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 India, when the father dies, that the oldest son must watch during the last moments in order to inhale the last breath of his father, which is the soul, in order to continue his life. 

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. 

4-5  From anahata to visuddha

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 Om.  It is the sound of the energy of the universe of which all things are manifestations.  The energy is what underlies all the forms – E=MC² - and the sound of that energy is said to be Om. 

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.  Om.  That’s the sense of the inward-turned meditation.  “I’ve got it within me.  The fire is here, it’s there, but I don’t have to go there to capture it.  I am there in this.”  The experience of the sound of om is ubiquitous.  And now you want to hear the sound directly, not simply through things, but directly.  That is the aspiration, then, of spiritual striving.  The lower triangle pointing down is inertia, physical inertia. 

   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.