“Memories Dreams Reflections” by Carl Jung, “Visions” chapter
“Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead” is the most poignant and pithy one liner in the short chapter titled Visions dedicated solely to the visions that Jung had after his heart attack in 1944. The chapter starts with a description of an out-of-body experience where Jung floats above the earth and towards a granite temple.
“It was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me.”
“There was no longer any regret that something had dropped away or been taken away. On the contrary: I had everything that I was, and that was everything.”
“My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course?”
For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos
a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which
each person sat by himself in a little box. And now I should have to convince myself all over again that this was important! Life and the
whole world struck me as a prison, and it bothered me beyond
measure that I should again be finding all that quite in order.
It is impossible to convey the beauty and intensity of emotion during
those visions. They were the most tremendous things I have ever experienced. And what a contrast the day was: I was tormented and
on edge; everything irritated me; everything was too material, too
crude and clumsy, terribly limited both spatially and spiritually. It was
all an imprisonment, for reasons impossible to divine, and yet it had
a kind of hypnotic power, a cogency, as if it were reality itself, for all
that I had clearly perceived its emptiness.
The insight I had had, or the vision of the end of all things, gave me the courage to undertake new formulations. I no longer attempted to put across my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts.
Something else, too, came to me from my illness. I might formulate
it as an affirmation of things as they are: an unconditional “yes” to
that which is, without subjective protests acceptance of the
conditions of existence as I see them and understand them,
acceptance of my own nature, as I happen to be.
It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to
affirm one’s own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate. Then, to experience defeat is also to experience victory. Nothing is disturbed neither inwardly nor outwardly, for one’s own continuity has withstood the current of life and of time. But that can come to pass only when one does not meddle inquisitively with the workings of fate.
I have also realized that one must accept the thoughts that go on within oneself of their own accord as part of one’s reality.
The strangest part of that chapter may be that Jung predicted the death of his doctor and his prediction was (unfortunately for the doctor) accurate. Part of his vision he writes:
It was my doctor, Dr. H. or, rather, his likeness framed by a golden chain or a golden laurel wreath. I knew at once: “Aha, this is my doctor, of course, the one who has been treating me. But now he is coming in his primal form, as a basileus of Kos.”
Then later:
I was worried about him. “His life is in danger, for heaven’s sake! He has appeared to me in his primal form! When anybody attains this form it means he is going to die, for already he belongs to the ‘greater company’!” Suddenly the terrifying thought came to me that Dr. H. would have to die in my stead. I tried my best to talk to him about it, but he did not understand me. Then I became angry with him. “Why does he always pretend he doesn’t know he is a basileus of Kos? And that he has already assumed his primal form? He wants to make me believe that he doesn’t know!” That irritated me. My wife reproved me for being so unfriendly to him. She was right; but at the time I was angry with him for stubbornly refusing to speak of all that had passed between us in my vision. “Damn it all, he ought to watch his step. He has no right to be so reckless! I want to tell him to take care of himself.” I was firmly convinced that his life was in jeopardy.
In actual fact I was his last patient. On April 4, 1944 I still remember the exact date I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the first time since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day Dr. H. took to his bed and did not leave it again. I heard that he was having intermittent attacks of fever. Soon afterward he died of septicemia. He was a good doctor; there was something of the genius about him. Otherwise he would not have appeared to me as a prince of Kos.
Throughout the book Jung laments the fact that as technology rapidly develops, we put all faith in science, and the spiritual and mystical is more and more thought to be ridiculous and laughable. His doctor did not believe him. Coincidence? Maybe. At one point Jung describes his argument with Freud about events occurring that seem to be unexplainable by pure chance or coincidence. (In this video he talks about this belief.)
What is easier for the modern academic to accept is more of a Malcolm Gladwell “Blink” style explanation: perhaps Jung knew that the doctor was going to die because he observed characteristics in the doctor that he had previously observed in other’s close to death, but his conscious mind was not able to articulate those observations. And so his unconscious mind articulated these observations in the form of an image, the doctor as a “basileus of Kos.”
I won’t speculate further. But I understand this exchange a little better with the more Jung I read:
Many years ago, when one of his daughters interviewed him as part of a school project and asked what his religion was, Martin, a nonobservant Jew, answered, “Oh, honey, I’m a Jungian.”
Sara Corbett, “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious“
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