs. So-and So?

He can apply it here for the first time, he can sing Hosanna.

By putting me in the church as the parson and he himself as part of the crowd, he can express his feeling in a gregarious way, he also can sing because all the others do. And now he is singing a Christmas song.

Why just that? And, mind you, it is one of the best known songs of this country.

Miss Howells: It is the birth hymn he is singing, the birth of his feeling.

Dr. Jung: Yes, it is a birth hymn, but we must see about its feeling value.

He is quite informed about symbolism, he has read a good deal, the intellectual side is no trouble to him.

But the feeling here is infantile.

This is a song that we have all sung as little children; it is perhaps the first song which would make any impression upon a child’s heart.

They may not understand the words-they sometimes twist the words into the funniest things. “Christ, our hope” they call “our grasshopper”!

There are funny things in childish prayers. Here, you see, he brings out the first solemn recognition of feeling when the whole community sings this Christmas song.

Here a lot of very genuine childlike feeling comes to the fore, and that is in connection with what we might call a sous-entendu in the dream. I am the sous-entendu.

So here you see the possible value of that community singing. What would that be?

Answer: Unity.

Dr. Jung: Not only that, though that might be the effect of it.

Mrs. Sigg: Strengthening of the feeling.

Dr. Jung: Quite so. Strengthening. You must understand the feeling of that man as something that creeps on its belly, unable to lift its head, something weak and soft which needs strengthening.

He needs a whole audience to help him bring out his feeling expression.

He could not get up and sing this song alone, as he could not express any kind of individual feeling for me.

He might quote the words of somebody else about me-“as he says.”

He might say that the Zurcher Zeitung had written thus and so about me, but he could not do it himself, even if he felt much more.

I emphasize this point because later in the dream that man gets up suddenly and sings an entirely different song alone, against the whole community.

That would not happen if it were not so tremendously important for the dreamer to sing his own tune.

It has a definite positive value, but there is a catch.

4 Principal newspaper of the city, now called the Neue Zurcher Zeitung.

Dr. Schlegel: It is not individual.

Dr. Jung: Exactly. It is done collectively, he can have his feeling without any responsibility, and that is what such a man absolutely needs.

The slightest trace of responsibility crushes his feeling right away, so that crowd is almost necessary to help him realize a feeling with responsibilities.

But naturally no sooner does that happen than up comes a new problem, and that is now the singer.

What does the fact that he sings an entirely different tune suggest to you?

Mr. Holdsworth: That somebody does not believe in the tune that the others are singing.

Dr. Jung: Obviously. Almost like a protest.

Dr. Baynes: A minority report in Parliament!

Dr. Jung: Yes, and it is again a feeling expression, it is not an opinion. It is really the same song but an entirely different tune.

What would that mean?

Dr. Schlegel: It is the individual attitude that is coming up.

Dr. Jung: Yes, one could say it is now individual, an individual voice in the dreamer that stands up for itself against the utterly gregarious situation which prevailed before.

The singer is now a very interesting figure.

You remember that he is characterized as somewhat Jewish in type, and he is hermaphrodite-at least there is great doubt about his sex-and the dreamer associates the hermaphrodite
in Meyrink’s novel Der Golem,

Now we have to go into a part at least of that story, which is really a very big attempt at dealing with figures of the collective unconscious.

Of course Meyrink does not know anything of my theories.

He deals with it in an entirely literary fashion one could say, with all the advantages and disadvantages of that method, yet the figures are perfectly recognizable.

First there is an anima figure called Miriam, a Jewess.

Then there is her father, Hillel, an old Cabalist, who is a typical wise man, also a figure of the collective unconscious.

That is a very sound connection, the wise old man is often in a father-like connection with the anima-either physical or spiritual.

In the case of Haggard’s Wisdom’s Daughte~ there is no actual father, but an old Egyptian priest instead, and She would be his medium.

It is a well known fact that priests often used young girls as seers or for casting oracles.

Now, these two figures play the main roles in the story.

Then there is that fearful thing, the Golem.

And there is besides a mysterious character called Athanasius Pernath.

He is a peculiar figure who enters in the beginning of the novel as the lover of Miriam, in whom the hero of the story (which is told in the first person) is interested too.

They meet somewhere and exchange hats, so the hero walks off with the hat of Athanasius, whom he does not know at all, and through this hat he gets fantasies and ideas into his head,
which do not belong to him but to Athanasius.

The name Athanasius is in itself a most valuable hint, it means the immortal one, so he is the immortal part of the hero.

In terms of the mandala, that would be the “centre,” the “diamond body.”

That has been expressed in other speculative philosophies in many different ways, such as the “spark of eternal fire,” the “sea-hawk:” or that precious immortal body, the Nous, that descended from above into the sea and through which all things came into existence.

Man is like that a chaotic sea into which a divine spark falls.

The baptism of Christ in the Jordan, when the Holy Ghost descends upon his head as a dove, is the same idea.

Also, the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples at Pentecost in the form of little flames-the creative spark that comes from above.

That is age-old symbolism.

It is revealed at the end of the book that the whole story is due to the fateful mistake of the hero in getting the hat of Athanasius.

He suddenly has visions of things that he does not understand, a sort of psychosis and the story deals with different phases of this.

The Golem is an entirely negative figure, the complete shadow of the immortal one.

He began as a lump of clay and was brought to life by black magic, by writing the holy name on his brow.

So he is a living being that has no soul, a mechanism which can be killed only by wiping out the holy name.

The figure occurs in many ancient Jewish legends, and Meyrink used it as a personification of the horrible troubles which befall the hero through those visions.

Then at the end of the story he has a sort of clarifying vision.

After many adventures he comes to the house where Hillel and Miriam are supposed to be living-a simple white house in a garden, with a wooden gate in front.

As this is the place that the dreamer refers to in his story, I will give you a rough translation of the way the author puts it:

“The night before it had been the same place, but now in the morning I see that it is by no means a simple place. There is a very beautiful golden gate, quite an elaborate thing, and there are two yew trees which rise above low bushes or flowering shrubs, flanking the entrance. I see now that the wall around the garden is covered with a beautiful mosaic made of lapis lazuli.

The god himself, a hermaphrodite, forms the two wings of the gate, the left side male, the right side female. The god is seated on a precious throne of mother-of-pearl, and his golden head is the head of a hare; the ears are erect and close together, looking like the two pages of an open book.

The air is full of the smell of dew and hyacinths and I stand there a long time, astonished. It is as if a foreign world were opening before my eyes. Suddenly an old gardener or servant
in the costume of the eighteenth century opens the gate and asks me what I want. I give him the hat of Athanasius Pernath, which I had wrapped up in paper.

The servant disappears with it, but in that moment before he shuts the gate behind him, I look inside and see not a house, but a sort of marble temple, and on the steps leading up to it, I see Athanasius with Miriam leaning on his arm. Both are looking down upon the town. Miriam catches sight of me, smiles and whispers something to Athanasius.

I am fascinated by her beauty. She is so young, just as young as I saw her in the dream. Athanasius then turns his head toward me and my heart almost ceases to beat. It is as if I should see myself in a mirror, such is the similarity of his face to mine. Then the gate shuts and I only see the resplendent figure of the hermaphroditic god.

After a while the servant brings my hat which was in the possession of Athanasius and I hear his voice, deep, as if from the depths of the earth. He says, ‘Mr. Pernath is much obliged and asks you not to hold him inhospitable that he does not invite you in, since it has always been a strict law of the house that guests are not invited. He also says he has not used your hat as he noticed at once that it was not his own, and he hopes that his hat has not caused you headache.'”

But it caused a tremendous headache!

Here we get into very deep waters, because this figure in the dream is obviously taken from that symbolism.

We naturally would not be able to see it from the form of the dream but from the associations.

It is valuable, in such a case, to have the associations, from which one discovers all sorts of things of which the dreamer is not aware.

We are forced to bring in all these considerations that are in this passage from Meyrink. The Jewish element certainly comes from this book; the dreamer associates that he is reminded again of the hermaphrodite of Meyrink and mentions that he thinks he is half a Jew.

The main figures of the story are also Jews, but these do not appear in the dream; the only one that occurs in the dream is that man who seems to be a hermaphrodite.

Now what would you say was the meaning of that figure after considering all this material?

Mrs. Crowley: It has the monotheistic idea. Jehovah was considered to be male and female in the Cabala. There is an analogy with the hermaphrodite there.

Dr. Jung: Mystics in general have had that point of view, and that would fit in with the idea that this figure might be God himself. Is that your idea?

What would you assume the hermaphrodite and Athanasius, Hillel, and Miriam to be?

In the dream, the immortal one, Athanasius, and Miriam are practically one figure, they are drawn together, which would almost allow us to say that is God because such a condensation would be called God on theological grounds.

What are the historical instances for such a composition?- are there no theologians here to tell us?

The Trinity, of course: the Father, the Son, and the female figure, the Holy Ghost.

The dove, the symbolical bird of love, was the bird of Astarte.

And originally in the Oriental church, the Holy Ghost was looked upon as a female figure, Sophia, the wife of God.

That idea is found in the “Pistis Sophia” and in other Gnostic manuscripts.

Mrs. Holdsworth: Did the Coptic Church cut out the virgin?

Who is going to be the husband of the Virgin?

Dr. Jung: That also leads to the idea of the hermaphrodite, but at the moment we are considering the idea that this condensation figure, two male figures and one female figure, is based on the idea of the Trinity.

We are now arriving at the interesting conclusion, following out Mrs. Crowley’s suggestion and according to the associations of the dreamer, that this figure is God.

The hermaphrodite in Meyrink is very clearly a god, three persons in one.

But don’t you think it is awkward to be confronted with such peculiar conclusions?

It means that God is singing a different tune from the people in his own church.

It suggests the famous story of the rich peasant to whom the people went to collect funds because the 8 Cabala (or kabbalah), the Jewish mysticism of the Middle Ages, embodies the
belief that every word and letter represents mysteries understood only by the initiate.

It is a form of gnosis based on scriptural interpretation.

old church had been· destroyed by lightning.

He said: “I am not such a damned fool as to give to one who has destroyed his own house!” Now what are we to conclude about this God singing a new tune?

Mr. Houlsworth: That God has a sardonic sense of humour, which I have always suspected.

Dr. Jung: We must not get blasphemous. When it comes to psychology we must stick to facts.

Dr. Schlegel: The Church belongs to the old collective God, but now comes a new God.

Dr. Jung: It might be so, for God is not allowed to have a word these days, the Church has taken it all out of his hands.

It is quite possible that he has changed his views in two thousand years; anybody would change his views, even if he were eternal.

So it is quite possible that he sings a different song now.

We are not informed. When we go back into history and remember what he said to the Chinese and the Hindus and the Jews and the Egyptians, it is hard to reconcile.

There are many very justifiable points of view.

To make them agree-that is a job for a superior mind.

We must be serious about this matter, for our dreamer is not at all an irreligious man, he has convictions.

And if I should say that miserable sinner sitting on the bench opposite him was God singing a different tune, it would be rather startling; when I reach the conclusion that the voice is God’s, according to all our wits, that is a pretty big statement.

If I were to say it was Mr. Smith’s voice, well and good.

But if I say that every minute we are in the presence of God, that he must collect his senses and realize that just as all our remote primitive ancestors have believed that the voice of dreams is the voice of God, so here the voice of God has spoken-well, if that man has any realization one would expect him to cock his ears at least.

But it is as if I said to you: I have disagreeable news-a phone message from the Observatory that at a distance of perhaps seventy million kilometers, a meteorite the size of Africa is headed for the earth, and those seventy million kilometers will be covered in no time, in a few days perhaps or a few weeks.

You would say that that would be startling news, but I tell you that people would be entirely unable to realize it.

We must wash, shave, have patients, have lunch, to hell with that stone.

Yet it is certain that within ten days our whole earth will be blasted to atoms.

I have seen time and again that people are unable to realize certain truths.

So when I say to this man that this is the voice of God, he takes it like a metaphor and just thinks it is a poetical way of putting things.

In this case it is of the utmost importance that his feeling should be touched; one should be careful to see in how far he can realize it through feeling.

Something must happen to his feeling; it is so soft, so weak, that divine intercession must take place in one form or another.

If I say to him that this singer is a compensatory phenomenon he will make an intellectual joke of it.

While if I make the flat statement: this is the voice of God, quite simply, that means that in such a feeling situation he almost invites divine intercession, and that a superior force will step in to help him where he is weak.

It has always been tremendously helpful when people could realize that just where they were the weakest and lowest; there intercession takes place. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 492-506