Anahata
Then the next is the heart, which is a very definite
center that still functions with us. For instance we say,
“You know it in the head, but you don’t know it in the heart.”
There is an extraordinary distance from the head to the heart, a distance
of ten, twenty, thirty, years, or a whole lifetime. For you
can know something in the head for forty years and it may never have touched the
heart. But only when you have realized it in the heart do you
begin to take notice of it.
Dr. Jung: Now, what could literally lift one above the earth?
Mr. Allemann: The sun rises above the horizon.
Dr. Jung: Yes, you rise above the horizon according to the Egyptian symbolism. If you are identical with the sun, you rise above the horizon with the sun ship and travel over the heavens. The sun is a superior power. If you are an appendix of the Pharaoh, the sun can lift you up to almost a divine position. And the contact with the sun in manipura lifts you up off your feet into the sphere above the earth. The wind also can do it, because in primitive beliefs the spirit is a kind of wind.
Therefore in many languages there is the same word for wind
and spirit, spiritus for instance, and
spirare means to blow or
breathe.
Animus, spirit, comes from the Greek
anemos, wind; and pneuma, spirit, is also a Greek word for wind.
Mr. Baumann: The sun is sometimes the origin of the wind.
Dr. Jung: Yes. You remember the case of the insane man who saw a sort of tube hanging down from the sun. He called it the “sun phallus,” and it caused the wind.
In anahata one begins to think, and that we become conscious of something which is not personal at this point.
The
name of the heart cakra is very interesting: it is called
anahata,
which means “not hit.” The full translation of its sense is
this: the sound that is not made by two things striking together.
(You) begin to reason, to think, to reflect about things, and
so it is the beginning of a sort of contraction or withdrawal from the mere
emotional function. Instead of following your impulses
wildly, you begin to invent a certain ceremony that allows you to disidentify
yourself from your emotions, or to overcome your emotions actually.
You stop yourself in your wild mood and suddenly ask, “Why am I behaving
like this?”
We find the symbolism for that in this center.
In anahata you behold the
purusa, a small figure that is the
divine self, namely, that which is not identical with mere causality, mere
nature, a mere release of energy that runs down blindly with no purpose.
People lose themselves completely in their emotions and deplete
themselves, and finally they are burned to bits and nothing remains – just a
heap of ashes, that is all. The same thing occurs in lunacy:
people get into a certain state and cannot get out of it.
They burn up in their emotions and explode. There is a
possibility that one detaches from it, however, and when a man discovers this,
he really becomes a man. Through
manipura he is in the womb
of nature, extraordinarily automatic; it is merely a process.
But in anahata a new thing comes up, the possibility of lifting himself above
the emotional happenings and beholding them. He discovers the
purusa in his heart, the thumbling, “Smaller than small, and greater than
great.” In the small flame means the first germlike
appearance of the self.
Mr. Dell: Is the process you describe the beginning of individuation in psychological terms?
Dr. Jung: Yes. It is the withdrawal from the emotions. You are no longer identical with them. If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. So in anahata individuation begins. But here again you are likely to get an inflation. Individuation is not that you become an ego – you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egoist. Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange. Therefore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego. The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection. For the ego is always far down in the muladhara and suddenly becomes aware of something up above in the fourth story, in anahata, and that is the self.
All the
primitive tribes that are on a somewhat higher level
of civilization usually have discovered anahata. That is,
they begin to reason, and to judge; they are no longer quite wild.
They have elaborate ceremonies – the more primitive they are the more
elaborate are the ceremonies. They need them in order to
prevent manipura psychology. They have invented all sorts of
things, magic circles, forms for the palavers, for the intercourse of people;
all those peculiar ceremonials are special psychological techniques to prevent
an explosion of manipura. In a palaver with primitives it is
simply de rigeur that you do certain things – to us, perfectly
superfluous things – but you can do nothing with the primitives unless you
observe the rules.
You see, anahata is still very feeble, and
manipura
psychology is quite close to us. We still have to be polite
to people to avoid the explosions of
manipura.
So at the diaphragm you cross the threshold from the visible
tangible things to the almost invisible intangible things.
And these invisible things in anahata are the psychical things, for this is the
region of what is called feeling and mind. The heart is
characteristic of feeling, and air is charteristic of thought.
For instance, it is the custom in
The heart is always characteristic of feeling because feeling conditions influence the heart. Everywhere in the world feelings are associated with the heart. If you have no feelings, you have no heart; if you have no courage, you have no heart, because courage is a definite feeling condition. And you say, “Take it to heart.” Or you learn something “by heart.” You learn it, of course, by the head but you won’t keep it in mind unless you take it to heart. Only if you learn a thing by heart do you really get it. In other words, if it is not associated with your feelings, if it has not sunk into your body until it reaches the anahata center, it is so volatile that it flies away.
So anahata is really the center where psychical things
begin, the recognition of values and ideas.
For instance, take a patient in analysis who has reached
the stage of manipura, where he is an absolute prey to his emotions and
passions. I say: “But you really ought to be a bit
reasonable; don’t you see what you do? You cause no end of
trouble to your relations.” And it makes no impression
whatever. But then these arguments begin to have a pull; one
knows that the threshold of the diaphragm is crossed – he has reached anahata.
So we can say that our civilization has
reached the state of anahata – we have overcome the diaphragm.
We no longer locate the mind in the diaphragm, as the Old Greeks did in
Homeric times.
Until you achieve the level of the heart, you remain in kinetic art, that of
possession and submission. Consider the difference between
lust and love. It is the difference between the second and
fourth centers. Dante beholding Beatrice saw her with the eye
of the heart. Acteon beholding the goddess
Artemis did so
with lust. This young hunter was out with his dogs, and he
followed a stream to its source, and there was
Artemis, the goddess, bathing
naked with her nymphs. He looked at her with the eye not of
beholding a goddess, cakra four, but cakra two – that is, with lust.
She splashed a bit of water on him and he was turned into a stag, which
we might observe was what he was in the first place, and his dogs consumed him.
Any reference below cakra four is dangerous in that it is kinetic, in
this sense, either of desire or of loathing. I once spent a
weekend with psychoanalysts and my role was to lecture on courtly love.
They did not know what that was. And I felt as though
I were really in the wrong place, for these learned people were adept at
analyzing people who were out of joint. They knew as much
about pedagogy and teaching people how to live as a garbage collector would
about how to cook a good meal. It struck me that trying to
solve the problems of cakra two in terms of cakra two is simply doomed to
failure. Lust is not cured by more lust.
The solution is to be found in terms of cakra four.
Nor can you solve the problems of cakra three in terms of cakra three.
Aggression does not remedy aggression. The only way
you can civilize little human animals is by civilizing them.
That is to say, by opening their heart cakra. And if they
cannot open the heart cakra, you can at least give them a system of civilized
rules about how to live, which will help them function as though their heart
cakra had opened. When illumination comes, and compassion
comes, then you do not need rules to tell you how to act compassionately.
You are spontaneously compassionate.
You can’t make a bad little animal into a good little animal by treating
him as though he were an animal. You have to waken the heart
cakra, which is the human sentiment of compassion, and understanding, that of
love instead of lust. Among the psychoanalysts were men who
said they didn’t know what love was, but they did know what fetishism was.
That is certainly tunnel vision of the human condition.
The human animal is found in the pelvic system, with those three first
cakras. But the heart is the beginning of humanity.
Now, going from anahata to
visuddha is quite analogous, but
it goes very much further. You see, in anahata thought and
feeling are identical with objects. For a man, feeling is
identical with a certain woman, for instance, and for a woman with that
particular man. The thought of a scientist is identical with
such-and-such a book. It is such a book.
So there are always external conditions, either for the feeling or for the mind.
Thought is always specific – scientific, philosophic, or aesthetic, for
example – because it is always identical with a particular object.
And so feeling is identical with certain people or things.
It is because somebody has done so-and-so that one is angry, because
there are such-and-such conditions. Therefore our emotion,
our values, our thoughts, our convictions are interdependent with facts, with
what we call objects. They are not in themselves or through
themselves. They are, as I say, interwoven with facts.
4-5 But to cross from anahata to
visuddha one should unlearn
all that. One should even admit that all one’s psychical
facts have nothing to do with material facts. For instance,
the anger which you feel for somebody or something, no matter how justified it
is, is not caused by those external things. It is a
phenomenon all by itself. That is what we call taking a thing
on its subjective level.
If
you have reached that stage, you begin to leave anahata, because you have
succeeded in
dissolving the absolute union of material external facts with internal or
psychical facts. You begin to consider the game of the
world as your game, the people that appear outside as exponents of your
psychical condition. Whatever befalls you, whatever
experience or adventure you have in the external world, is your own experience.
If you can see that, you are on your way to visuddha, because in visuddha the whole game of the world becomes your subjective experience. The world itself becomes a reflection of the psyche. For instance, when I say that the world consists of psychical images only – that whatever you touch, whatever you experience, is imaged because you cannot perceive anything else; that if you touch this table, you might think it substantial, but what you really experience is a peculiar message from the tactile nerves to your brain; and even this you may not experience because I can cut off your fingers, you still experience your fingers only because the cut-off nerves cannot function in any other way; and your brain even is only an image up here – when I say such a heretical thing I am on the way to visuddha.
Cakra
4 is anahata, which means “not hit.” Ana is “not.”
Hata is “hit.” What this refers to is the sound that
is not made by any two things striking together. The sound of
my voice, any sound you hear, is made by two things striking together. The
voice is air striking the vocal cords. What is the sound that
is not made by any two things striking together? It is
Cakra
4 is the heart cakra. This is the cakra of transformation.
The little foyer is the foyer of the wish-fulfilling tree.
As the energies and as the illumination begin to approach this
break-through, one has the feeling, “All my wishes are about to be realized.”
And they are. The crucial thing here is the center,
where again we have the yoni. The last time we saw it
with the lingam within it was at Cakra 1. But this is
the golden lingam-yoni of the virgin birth. This is
the yoni of the birth of the spiritual as opposed to the merely physical life, a
new trajectory of ideas that no animal can have. With the
notion of a spiritual life, the first three cakras fall into a secondary
position. People can go so far, as I said, going up that
pingala, line, as to reject altogether their bodies which have fallen into a
secondary place. The problem is to come to this realization
through the body, so that it’s in the body that the spiritual life is
realized. The animal here is an antelope, or a gazelle, which
is the vehicle of Prana, the Lord of the Wind, the breath.
This is the place where breath takes over and is in charge.
Two triangles form the six-pointed star. The first
represents aspiration. You have heard the syllable om
resounding through all things. You don’t have to go anywhere,
it’s here, it’s here.
So now we are going to have a system of symbols of trying to put down the
inertia system, the cravings of the mere physical body, so that a spiritual
realization and amplification can be realized, and the energy can be carried on
up. That’s the center of transformation.