Of what those factors consist, we have no idea, since we can observe only their effects. We may assume that they are of a psychical nature comparable to that of conscious contents, yet there is no certainty about this. But if we imagine such a likeness we can hardly refrain from going further. Since the contents of our minds are only conscious and perceivable in so far as they are associated with an ego, the phenomenon of the voice, having a strongly personal character, may also issue from a center—one, however, which is not identical with that of our conscious ego.
Such reasoning is permissible if we conceive of the ego as being subordinated to, or contained in, a superordinated self as a center of the total, illimitable and indefinable psychic personality.
Although my argument seems to be abstruse, it is at least an honest attempt to formulate observed facts. To put it simply one could say: Since we do not know everything, practically each experience, fact or object contains something which is unknown.
Hence if we speak of the totality of an experience, the word "totality" can refer only to the conscious part of the experience. The same holds true, as I have mentioned, of every experience and also of the psyche, whose absolute totality covers a greater surface than consciousness.
In other words, the psyche is no exception to the general rule that the universe can be established only in as far as our psychic organism permits. My psychological experience has shown time and again that certain contents issue from a psyche more complete than consciousness. They often contain a superior analysis or insight or knowledge which consciousness has not been able to produce. We have a suitable word for such occurrences—intuition. In pronouncing it, most people have an agreeable feeling as if something had been settled.
But they never take into account the fact that you do not make an intuition. Consequently I explain the voice, in the dream of the sacred house, as a product of the more complete personality to which the dreamer's conscious self belongs as a part, and I hold that this is the reason why the voice shows an intelligence and a clarity superior to the dreamer's actual consciousness.
This superiority is the reason for the unconditioned authority of the voice. In the church dream he has made an attempt to reconcile two sides of life by a kind of cheap compromise. As we know, the unknown woman, the anima, disagreed and left the scene. In the present dream the voice seems to have taken the place of the anima, making not a merely emotional protest but rather a masterful statement about two kinds of religion. According to this statement, the dreamer is inclined to use religion as a substitute for the "image of the woman," as the text says.
The "woman" refers to the anima. This is borne out by the next sentence, which speaks of religion being used as a substitute for "the other side of the soul's life. The critique, therefore, would read as follows: ''You try religion in order to escape from your unconscious.
You use it as a substitute for a part of your soul's life. But religion is the fruit and the culmination of the completeness of life, that is, of a life which contains both sides.
The patient always tried to avoid his emotional needs. The "mystery" of the anima is the religious innuendo, a great puzzle to my patient, who naturally enough knew nothing of religion except that it was a creed.
And he understood that religion can be a substitute for certain awkward emotional demands which one might circumvent by going to church. The prejudices of our age are visibly reflected in the dreamer's apprehensions. The voice, on the other hand, is unorthodox, it is even unconventional to a shocking degree: it takes religion seriously, puts it upon the very apex of life, of a life containing "either side," and thus upsets the most cherished intellectual and rationalistic prejudices.
This was such an overturn that my patient was often afraid he might go crazy. Well, I should say that we—knowing the average intellectual of today or of yesterday—can easily sympathize with his predicament. To take the "image of the woman"—in other words, the unconscious mind—into account earnestly, what a blow to enlightened common sense!
Then I got the whole backwash of his upsetting experience. No wonder that he wanted to run away from his adventure!
He had the great advantage of being neurotic and so, whenever he tried to be disloyal to his experience or to deny the voice, the neurotic condition instantly came back. He simply could not "quench the fire" and finally he had to admit the incomprehensibly numinous character of his experience.
He had to confess that the unquenchable fire was "sacred. One might, perhaps, consider this case an exception in as much as really human and complete persons are exceptions. It is true that an overwhelming majority of educated people are fragmentary personalities and have a lot of substitutes instead of the genuine goods. Being like that meant a neurosis for this man, and it means the same for a great many other people.
What is usually and generally called "religion" is to such an amazing degree a substitute that I ask myself seriously whether this kind of "religion," which I prefer to call a creed, has not an important function in human society. The substitution has the obvious purpose of replacing immediate experience by a choice of suitable symbols invested in a solidly organized dogma and ritual. The Catholic church maintains them by her indisputable authority, the Protestant church if this term is still applicable by insistence upon faith and the evangelical message.
In my profession I have encountered many cases of people who have had such an immediate experience, and who would not submit to the authority of dogmatic decision. I had to accompany them through the peripeties of passionate conflicts, panics of madness, desperate confusions and depressions which were grotesque and terrible at the same time, so that I am amply aware of the extraordinary importance of dogma and ritual, at least as methods of mental hygiene.
If the patient is a practicing Catholic, I invariably advise him to confess and to communicate in order to protect himself from immediate experience, which might easily be too much for him.
With Protestants it is usually not so easy, because dogma and ritual have become so pale and faint that they have lost their efficacy to a high degree. There is also, as a rule, no confession and the parsons share in the common dislike of psychological problems and also, unfortunately, in the common psychological ignorance.
The Catholic "director of conscience" has often infinitely more psychological skill and insight. As a doctor I might, of course, adhere to the socalled "scientific" creed, holding that the contents of a neurosis are nothing but repressed infantile sexuality or will to power and, by thus depreciating these contents, it would be possible to a certain extent to shield a number of patients from the risk of immediate experience.
But I know that this theory is only partially true, which means that it formulates only certain superficial aspects of the neurotic psyche. And I cannot tell my patients what I myself do not fully believe. Now people may ask me: "But if you tell your practicing Catholic to go to the priest and confess, you are also telling him something which you do not believe"—that is, assuming that I am a Protestant.
In order to answer this critical question I must declare first that, if I can help it, I never preach my belief. If asked I shall surely stand by my convictions which do not go further than what I consider to be my actual knowledge. I am convinced of what I know. Everything else is hypothesis and beyond that I can leave a lot of things to the Unknown. They do not bother me. But they would begin to bother me, I am sure, if I felt that I ought to know something about them.
As long as such a defense works I shall not break it down, since I know that there must be powerful reasons why the patient has to think in such a narrow circle. But if his dreams should begin to destroy the protective theory, I have to support the wider personality, as I have done in the dream case described. In the same way and for the same reason, I support the hypothesis of the practicing Catholic while it works for him.
In either case I support a means of defense against a grave risk, without asking the academic question whether the defense is more or less an ultimate truth. I am glad when and as long as it works. With our patient the Catholic defense had broken down long before I even touched the case.
He would have laughed at me if I had advised him to confess or anything of the sort, as he laughed at the sex theory, which was not one to be supported with him either.
But I always let him see that I was entirely on the side of the voice, which I recognized as part of his future greater personality, destined to relieve him of his onesidedness. This method guarantees a much better rendering of an irrational fact, such as the psyche. It is perhaps not quite clear why I call certain dogmas "immediate experiences," since a dogma is in itself the very thing which excludes immediate experience.
Yet the Christian dogmas which I mentioned are not peculiar to Christianity alone. They occur just as often in pagan religions and, moreover, they can reappear spontaneously as psychical phenomena in all kinds of variations, as they have, in a remote past, originated from visions, dreams, or trances. Such ideas were never invented. They came into existence when mankind had not yet learned to use the mind as a purposeful activity. Before people learned to produce thoughts the thought came to them.
The dogma is like a dream, reflecting the spontaneous and autonomous activity of the objective psyche, the unconscious. Such an expression of the unconscious is a much more efficient means of defense against further immediate experiences than a scientific theory.
The theory has to disregard the emotional values of the experience. The dogma, on the contrary, is most expressive in this respect. A scientific theory is soon superseded by another. The dogma lasts for untold centuries.
The dogma represents the soul more completely than a scientific theory, for the latter expresses and formulates the conscious mind alone. Furthermore, a theory can do nothing but formulate a living thing by abstract notions. The dogma, on the contrary, expresses aptly the living process of the unconscious in the form of the drama of repentance, sacrifice and redemption.
It is rather astonishing, from this point of view, that the Protestant schism could not have been avoided. But since Protestantism has become the creed of the adventurous Germanic tribes with their characteristic curiosity, acquisitiveness and recklessness, it seems to be possible that their peculiar character could not quite agree with the peace of the church, at least not for any length of time. There was, perhaps, too much of the Imperium Romanum or of the Pax Romana in the church, too much, at least, for their energies that were and are still insufficiently domesticated.
It is quite likely that they were in need of an unmitigated and less controlled experience of God, as often happens to adventurous and restless people, too youthful for any form of conservatism or resignation. They removed therefore the intercession of the church between God and man, some more and some less. Owing to the abolition of protective walls the Protestant has lost the sacred images expressive of important unconscious factors, together with the ritual, which, since time immemorial, has been a safe way of dealing with the unaccountable forces of the unconscious mind.
A great amount of energy thus became liberated and went instantly into the old channels of curiosity and acquisitiveness, by which Europe became the mother of dragons that devoured the greater part of the earth.
Since those days Protestantism has become a hotbed of schisms and, at the same time, of a rapid increase of science and technics which attracted human consciousness to such an extent that it forgot the unaccountable forces of the unconscious mind.
The catastrophe of the Great War and the subsequent extraordinary manifestations of a profound mental disturbance were needed to arouse a doubt that everything was well with the white man's mind. We again see people cutting each other's throats to support childish theories of how to produce paradise on earth. It is not very difficult to see that the powers of the underworld—not to say of hell—which were formerly more or less successfully chained and made serviceable in a gigantic mental edifice, are now creating, or trying to create, a State slavery and a State prison devoid of any mental or spiritual charm.
There are not a few people, nowadays, who are convinced that mere human reason is not entirely up to the enormous task of fettering the volcano. This whole development is fate. I would not blame Protestantism or the Renaissance for it. Life has become quickened and intensified. Our world is permeated by waves of restlessness and fear. Protestantism was, and still is, a great risk and at the same time a great opportunity.
Look at the devilish means of destruction! They are invented by perfectly harmless gentlemen, reasonable, respectable citizens, being all we hope to be. And when the whole thing blows up and causes an indescribable inferno of devastation, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply occurs, yet it is all man made. But since every person is blindly convinced that he is nothing but his very modest and unimportant consciousness, which neatly fulfils duties and earns a moderate living, nobody is aware that this whole rationally organized crowd, called a state or a nation, is run by a seemingly impersonal, imperceptible but terrific power, checked by nobody and by nothing.
This ghastly power is mostly explained by fear of the neighboring nation, which is supposed to be possessed by a malevolent devil. As nobody is capable of recognizing where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, one simply projects one's own condition upon the neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas.
The worst of it is that one is quite right. All one's neighbors are ruled by an uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear just like oneself. In lunatic asylums it is a wellknown fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by wrath or hatred. Page 61 The Protestant is left to God alone. There is no confession, no absolution, no possibility of any kind of an atoning opus divinum. He has to digest his sins alone and he is not too sure of divine grace, which has become unattainable through lack of a suitable ritual.
Owing to this fact the Protestant conscience has become wakeful, and this bad conscience has acquired a disagreeable tendency to linger and to make people uncomfortable. But through this the Protestant has a unique chance to realize sin to a degree hardly attainable by Catholic mentality, for confession and absolution are always ready to relieve too much tension.
But the Protestant is left to his tension, which can continue to sharpen his conscience. If you have done something which puzzles you and you ask yourself what has prompted you to such an action, you need the motive of a bad conscience and its corresponding discriminating faculty in order to discover the real motive of your behavior. It is only then that you are able to see what motives are ruling your deeds.
If a Protestant survives the complete loss of his church and still remains a Protestant, that is, a man who is defenseless against God and is no longer shielded by walls or by communities, he has the unique spiritual chance of immediate religious experience.
I do not know whether I have succeeded in conveying what the experience of the unconscious mind meant to my patient. There is, however, no objective measure for the value of such experience. We have to take it for what it is worth to the person who has the experience.
Thus you may be impressed by the fact that the apparent futility of certain dreams should mean something to an intelligent person. But if you cannot accept what he says, or if you cannot put yourself in his place, you should not judge his case. The genius religiosus is a wind that bloweth where it listeth. There is no Archimedean point from which to judge, since the psyche is indistinguishable from its manifestation.
The psyche is the object of psychology, and—fatally enough—its subject at the same time and there is no getting away from this fact. The few dreams I have chosen as an example of what I call ''immediate experience" are surely unobtrusive to the inexperienced eye. They make no show, being modest witnesses of a merely individual experience. But even the sum total of the series of dreams could not compare in beauty and expressiveness to any part of a traditional creed.
A creed is always the result and fruit of many minds and many centuries, purified from all the oddities, shortcomings and flaws of individual experience. But for all that, the individual experience, with its very poverty, is immediate life, it is the warm red blood pulsating today. It is more convincing to a seeker after truth than the best tradition.
No one else will have the same dreams, although many have the same problem. But just as there is no individual differentiated to a condition of absolute uniqueness, so also there are no individual products of an absolutely unique quality. Even dreams are made of collective material to a very high degree, just as, in the mythology and folklore of different peoples, certain motives repeat themselves in almost identical form. I have called those motives archetypes 11 and by them I understand forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin.
The latter hypothesis is indispensable, since even complicated archetypal images can be spontaneously reproduced without any possible direct tradition. The theory of preconscious, primordial ideas is by no means my own invention, as the term "archetype," which belongs to the first centuries of our era, denotes.
The arrangement emphasizes the symbolic importance of the number four, by putting it in place of the altar or the iconostasis, where one would expect to find the sacred images. My case is no exception in this respect. I have observed many cases where the four occurred and it always had an unconscious origin, that is, the dreamer got it first from a dream and had no idea of its meaning nor had he ever heard of the symbolic importance of the four.
It would of course be a different thing with the three, since the Trinity represents an acknowledged symbolic number accessible to everybody. But four with us, and particularly with a modern scientist, conveys no more than any other number.
Number symbolism and its venerable history is a field of knowledge utterly beyond the interests of our dreamer's mind. If dreams, under such conditions, insist upon the importance of the four, we have every right to call its origin an unconscious one. From this fact we must conclude that it points to a meaning which we have to call "sacred. It is of course impossible to give a complete account of this comparative procedure within the frame of this book.
I must, therefore, restrict myself to mere allusions. Since many of the unconscious contents seem to be remnants of historical mental conditions, we need only go back a few hundred years in order to reach that conscious level which forms the parallel to our unconscious contents. In our case we step back not quite three hundred years and find ourselves among scientists and philosophers of nature who are seriously discussing the enigma of the quadratura circuli.
But they knew in those days that the circle meant the Deity: "Deus est figura intellectualis, cujus centrum est ubique, circumferentia vero nusquam," as one of these philosophers said, repeating St. A man as introverted and introspective as Emerson could hardly fail to touch upon the same idea and likewise quote St.
And because the macrocosm, the Great World, was made by the creator "in forma rotunda et globosa," 20 the smallest part of the whole, the point, also contains this perfect nature. As the philosopher says: "Omnium figurarum simplicissima et perfectissima primo est rotunda, quae in puncto requiescit. That round thing was in possession of the key which unlocked the closed doors of matter.
As it is said in Timaeus, only the demiurge, the perfect being, was capable of dissolving the tetraktys,23 the embrace of the four elements, that is, the four constituents of the round world. One of the great authorities since the thirteenth century, the Turba Philosophorum, says that the rotundum can dissolve copper into four.
Some hoped to lay hold of him in the form of a prima materia containing a particular concentration or a specially apt kind of substance.
Page 68 Make the circle round and thou shalt have the Philosopher's Stone. While the original Adam was mortal, because he consisted of the corruptible four elements, the second Adam is immortal, because he consists of one pure and incorruptible essence. Ideo quia ex simplici et pura essentia constat, in aeternum manet.
We have historical documents which prove that often dreams, visions, even hallucinations, were mixed with the great philosophic opus. Matter, however, could easily accept such projections, because at that time it was a practically unknown and incomprehensible entity. But since chemical matter nowadays is something we know fairly well, we can no longer project as freely as our ancestors were able to do. For the time being we are satisfied with the fact that an idea of God, utterly absent from the conscious mind of modern man, returns in a form known consciously three hundred or four hundred years ago.
I do not need to emphasize the fact that this piece of history was completely unknown to my dreamer. One could say, quoting a classical poet: "Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret.
They were symbolized by the four partitions of the circle. From him it is the Monad came, in the manner of a ship, laden with all good things, and in the manner of a field, filled or planted with every kind of tree, and in the manner of a city, filled with all races of mankind.
The Monad is but a spark of light , a platform supported by four pillars corresponding to the Christian quaternarium of the Evangiles, or to the Tetramorphus, the symbolic riding animal of the church, consisting of the symbols of the four evangelists, the angel, eagle, ox or calf, and lion. The analogy of this text with the New Jerusalem of the Revelations is obvious.
But why should my patient repeat those old speculations? I do not know why he should. I do not really think that they get it from three hundred or four hundred years ago. That age was rather another time when this same archetypal idea was very much in the foreground. As a matter of fact, it is much older than the Middle Ages, as Timaeus proves.
Nor is it a classical or an Egyptian inheritance, since it is to be found practically everywhere and in all ages. One has only to remember, for instance, how great an importance is attributed to the quaternity by the red Indians.
I have always been particularly interested to see how people, if left to their own devices and not informed about the history of the symbol, would interpret it to themselves. I was careful, therefore, not to disturb them with my own opinions and as a rule I discovered that people took it to symbolize themselves or rather something in themselves.
Though it was easy to see that it was often almost a replica of Ezekiel's vision, it was very rare that people recognized the analogy, even when they knew the vision—which knowledge, by the way, is pretty rare nowadays.
What one could almost call a systematic blindness is simply the effect of the prejudice that the deity is outside man.
Although this prejudice is not solely Christian, there are certain religions which do not share it at all. On the contrary they insist, as do certain Christian mystics, upon the essential identity of God and man, either in the form of an a priori identity, or of a goal to be attained by certain practices or initiations, as we know them, for instance, from the metamorphoses of Apuleius, not to speak of certain yoga methods.
The application of the comparative method indubitably shows the quaternity as being a more or less direct representation of the God manifested in his creation. We might, therefore, conclude that the symbol, spontaneously produced in the dreams of modern people, means the same thing—the God within. Although the majority of cases do not recognize this analogy, the interpretation might nevertheless be true.
If we take into consideration the fact that the idea of God is an ''unscientific" hypothesis, we can easily explain why people have forgotten to think along such lines. I myself, as well as my colleagues, have seen so many cases developing the same kind of symbolism that we cannot doubt its existence any longer.
My observations, moreover, date back as far as and I waited fourteen years before I alluded publicly to them. It would be a regrettable mistake if anybody should understand my observations to be a kind of proof of the existence of God.
They prove only the existence of an archetypal image of the Deity, which to my mind is the most we can assert psychologically about God. But as it is a very important and influential archetype, its relatively frequent occurrence seems to be a noteworthy fact for any theologia naturalis. Since the experience of it has the quality of numinosity, often to a high degree, it ranks among religious experiences. I cannot omit calling attention to the interesting fact that whereas the central Christian symbolism is a Trinity, the formula of the unconscious mind is a quaternity.
As a matter of fact even the orthodox Christian formula is not quite complete, because the dogmatic aspect of the evil principle is absent from the Trinity, the former leading a more or less awkward existence as devil.
Since a God identical with man is a heretical assumption, 37 the "God within" is also dogmatically difficult. Contrary to the dogma there are not three, but four aspects. It could easily be inferred that the fourth represents the devil.
Though we have the logion: "I myself and the Father are one. Who seeth me seeth the Father," it would be considered as blasphemy or as madness to stress Christ's dogmatic humanity to such a degree that man could identify himself with Christ and his homoousia. But this is precisely the inference. From an orthodox standpoint, therefore, the natural quaternity could be declared to be "diabolica fraus" and the capital piece of evidence would be the assimilation of the fourth aspect which represents the reprehensible part of the Christian cosmos.
The church, I assume, has to invalidate any attempt at taking such results seriously. She must even condemn any approach to these experiences, since she cannot admit that nature unites what she has separated. The voice of nature is clearly audible in all the events that are connected with the quaternity, and this arouses all the old suspicions against anything connected with the unconscious mind.
Scientific exploration of dreams is old oneiromancy and as objectionable as alchemy. Close parallels to the psychology of dreams are to be found among Latin alchemical tracts and are, like these, full of heresy.
If we were still living in a medieval setting where there was not much doubt about the ultimate things and where every history of the world began with Genesis, we could easily brush aside dreams and the like. Unfortunately we live in a modern setting, where the ultimate things are doubtful, where there is a prehistory of enormous extension, and where people are fully aware of the fact that if there is any numinous experience at all, it is the experience of the psyche.
We can no longer imagine an empyrean world revolving round the throne of God, and we would not dream of seeking for Him somewhere behind the galactic systems. But the human soul seems to harbor mysteries, since to an empiricist all religious experience boils down to a peculiar condition of the mind. If we want to know anything of what religious experience means to those who have it, we have every chance nowadays of studying every imaginable form of it.
And if it means anything, it means everything to those who have it. This is at least the inevitable conclusion one reaches by a careful study of the evidence. One could even define religious experience as that kind of experience which is characterized by the highest appreciation, no matter what its contents are. Modern mentality, in as much as it is formulated by the verdict "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," will turn to the soul as to a last hope.
Where else could one obtain experience? The voice of nature will answer and all those concerned with the spiritual problem of man will be confronted with new baffling problems. Through the spiritual need of my patients I have been forced to make a serious attempt at least to understand some of the extraordinary implications of the symbolism produced by the unconscious mind.
As it would lead much too far to go into a discussion of the intellectual as well as the ethical consequences, I have to content myself with a mere allusion. The main symbolic figures of a religion are always expressive of the particular moral and mental attitude involved. I mention, for instance, the cross and its various religious meanings. Another main symbol is the Trinity. It is of an exclusively masculine character. The unconscious mind, however, transforms it into a quaternity, being a unity at the same time, just as the three persons of the Trinity are one and the same God.
The old philosophers of nature represented the Trinity, in as much as it was "imaginata in natura," as the three , the earth or the body. They symbolized the latter by the Virgin. The medieval philosophers of nature undoubtedly meant earth and woman by the fourth element.
The quaternity in modern dreams is a product of the unconscious. As I explained in the first chapter, the unconscious is often personified by the anima, a female figure. Apparently the symbol of the quaternity issues from her. But since the woman, as well as evil, is excluded from the Deity in the dogma of the Trinity, the element of evil would also form a part of the religious symbol, if the latter should be a quaternity.
They play a considerable role in practical treatment. While we are not concerned here with psychotherapy, but with the religious aspect of psychical phenomena, I have been forced through my studies in psychopathology to dig out these historical symbols and figures from the dust of their graves.
I shall not mind, therefore, if this long discussion on the quaternity symbol, the circulus quadratus and the heretical attempts to improve on the dogma of the Trinity seem to be somewhat far fetched and overemphasized. But in point of fact my whole discourse about the quaternity is no more than a regrettably short and inadequate introduction to the final and crowning piece of my paradigmatic case. Already at the very beginning of our dream series the circle appears. It takes the form, for instance, of a serpent, which describes a circle2 round the dreamer.
Page 79 It appears in later dreams as a clock, a circle with a central point, a round target for shooting practice, a clock that is a perpetuum mobile, a ball, a globe, a round table, a basin, and so on. The square appears also, about the same time, in the form of a town square or garden with a fountain in the center.
In other dreams the circle is represented by rotation, four children, for instance, carry a "dark ring" and walk in a circle. The center seems to be particularly emphasized. All those dreams lead up to one picture which came to the patient in the form of a sudden visual impression.
He had already had such glimpses or visualizations on different occasions, but this time it was a most impressive experience. It only matters how the patient feels about it. It is his experience, and if it has a deeply transforming influence upon his condition there will be no use arguing against it.
The psychologist can only take note of the fact and, if he feels equal to the task, he might also make an attempt to understand why such a vision had such an effect upon such a person. The vision was a turning point in the patient's psychological development. It was what one would call—in the language of religion—a conversion. This is the literal text of the vision: "There are a vertical and a horizontal circle with a center common to both. This is the world clock.
It is carried by the black bird. A hand is rotating upon it. The horizontal circle consists of four colors. Four little men are standing upon the circle carrying pendula and the golden ring [of the former vision] is laid around it. The middle pulse is one complete rotation of the hand. Page 81 "3. It seems to be an attempt to make a meaningful whole from the formerly fragmentary symbols, then characterized as circle, globe, square, rotation, clock, star, cross, quaternity, time, and so on.
It is of course difficult to understand why a feeling of "most sublime harmony" should be produced by this abstract structure. But if we think of the two circles in Plato's Timaeus, and of the harmonious allroundness of his anima mundi, we might find an avenue leading to an understanding.
Again, the term "world clock" suggests the antique conception of the musical harmony of the spheres. It would be a sort of cosmological system. If it were a vision of the firmament and its silent rotation, or of the steady movement of the solar system, we would readily understand and appreciate the perfect harmony of the picture.
We might also assume that the platonic vision of the cosmos was faintly glimmering through the mist of a semiconscious mental condition. But there is something in the vision that does not quite agree with the harmonious perfection of the platonic picture.
The two circles are different in nature. Not only is their movement different, but their color, too. The vertical circle is blue and the horizontal one containing four colors is golden. In a former dream, the four points were represented once by four children and again by the four seasons. This picture reminds one immediately of medieval representations of the world in the form of a circle or of the rex gloriae with the four evangelists or of the melothesiae, where the horizon is formed by the zodiac.
The representation of the triumphant Christ seems to be derived from similar pictures of Horus and his four sons.
They consist as a rule of a circular padma or lotus which contains a square sacred building with four gates, indicating the four cardinal points and the seasons.
The center contains a Buddha or more often the conjunction of Shiva and his Shakti or an equivalent dorje thunderbolt symbol. In our case, however, the center is empty. It consists only of a mathematical point. Our symbol is a clock, symbolizing time. The only analogy to such a symbol that I can think of is the design of the horoscope. It also has four cardinal points and an empty center. There is, moreover, another peculiar coincidence: rotation is often mentioned in the previous dreams and this is usually reported as moving to the left.
Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in The Red Book: Liber Novus may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url.
If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to psychology, non fiction lovers. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you.
Some of the techniques listed in Memories, Dreams, Reflections may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.
Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to psychology, non fiction lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:.
0コメント