Encounters with C. G. Jung: The Journal of Sabi Tauber (1951–1961)
001 Don’t let your salamander be incited by your relatives! It is a cold-blooded animal that can stand the fire and remains calm through it all. It is the ‘stone of wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 36
002 “How did you withstand the great darkness?” Jung’s voice was calm when he replied, “I wasn’t always able to.
But because I surrendered to the darkness, it released me again. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 36
003 You have to be more honest! Pay attention to every movement of the soul, look at it, and be lovingly creative with it.
A noli me tangere attitude makes one dumb and unrelated. True relationship enriches.
To engage in a short-circuited sexual liaison leaves one poor and dumb – one has cheated oneself. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 26
004 If other people’s wings are lame, leave them behind; you two are to fly on nevertheless.
The true spirit, as it lives for example in the / Ching – clear and yet cunning; clever and wise; open and yet hidden – this spirit helps in dreams and in daily reality to break the spell of the dark mother. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 26-27
005 Jung answered mildly, telling me matter- of-factly about the almost unbearable challenge of his destiny:
For the past 150 years, the ancestors on his mother’s side had been ministers, on father’s side physicians.
He had to take on the issues from both sides and solve them!
In addition, there was the problem of the body and soul. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 29
006 Often it is the dead ones who are calling on us with their questions and problems.
Everything spiritual comes from that realm.
Each one takes on his ancestors and passes himself on to the next generation with one’s own solution. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 29
007 To find the right way between the calling of our destiny and the tasks of everyday life is very difficult.
Weekdays, this is what you do: in the morning you sort out the very urgent from the urgent.
The question is: is it better that I do very little for only a few people, or that I die from exhaustion and not be able to do anything for anybody anymore?
One has to bear the fact that one cannot do justice to everybody.
Then you make a program for the day and hold on to it ritually! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 29
008 By all means, one has to fight every day for one’s own free time to restore libido within, otherwise one perishes in today’s fast paced, empty rushing.
I for one don’t go to concerts or the theatre anymore in the evenings.
Try to have your kids in bed by pm, and from 8 to 10 pm the time belongs to you and your creativity. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 29
009 Be consistent! But at 10 pm you ritually wrap up and go to bed, otherwise the body gets abused.
Discipline makes happy. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 29
010 A tonsillectomy is needed when external poison combined with our own, inner poison becomes one source of poison.
Such a monster is very dangerous, for as soon as it is finished with its victim, it goes on to the next one, that is, such a libido-drain into the unconscious ‘spreads’ and endangers your husband and your children!
One becomes the monster, because the libido flows backwards into oneself. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 31
011 The lesion in your case is the inferior, negative intuition.
It should lead positively to your feeling, but instead your intuition cuts the feeling off negatively.
The blood empties toward the inside and worthlessly seeps away, instead of pouring out into a creative act, full of joy and strength! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 31
012 It was as if Jung would throw a golden ball into the depth of my ‘inner fountain.’ Through him I experienced God. He said that he didn’t ‘believe’ – he ‘knew.’ And I know now firmly through him. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 32
013 Well, this is wintertime, when Demeter has to cede her child to Pluto. The River god has kidnapped the child; it’s his turn.
You have to say yes to that; you have to let it be winter, give yourself to the
Rivergod – only then can it be spring again, rebirth.
And besides, you don’t have to ‘endure’ it; precisely not to endure, rather, you have to let yourself be overwhelmed, for he is greater than you – he is God! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 32
014 The meaning lies in the wave flooding you.
Not that you have to overcome the unconscious; the unconscious has to overcome you.
It’s an amazing grace to be chosen to become Pluto’s mother-in-law, and it is a fabulous honor to be personally called by the Rivergod! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 32
015 God needs the child part-time, because he has to restore its mana, renew its divine nature, therefore it is the divine child.
The youngest daughter symbolizes one’s own future, which one can never fully experience because one dies before that. The other half of the daughter belongs to the Other. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 32
016 We all are pilgrims. We should not be all that attached to this world.
A tramp is unbound; he is only a visitor on this earth; his home is in the beyond. The dream tells you: This is what you carry within -know and appreciate it! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 32
017 It was as if Jung would throw a golden ball into the depth of my ‘inner fountain.’ Through him I experienced God. He said that he didn’t ‘believe’ – he ‘knew.’ And I know now firmly through him. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 32
018 Don’t let the Rivergod wait! It is a distinctive honor to be called.
A primitive would become chief because of it.
With every experience of God our understanding grows, and we become capable of greater things.
The self doesn’t give us tasks we can’t do.
One cannot write and speak of everything about God, but between two people one can feel it. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 34
019 At the beginning of the new year I was allowed to visit Jung.
He was sick, indeed, and sad. I was ashamed to have had even the faintest expectations, and he immediately sensed my feeling and said, “No, there is no libido left, no strength in my heart, and no creative impulse.
And that’s what you need; that’s precisely what you came here for. It’s totally natural and okay. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 52
020 But one doesn’t really need an analysis when one has real, true relationships and is able to think psychologically.
Just be real and true to yourself, and the people around you will be forced to be the same, which will create real and true relationships. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 52
021 Then he [Jung] mentioned for the first time a distinguished old lady who knew geomancy very well, saying that she will deal with the organization of the group work.
“Honestly, she looks like a ghost and is part witch, but she is very knowledgeable and smart! Only, you may not be afraid of her!” ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 52
022 Once in a while there came a little note from Jung, as encouragement and a reminder to see it through.
Then I met for the first time ‘the woman’ prophesied by the gypsy.
Though I’d been prepared, I fell headlong into her trap!
It was a good lesson and I am eternally indebted toward her.
Thank God, my dreams provided the opportunity to meet with Jung. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 53
023 “You are much too reasonable, that’s why your heart is hurting.
It’s almost suffocating, because it is so imprisoned.
You think ‘nothing but real’ but you should also include rubeus and puella in your worldview!
Those have to be integrated.
Out of the so-called ‘real world’ you have to make a ‘psychic world.’ ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 53
024 Precisely because you are much too reasonable and realistic, the life of the soul (the psychic world) becomes so intense and vehement – all rubeus and puella, which elicits identification with them.
Live more in the ‘psychic world,’ apparently unreasonably and irrationally, and you will integrate rubeus and puella.
In this way they will loosen their intensity and at the same time become real.
This closes the circle. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 55
025 I asked him whether I was not simply too cowardly to live rubeus and puella in a concrete way.
“No,” he replied, “it’s a fateful calling on which level you have to live it.
Puella and rubeus are psychic factors that can’t be dealt with on the level of ‘popularity’ because of your acute sense of reality – it wouldn’t make sense anymore.”
And softly, but urgently, he added, “Should you ever do something ‘unreasonable,’ know that it would be an alleviation.
Don’t let it confuse your heart (that would be identification).
Though it might be chalked up to you in outer life, for the inner life it is fine.
Thinking like that protects against identification.” ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 55
026 And then Mrs. Jung very kindly invited me for lunch.
I was terribly embarrassed, to Jung’s obvious amusement.
But he had a way to cheer me up so that it became a very pleasant meal for the three of us, with open windows, sunshine and a smiling ‘knowing’ lake.
The two were like my parents, changed and yet the same. I received and found myself engaged as mediator, transformed and yet, also, the same.
This is the year I turned forty. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 62
027 In support, and as a reward, I was privileged to experience Miss Hannah’s genuine courage and energy.
She gave me a felt sense of a wonderful righteousness.
Catching my every thought of flight, yet never denouncing my weakness, she strengthened my own courage.
“Seeking death is the longing for rebirth,” she remarked wisely.
Behind every word stood the proof of her own life. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 62
028 To start off, Jung encouraged me to continue my work with the synchronicity phenomena, in spite of the difficulties with Mrs. X.
Concerning her power and hardness, he gave me the following explanation: “She would have to admit to far more of her own shadow, so as to be in direct contact with the earth.
Because she doesn’t have a ‘stand’ without such an earth-contact, she constructs a kind of coordinate system in her mind about the world and humanity, and forces everything into it subjectively and despotically.
Synchronicity makes her insecure, and therefore she exercises power over us.
But there is no insight with power, only with love. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 62
029 There are people who smash a motor that doesn’t work, instead of checking with love what might be wrong.
“Where I’m concerned, I should simply continue my work in the dark and stay open for everything. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 62
030 He [Jung] told me how, for example, during This research on dementia praecox, he was under a constant fear of going insane.
In the heat of summer he’d dreamed that suddenly an icy coldness set in. He thought that was the onset of insanity – but then, in 1914, war broke out. ~Sabi Tauber, SabiTauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 63
031 But you can never forget that Nature is just as cruel and deadly as she is life-sustaining! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 63
032 As to my husband, Jung suggested that perhaps all of his anima was invested in me, and only if I don’t hide out, only if I am completely real, open, and conscious, can he come to his own reality through mine.
In that way, the unconscious no longer slides between him and his anima. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 63
033 Oftentimes, female analysts would exercise power over their analysands at the end of their analysis, as soon as they act from their totality, in order to keep them ‘down.’
Conversely, male analysts simply evade the challenge and withdraw. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 63
034 The whole personality, and a clear and brave attitude is needed for a friendship to develop, a true relationship.
Most people are afraid when one is one’s essential self.”
Then he asked me whether I had ever sensed such evasiveness in him.
“No, never!” I answered with conviction, for that was precisely his greatest asset: his total presence and his rock-solid reality. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 63
035 Actually, he continued, one should always be able to live essentially, but that was impossible.
He therefore had learned to wear a mask and to ‘make belief that he knew nothing,’ so that his partner would be talking without inhibition. Insight into the other is a danger! ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 63
036 When I was deadly sick, everything fell off me; I had to forge a long and solitary path, and only those parts of my personality, that at some point of my life I had painfully and laboriously integrated, came faithfully with me. Those have become eternal values. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 63-64
037 In the future I will bow deeply before every rainbow.
It is a radiating symbol for me of ‘overcoming,’ and the only way from earth to heaven. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 64
038 Miss Hannah made an attempt at rescue.
She had a way of showing me my flight from the earth and sounded an alarm based on a warning dream, saying that I wanted to be too self-sufficient, too independent. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 64
039 I visited him in Kusnacht, with, and in spite of, my illness for I knew that only he could see deep into my heart. It was a stormy day.
I put my hand into his and simply had to cry for a while.
His wonderful benevolence radiated calmness and warmth over me.
Through tears I asked him how could I possibly make water out of my inner fire, so that I could better tolerate lying still.
He smiled gently, “Just like that – with tears.” ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 64
040 Jung taught me exercises on the piano to train the independence of the right and the left hand.
Jung’s comment: “To play the piano means using and living the feeling function.
All feelings have two sides, positive and negative, conscious and unconscious.
With these, one can be dependent or independent.” ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 66
041 Humans cannot be perfect, only God. A desire to be perfect is false arrogance, hubris. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 67
042 Then we looked at my newest tarot and geoscope:
Jung commented: “Many epees, that is a lot of spirituality, but also high values of coupes (reine coupes): large femininity – it’s the problem of masculine and feminine within you.” ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 68
043 Jung, for example, did not intuit what the number four might mean when he studied it, but he compiled the reality of the number four from all he could find in the world.
The four is reality and truth; he had not to invent the correspondences. ~Sabi Tauber Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 69
044 As an encouragement to stand strong, Jung sent me a couple of books with the newest scientific insights, i.e. Pascual Jordan, Verdrangung und Komplementaritat (Stromverlag, Hamburg-Bergedorf 1947), and James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy (1943).
They were fabulously clear and aroused my enthusiasm, for they all gave prime importance to the soul. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 70
045 Furthermore, there were Jung’s letters to an English clergyman, which I got to read as well, admiring their wonderful strength.
I made a translation for myself.
Water and heaven are my Thou!
Perhaps the door to people will close –
lonely I can see the winds,
blowing quietly across the earth:
Fertilizing spirit – timeless
it works for eternity. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 70
046 We humans must live in reality, that is, have our own mana and real relationships!
Nobody knows what Christ was like as a real person; like William Tell he is a myth.
I only want to be real, without the burden and responsibility of a myth. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 71
047 The natural sciences work only with dry statistics; theology weighs everything morally. In that way, both lose their essential, real values.
Psychology on the other hand includes everything and is therefore true, real life!” ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 71
048 this is melancholy because one cannot live one’s feeling openly and fully.
Then, of course, one is not as vulnerable as a flower in nature that might be plucked by anyone at any moment.
Individuation grows on its own.
It is the totally true and real way of a human being, his essential pattern, as in the example of the leaf-cutting ant.
One has to follow faithfully, go with the current, ‘grow in the forest.’
We must do what we hold to be right and what is possible.
In that way we answer the question that our destiny puts to us. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 72
049 They don’t understand my idea of synchronicity.
It doesn’t work causally, but meaningfully, and only when emotion is involved! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 72-73
050 The principle of probability calculations is wrong.
‘Mere coincidence’ is more than we assume – it’s not just ‘chance,’ it’s all ‘arranged’! Synchronicity is a reality!” ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 73
051 Jung told me that he’d like to leave out the astrological experiments
in the next edition of his book on synchronicity, because, time and again, people get the idea that he wants to prove the correctness of astrology.
But that wasn’t the point! His reservation is with the application of the theory of probability. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 73
052 The flying saucers, too, are a phenomenon of synchronicity: new life is coming from outside the earth, from a new standpoint.
But it’s like a ‘spook in the stable’: one doesn’t talk about it, because it is dangerous!” ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 73
053 Synchronicity exactly fits into your life.
You have to experience it in your own life, ‘for real.’
With you, either everything is here (full of life), or there is nothing (no joy, no gana); these are extreme opposites to be dealt with, if one has no experience.
With a goddam naivete, like ‘The Little Rose from the Santis,’ You fall into the traps of Mrs. X.!
You don’t experience yourself enough. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 76
054 You only fall victim if you don’t know your other side; otherwise you could say, ‘Yep, have known this for a long time!’
Something always happens when one inwardly says ‘yes’ to life.
You look like a teenager, outright ‘prohibitive,’ full of expectations and longings.
Say yes to yourself, then life will come to you! The light is only your will; God is in the shadow. Don’t mix this up! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 76
055 Many pastors don’t understand the Book of Job, because they don’t have a genuine relationship with God, only an assumed one.
So, they have no idea of the terror of the religious man before God.
The most important thing for man is his personal relationship to God (children education).
All of Job (whether from different sources or not) is built around this one experience: the relationship between man and God.
People with a genuine religious sensibility understand this immediately. (Again, the simple folk!) ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 80
056 When I visited Jung for the first time in the new year, I was touched by how loving and caring he was.
With increasing eagerness, he proceeded to explain why one shouldn’t be a coward toward life. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 81
057 Especially the dark side of life has to be accepted wherever it presents itself; only by having lived and accepted this life completely is one redeemed forever.
And there is only one situation where shirking something is allowed, namely when the burden of being a coward (the knowledge of it) is as great as the ‘holy sin’ one would commit otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 81
058 I had to accept life. Exactly where one is a coward and shirks from the darkness, incest with one’s children begins. What I don’t do, my children have to do. Sexuality still has a totally different task besides begetting children. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 81
059 He[Jung] had lived so securely in this long-lasting partnership that it came as a real shock.
Thank God, by summer they could both celebrate his 80th birthday with full confidence and quiet happiness.
After the grand celebrations and bestowal of the umpteenth honorary doctorate, they danced a waltz together in their own garden to the music of the village band! ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 84
060 Every once in a while, I had had a dream about Mrs. Jung.
She had been a living example to all of us women of how to love without being possessive, and how to suffer without turning bitter.
She was wonderfully grand!
Because of it, her partner gave her the greatest gift: the path to one’s own God.
At the beginning of the following year she would no longer be with us. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 84
061 One has to learn to deal with such a superpower, for it wants to be part of you!
Divinity is caught in its own power of creation, world-creating but blind (an animal, an elephant, for example).
Thus, Job did not know God in the beginning; he did not fathom his power. You are at present under the pressure of the elephant!” ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 85
062 Only in life-endangering situation can one see what one is capable of.
Just don’t fail, by all means, and don’t ruin God’s “game of incarnation” with nonsense or sexual adventures!
To prove oneself in the fire!
In civilized, everyday life there is no opportunity for that.
But everyday life and daily chores are like eating and drinking.
We need that, otherwise we die, and God cannot incarnate himself. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 86
063 Without the reality of everyday life, the plant of eternity cannot grow and thrive.
It wants to grow in this world, here and now. God himself wants to grow! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 86
064 Through my experiences with Jung I receive my individuality; I recognize
myself in them and become myself.
(Now I understand why he loves Goethe’s poem, The God and the Bayadere so much!)
My everyday life got a new face.
But it remains difficult to weave it into a worthy cloth for eternity. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 86
065 He [Jung] had to do some errands on the way and guided me securely through the complicated maze of the streets in Zurich, all the while talking and joking.
He expressed his unhappiness over the many misunderstandings around his theory of synchronicity and, in general, over the lack of followers. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 89
066 He [Jung] responded by telling me about the demand of fate for detachment.
He laughed, “Had you known me earlier, life would have become much more difficult for you, because the demand for detachment is there anyway, but when we are older, we can fulfill it more easily. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 90
067 There are such white men who are especially vulnerable to snakes, and black people immediately take notice.
They are the pueri aeterni types, those who are not grounded, who shy away from any sort of responsibility, wanting to be free and unbound, ‘flying high.’
They usually die early, and this is their way of being ‘free as a bird.’ ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 91
068 In Bollingen he would always cook himself; at home the cook would ask him about menus and advice on how to prepare them.
He knew hundreds of exquisitely rare and exotic recipes! “Cooking is earth,” he said in response to our incredulous giggling.
“Why should taste be less important than hearing? Cooking over the open fire is a difficult and dangerous matter. It is magic!
The fire is hot and we get ‘fiery’ – a thousand different things have to be observed to make it a success.
Of course, ‘swearing’ is part of it (as with sailing)! ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 92
069 After he had emptied his glass of Burgundy, I asked Jung, with the wine bottle in hand, whether he liked some more.
He declined resolutely, “No thanks, I only drink one glass” – then took the bottle out of my hand, “or one and a half” and poured himself some more. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 92
070 He [Jung] saw his wife as a 15-year-old girl in the stairwell [at the Rauschenbach’s home] for the first time and immediately knew that this was his wife! He had even left the house and told his friend that he had just seen his wife! ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 94
071 Youth needs firm guidelines to grow up (as, for example, to always act like a gentleman, or to always be absolutely honest).
In old age, the situation changes; increasingly, it depends on the ‘how’ instead of the ‘what.’ ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 95
072 Jesus was the first to teach people that one’s attitude is important – he went to school with the Essenes. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 95
073 What is right in the first, biological phase of life is not right in the second, other phase of life.
There is a total reversal in values.
If values and perspectives don’t change, a neurosis will surely develop at forty, midlife.
A complete transformation has to take place, lest there be death.
The passage to the second phase starts at the darkest end. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 100
074 Men, for example, generally believe that it starts with sexuality
(brothels are sustained by married men).
But the development in the second phase must lead to the great eras that holds the human community together (which is transpersonal, not personal). ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 100
075 Men get hypnotized only by the sexual character of this eros, but it’s not sexual at all.
If someone still tries to solve the problem on the sexual plane, he ends up in a depression because he missed the meaning.
A man has to serve his anima (La maittresse) like a knight, just as the animus should serve the woman and not dominate her! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 100
076 Animus and anima are true half-gods.
If a man comes to feel his anima, he has to stop and say to himself: ‘Still, be quiet, the goddess is present!’
He has to go into submission and be committed to her.
But if a man has only cursed and suppressed his anima, then of course she remains inferior, dull, and stupid.
He has, then, to make her aware of her unconsciousness! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 101
077 A woman who cannot include her soul in intercourse is mere anatomy.
Women must have an enormous claim.
Sexual intercourse in the second phase of life can oftentimes feel deeply humiliating for the wife in a marriage, if she functions as the legitimate prostitute of her husband.
One must see it absolutely as it is.
The real marriage begins where adultery seems to take place.
At that point a true, real relationship may begin, actual love begins! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 101
078 If one partner loves someone outside the marriage, it is his very own, personal business, perhaps following his innermost law.
No special ‘gestures’ are needed, like touching, sexual intercourse etc.; they do not matter.
The subjective inner truth is the absolute essence (independent of gestures); that is the innermost freedom.
This problem reaches everybody who has a claim to spirituality – precisely because it means spiritual growth. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 101
079 Body means reality. Sometimes the body is an abyss and one gets engulfed, while spirit flutters around by itself like a butterfly.
A dangerous separation ensues that leads to death, for one lives outside of reality. Vitality in its fullest is experienced when one lives totally within the body and with the body!
Every spiritual progress includes a better connection to the body. (Yoga!) ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 101
080 In earthly union wants to form.
Without connection to the body, spiritual progress is simply nonsense. Where a soulful connection exists, we should think: ‘Beware, you are in higher presence!’
A God or a Goddess is present.
It doesn’t matter who it is.
It is a sacred mystery that belongs wholly to oneself. It is pure experience, and the freedom of the soul!” ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 102
081 Soul-connections outside the marriage are absolutely legitimate in the second half of life. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 102
082 One has forgotten that one is not the only master of one’s house.
Up to the Middle Ages one was aware of that.
In this respect, the Reformation has sinned as well, pouring out the baby with the bath water, whereas the Catholic Church has maintained a relationship with the unconscious through its cult. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 104
083 Here is yet another example of wrong Western thinking: One assumes that education in the natural sciences gives us an accurate picture of reality.
But the “norm” of the natural sciences is not an existing reality at all; it is an abstraction, only a statistical means. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 106
084 In the natural sciences we live in a totally artificial world, abstracted from reality, and that’s why the scientist has a hard time finding his way around in it.
The statistical truth is the way of stereotyping society, something we take over from America, which is not at all different from communism. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 107
085 This is also the reason why India with its many illiterates is endangered by communism, in spite of its old culture, because people don’t understand their culture any more.
Nehru has tried to maneuver, but it is a dangerous game! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page
086 That is the self of man, the Unknown, Christus in nobis, the kingdom of God.
Therefore strive first to know yourselves!
Here Christ touches on the secret of individuation, self-realization.
In the Indian religion, the primal being is Atman Purusha, the primeval man, who sacrificed himself in order to build the world. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 107
087 There are people who believe that Christ was familiar with Buddhism.
In the second century before Christ, Buddhist monasteries sprung up in Persia.
After the conquest of Alexander the Great, there were relations with India. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 109
088 There, the “son of man” figures as the steward of justice, the advocate of man before God. Christ has identified himself
with the steward of justice.
When he calls himself “the son of man” he took it directly from the Liber Enoch: The son of man, chosen by God, who ensures that humans are justified before God. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 109
089 Yahweh was in danger of falling into oblivion with the emerging Greek spirit.
Many Jews only spoke Greek.
Jesus was the reformer who saved the Jewish religion by saying that “God is good.”
This is why he saw Satan falling from heaven.
He saved the Jewish religion by affirming that God is good.
The Apocalypse brings back the “Fear of God.” The old, terrible God reappears. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 109
090 It took Jung years to track down the apocryphal texts that had been left out of the Bible.
The Liber Enoch records the expectation of the great Essene community that the “Son of Man” would come to help humanity gain its rights before God. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 110
091 Faith and knowledge are not opposites, because these concepts lie on different levels.
Objects of knowledge are facts.
The stories in the Bible obviously are not meant as descriptions of facts – as
such they would be either impossible or nonsense, like, for example, the Trinity, or the Immaculate Conception. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 111
092 A virgin can indeed be pregnant by a spirit.
There exists in all languages an expression for spiritual pregnancy.
And from this emerges the savior of mankind, the Son of God.
The Jews say that Mary was a hairdresser, and that Joseph got her pregnant out of wedlock, so she had to give birth hidden away in a manger. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 111
093 Mary represents the feminine that is innate in every man.
But in intellectual men the feeling function is often undeveloped, just as for beautiful women beauty is often valued higher, at the cost of thinking. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 111
094 Pueblo Indians call themselves “the sons of the sun.”
Jung had been impressed by their great dignity and, next to them, felt like a ridiculous puppet. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 113
095 One does Yoga – meaning that the West seeks access to its own culture via a detour through the East, while the East is doing the same thing through the West. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 113
096 Many people have two drawers: one for the weekdays, where they store their knowledge; the other only for Sunday, where they store their faith. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 114
097 At last I follow the old man in his heavy wooden clogs up the small trodden stairs to the tower room.
It is warm here and cozy, but the air weighs heavily.
One has the feeling of important things happening here all the time.
He stretches out comfortably in his old, shaky armchair (which, I fear, threatens to break down at any moment), lights the pipe, and looks at me – and under this gaze one is transported at once into the core of the universe, the place where fate is forging the future. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 118
098 In his youth, the man is clear and determined; he has firm intentions, an enduring will.
He first develops his logos.
The young woman has vague wishes and goals; she lacks differentiation.
She is passive, she adapts to her man.
Her interests are drawn to this and that; she develops her feeling first, and logos comes second. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 118
099 Man develops his logos first, then it all reverses.
For the woman, increasingly more weight is given to the animus – he forces her to name things, to recognition, the search for meaning, development of logos, lucidity of feeling, spiritual development in general.
The man, through his anima, is driven away from logos into the feminine sphere, has longings for feeling states. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 118
100 Jung continues by telling me that he experiences the most meaningful period of his life right here and now, in Bollingen.
Here he leaves the world of thought and intellect behind, and existence becomes timeless.
He forgets who he is, living in relationship with Mother Nature, touching on endlessly profound, enigmatic things without wanting to understand them, only touching. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 118
101 Women, too, are in danger of being possessed by the animus – then they are ridden by an opinionated devil!
Their urge for clarity may get on a man’s nerves.
A strong animus is always a danger; he is god-like! I have had a very strong anima, otherwise I would never have come to psychology.
This is why I had to work in the first place.
Neither would you have come to psychology without your strong animus. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 119
102 By all means, you have to fix your gaze on this point, that is, you have to keep your goal in mind with all your might, otherwise you will lose your consciousness – and God wants our consciousness; he needs it for his redemption.
If you keep your eyes fixed on the far-off point, the castle always remains close by.
That’s how it’s supposed to be. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 120
103 The beauty of this world is a true divine power, and one comes under its spell by looking at it directly!
You may not enter the castle, lest you lose consciousness, and then God would feel betrayed, for, by Himself, he is an anonymous power without a reflecting consciousness.
One has to keep the goal in mind, then the power follows. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 120
104 In a man’s psyche, the sorceress in the castle spins a web around him; he is being abducted like Merlin and has to go on in the twilight, swaying blindly, moved by currents, suspended, swimming.
Then the magic being stays close, just like you have the castle close by.
But if he would enter directly, he’d be swallowed up by the terrible Mother, and then the Mother is betrayed!
The man must have already won clarity when he enters the twilight, otherwise he is lost!” ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 120
106 Your animus has wrapped you up in one big vapor of ideas, rendering
you blind for what is close, true, and alive!
Don’t be so complicated!
Tolerate your warm, genuine feeling, even if it hurts the damnedest!
You want to avoid the pain, so you incarcerate your feeling in a deep cellar and close the door.
Well, and then what happens?
The animus takes its place with his empty haze of ideas, and you sit in the dryness.
Life is wiped out. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 122
107 You have to be like a child and take yourself completely seriously.
You have to make gifts to your empty heart, follow your ‘appetites,’ really do ‘stupid things,’ only the animus thinks one will be laughed at.
You may never again suppress your feeling, lest life become a wasteland.
Take it seriously; ‘it’ is always right! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 122
108 Never think how the people around you might react – it only matters what it means to you.
The simpler one is, the greater is life, for then it is on the level of nature.
Whenever you feel that your life force is vanishing, simply ask your unconscious, ‘What do you want?’
Seek your own water, your own source, otherwise you automatically drain that of others.
109 One has to concretely seek life! I, for example, let my hand sometimes go along my bookshelves, and all of a sudden there is a kind of inner twitch.
That’s the book I take out – and look here, there’s meaning!
That’s what my unconscious wanted to tell me.
Or, I might simply look all around me, questioningly, and discover a face in a rock.
I paint it and talk to it – and life is with me! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 123
110 Pay attention to where it is inclined within you; be mindful of your ‘desires.’
To look for a source means to dig in the dirt until it becomes increasingly wet.
Then one first has to let the dirt settle until one can collect the clean spring water.
That is reality: to dig into life!” ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 123
111 My eyes grew wide open in wonderment.
I mused, “You really are an artist!”
He laughed freely, “Life is an art – unfortunately we have to learn this lesson anew, because we are distorted by culture to such a degree that we have forgotten how to follow the flow of water, like an underground waterway, that is, to follow the potentials in a totally irrational manner.
Pour water onto a plain, and it will immediately find even the slightest gradient and start to flow. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 123
112 A gnostic, a Carpocratian, once pointed out that one should find a different reading for the particular paragraph in the Bible where Christ says, something like, ‘Before you place a gift onto the altar of God, go and make peace with your brother, otherwise you will have to appear before the judge and be dragged into prison.’
Taken subjectively, related to yourself: ‘Make peace with the brother within you, before you stand before God.’ ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 124
113 I said, “It is the sacred within you that I love so much, so I only want to belong to it and not be attached to you!”
My own words frightened me.
But he only shook his head “If you want to catch the pearly dew of God/ Just hang unshakably on to his mankind.” A saying by the German mystic Angelus Silesius (1624-1677). ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 124
114 Born hermits are very rare.
The world would have disintegrated into single cells, were it not for a connecting eros holding it together.
This societal cohesion is only achieved by a free libido that is not bound up by family.
You need contact with other people; your free libido wants to achieve something.
Accept life where it approaches you! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 125
115 Ignaz and I picked him up in Bollingen, much too early of course.
But Jung, too, was ready, lovingly outfitted by Miss Bailey with hat,
cane, and coat.
He teased her on the way out, to be sure to let him back into the house late at night!
We drove back to Winterthur in snail-tempo, holding our breath while listening to his outrageous ideas about flying saucers.
It was more thrilling than an adventure novel. ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 126
115 Jakob Bohme wrestled with this problem.
But then he was also a Gnostic, and the Gnostics are always insulted for struggling with questions that the theologians have brushed aside as uncomfortable.
In truth, they were theologians, for example Valentinus or Basilides; the great Gnostics were great theologians.
Valentinus, for example, was even papabile; he aspired to the bishop’s seat in Rome. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 130
116 Among the new finds of Egypt, in this Gnostic library, we have an original script from the Valentinian school, the so-called Evangelium veritatis, the Gospel of Truth, where, contra to other fathers of the church, he tried in a reflective way to extract the quintessence of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 131
117 These people thus came upon the problem: “Where does evil come from?”
This question comes from Basilides, the great Gnostic, who concerned himself especially with the question of evil, and hence with the problem of the shadow.
So, for these Gnostics it was clear that Christ was, in fact, born with a shadow, but that he cut this shadow off from himself, and this shadow became the devil. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 131
118 This fits with the history of symbolism, in that Christ and the devil have a whole series of symbols in common.
For example, the devil is “the lion,” and Christ is “the lion,” Leo de tribe Juda or, “He [the devil] is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for one to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).
Or the eagle and the stella matutina, that is, the morning star, Lucifer.
Both are Lucifer. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 131
119 Or consider, for example, the highly original Therese of Avila.
From some of the anecdotes one can see very well what she really thought.
Once she was on an outing. A wheel broke and the carriage fell to its side.
She had to crawl out from under and then said, her gaze turned toward the sky, “Now I understand why you only have such few friends!” ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 138
120 Our daughter said, when her grandmother tried to teach her the Lord’s Prayer – she was seven years old – “I won’t pray that.”
I asked her, “Why not?” – “God doesn’t lead us into temptation, that is evil.”
And she persisted. I didn’t tell her this.
But, when you consider, the almighty, the all-knowing, the greatness of the Godhead, about to lead those little aphids on earth into temptation: what an idea! ~Sabi Tauber, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 140
121 Meister Eckhart says in his sermon about Sin and Repentance, “God has burdened those
He loves most with sins beforehand. And the apostles – were they not altogether deadly sinners?”
He, too, knew that it corresponds to the will of God that man also has to go through the darkness, and that there is no redemption without a price being paid for it. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 141
122 To Americans I’m fond of saying, “Mary had a little lamb. It was as white as snow. But once she took it down to Pittsburgh … ” – and now look at the damn thing!
I don’t know whether you understand this American slang?
Ignaz Tauber: Not everybody does.
- G. Jung: That’s a famous nursery rhyme: “Mary had a little lamb, his fleece was as white as snow.”
But once she took it down to Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh, you must know, is black from soot. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 141
123 In the natural sciences you have a so-called real object that is in no way tied to your psyche.
It is independent. I mean, you can die and the object is still there.
With the psychic it is apparently a wholly subjective business, in that it only functions as long as you psychically function. Apparently. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 145
124 But if one examines this more closely, we are actually dealing, in the case
of the natural sciences, with insights that hinge on an external object that is difficult to recognize.
Which means, they are conditioned by the object.
How difficult these observations are, demonstrates, for example, modern nuclear physics.
It is extraordinarily difficult to get a picture of what’s happening in nature. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 145
125 But in truth the psyche is precisely that which we don’t know about ourselves!
What we know about ourselves is our consciousness and its contents.
This consciousness, however, is considerably disturbed by objective processes, which in themselves are unconscious and unknown to us; it finds itself in opposition to them. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 146
126 The crystal has an axial psyche. It’s the same with us.
We also have a mathematical foundation of the human being, the psychic human.
You can observe this in mandalas – there we have a definitive or mathematical structure, an axial system, that brings about infallibly, and in the uncanniest way – certain things that seem quite miraculous to us.
But it is a mathematical structure, as for example the so-called “3 + 1” structure of traditional mandalas. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 147
127 This, then, is the collective unconscious, which is impersonal – as impersonal as, for example, the human liver.
The human liver is approximately the same in a Chinese, or an Indian, or an African, or an Eskimo.
Just as the heart and all the fundamental vital functions are about the same.
They are not personal.
It’s not your personal prerogative to have a heart, or your personal achievement
to have a stomach. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 149
128 For example, cooking salt simply has a cubic nature.
Water has a hexagonal structure.
It simply has it, so this it is [categorized]. If it doesn’t have it, it’s not water.
You cannot suddenly discover water that crystallizes in another system, or cooking salt.
It’s impossible, it’s part of it.
And so, to every living being belongs a psyche that is objective, which we didn’t seek, which is present before we even know it. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 148
129 Perhaps you’ve also had the experience of a talented astrologer quietly telling you your whole life story from your horoscope – and it is accurate!
That wouldn’t be possible if not everything were fundamentally laid out and aligned in a synchronistic manner with the positions of the stars.
That is incredibly simple. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 149
130 Once I had an assistant who later committed suicide.
Years before. [ … ]There is such an astrological system.
At the time, I calculated the charts myself because I wanted to find out how they worked.
I saw that he had a symbol.
There is a symbol for every degree of the zodiac, from the ascendant, from the moment of birth.
A horse grazing, unaware that it is stalked by a tiger.
The commentary, already printed and available long ago, read, “One who will prematurely disappear through suicide. Before his time.” And so it was. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 149
131 Ah yes, then mainly a treatise of astrology [By Mr. Gocienius] from a medical perspective. Very interesting!
Therein one finds the first individual horoscopes and rather smart questions, for example about the psychological relationship between murderer and victim, how this is expressed astrologically. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 150
132 Then I started to preoccupy myself seriously with it [Astrology], and I found that it was the old psychology.
It was the old psychology, based on the objective-psychic.
The case with the objective psychic, you see, is such: I have a certain character and a certain individuality, and that consists of imponderables.
It’s something like when you give a wine connoisseur a special wine that you know where it comes from, and this wine connoisseur can tell you, it’s such-and-such year, such-and-such location, and so has to be such-and-such vineyard.
This is possible. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 150
133 And so, too, is man imprinted at the moment of his birth with the location, the country, his environment, the whole kairos, the moment in time.
And this is expressed in the horoscope.
This is why you can already discern certain predispositions in the horoscope (the
birth chart), which sometimes later in life might play a very big role.
Astrology, in fact, is coming into full bloom in our time, not in the Middle Ages.
There it was in its infancy. In our time, astrology is at its peak. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 151
134 And just as the body is composed of various organs, so the psyche consists of various archetypes, of inborn forms.
These are not inborn ideas, but forms of psychic happenings. They are forms of instinct.
Instinct is not simply a dynamism that does something; rather, instinct is specific and therefore has a specific form. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 151
135 When God becomes man, he enters the dark sphere of humanity.
But Christ rejected the devil, dismissed the dark side of God.
Therefore, incarnation has not even taken place yet!
Only now, in our time, the complete incarnation of the Anthropos is happening within each individual human being.
At that point the relationship to an exterior God disappears, because one has God within. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 160
136 We are now approaching the astrological Age of Aquarius.
The symbol shows two wavy lines: the upper and the lower waters.
Above is the sphere of the sky, atmosphere; below the heavy, humid air, close to earth.
That reminds one of the Book of Genesis: There was a separation of the upper and lower waters, when the devil appeared in the world. God didn’t say that he was pleased. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 160
137 Helmuth Jacobsohn writes that it is very easy to demonstrate the transition from the astrological eon of Taurus into Aries.
At the end of each eon there is a basic change in the perception of God, a new aspect is revealed. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 161
138 Today, we are faced with the task of the union of opposites.
Now the incarnation has to be truly accomplished, and not in a disinfected body, but in the real and natural human being. ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 161
139 There is a colossal change in the concept of God:
- to acknowledge the dark side of God, and to know that oneself embodies God.
How can this be digested? Certainly, no longer with the Christian ethic!
It is no longer, “Go away, Satan!” One has to recognize one’s own face in it! ~Carl Jung, Sabi Tauber: Encounters with Jung, Page 161
140 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God! (Hebrews 10:31)
One needs morality.
