 The Self. Symbols of Totality. If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima or animus problem so that he or she is no longer partially identified with it, the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form representing the self, the innermost nucleus of the psyche. In the dreams of a woman, this center is usually personified as a superior female figure, a priestess, sorceress, earth mother or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian, an Indian guru, a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth. Two folktales illustrate the role that such a figure can play. The first is an Austrian tale. A king has ordered soldiers to keep the night watch beside the corpse of a black princess who has been bewitched. Every midnight she rises and kills the guard. At last, one soldier, whose turn it is to stand guard, despairs and runs away into the woods. There he meets an old guitarist who is our Lord himself. This old musician tells him where to hide in the church and instructs him on how to behave so that the black princess cannot get him. With this divine help, the soldier actually manages to redeem the princess and marry her. Clearly, the old guitarist who is our Lord himself is, in psychological terms, a symbolic personification of the self. With his help, the ego avoids destruction and is able to overcome and even redeem a highly dangerous aspect of his anima. In a woman's psyche, as I have said, the self assumes feminine personifications. This is illustrated in the second story, an Eskimo tale. A lonely girl who has been disappointed in love meets a wizard traveling in a copper boat. He is the spirit of the moon, who has given all the animals to mankind and who also bestows luck in hunting. He abducts the girl to the heavenly realm. Once, when the spirit of the moon has left her, she visits a little house near the moon ghost's mansion. There she finds a tiny woman clothed in the intestinal membrane of the bearded seal, who warns the heroine against the spirit of the moon, saying that he plans to kill her. It appears that he is a killer of women, a sort of bluebeard. The tiny woman fashions a long rope, by means of which the girl can descend to earth at the time of the new moon, which is the moment when the little woman can weaken the moon spirit. The girl climbs down, but when she arrives on earth, she does not open her eyes as quickly as the little woman told her to. Because of this, she is turned into a spider and can never become human again. As we have noted, the divine musician in the first tale is a representation of the wise old man, a typical personification of the self. He is akin to the sorcerer Merlin of medieval legend or to the Greek god Hermes. The little woman in her strange membrane clothing is a parallel figure, symbolizing the self as it appears in the feminine psyche. The old musician saves the hero from the destructive anima, and the little woman protects the girl against the Eskimo bluebeard, who is, in the form of the moon spirit, her animus. In this case, however, things go wrong, a point that I shall take up later. The self, however, does not always take the form of a wise old man or wise old woman. These paradoxical personifications are attempts to express something that is not entirely contained in time, something simultaneously young and old. The dream of a middle-aged man shows the self appearing as a young man. Coming from the street, a youth rode down into our garden. There were no bushes and no fence, as there are in real life, and the garden lay open. I did not quite know if he came on purpose or if the horse carried him here against his will. I stood on the path that leads to my studio and watched the arrival with great pleasure. The sight of the boy on his beautiful horse impressed me deeply. The horse was a small, wild, powerful animal, a symbol of energy. It resembled a boar, and it had a thick, bristly, silvery gray coat. The boy rode past me between the studio and house, jumped off his horse and let him carefully away so that he would not travel on the flower bed with its beautiful red and orange tulips. The flower bed had been newly made and planted by my wife, a dream occurrence. This youth signifies the self, and with it renewal of life, a creative élan vital, and a new spiritual orientation by means of which everything becomes full of life and enterprise. If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich, unending inner adventure full of creative possibilities. In a woman's psychology, this same youthful personification of the self can appear as a supernaturally gifted girl. The dreamer in this instance is a woman in her late 40s. I stood in front of a church and was washing the pavement with water. Then I ran down the street just at the moment when the students from the high school were let out. I came to a stagnant river across which a bored or tree trunk had been laid. But when I was attempting to walk across, a mister of a student bounced on the board so that it cracked, and I nearly fell into the water. Idiot, I yelled out. On the other side of the river, three little girls were playing, and one of them stretched out her hand as if to help me. I thought that her small hand was not strong enough to help me, but when I took it, she succeeded without the slightest effort in pulling me across and up the bank on the other side. The dreamer is a religious person, but according to her dream, she cannot remain in the church, Protestant, any longer. In fact, she seems to have lost the possibility of entering it, although she tries to keep the access to it as clean as she can. According to the dream, she must now cross a stagnant river, and this indicates that the flow of life is slowed down because of the unresolved religious problem. Crossing a river is a frequent symbolic image for a fundamental change of attitude. The student was interpreted by the dreamer herself as the personification of a thought that she had previously had, namely that she might satisfy her spiritual yearning by attending high school. Obviously, the dream does not think much of this plan. When she dares to cross the river alone, a personification of the self, the girl, small but supernaturally powerful, helps her. But the form of a human being, whether youthful or old, is only one of the many ways in which the self can appear in dreams or visions. The various ages it assumes show not only that it is with us throughout the whole of life, but also that it exists beyond the consciously realized flow of life, which is what creates our experience of time. Just as the self is not entirely contained in our conscious experience of time, in our spacetime dimension, it is also simultaneously omnipresent. Moreover, it appears frequently in a form that hints at a special omnipresence. That is, it manifests itself as a gigantic, symbolic human being who embraces and contains the whole cosmos. When this image turns up in the dreams of an individual, we may hope for a creative solution to his conflict because now the vital psychic center is activated, that is, the whole being is condensed into oneness in order to overcome the difficulty. It is no wonder that this figure of the cosmic man appears in many myths and religious teachings. Generally, he is described as something helpful and positive. He appears as Adam, as the Persian gayomart, or as the Hindu Purusa. This figure may even be described as the basic principle of the whole world. The ancient Chinese, for instance, thought that before anything whatever was created, there was a colossal divine man called Panku who gave heaven and earth their form. When he cried, his tears made the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. When he breathed, the wind rose. When he spoke, thunder was loosed, and when he looked around, lightning flashed. If he was in a good mood, the weather was fine. If he was sad, it clouded over. When he died, he fell apart, and from his body the five holy mountains of China sprang into existence. His head became the Thai mountain in the east, his trunk became the Song mountain in the center, his right arm the Hong mountain in the north, his left arm the Hong mountain in the south, and his feet the Wa mountain in the west. His eyes became the sun and moon. We have already seen that symbolic structures that seem to refer to the process of individuation tend to be based on the motif of the number four, such as the four functions of consciousness, or the four stages of the anima or animus. It reappears here in the cosmic shape of Panku. Only under specific circumstances do other combinations of numbers appear in the psychic material. The natural unhampered manifestations of the center are characterized by fourfoldness, that is to say by having four divisions or some other structure deriving from the numerical series of four, eight, sixteen, and so on. Number sixteen plays a particularly important role, since it is composed of four fours. In our western civilization, similar ideas of a cosmic man have attached themselves to the symbol of Adam, the first man. There is a Jewish legend that when God created Adam, he first gathered red, black, white, and yellow dust from the four corners of the world, and thus Adam reached from one end of the world to the other. When he bent down, his head was in the east and his feet in the west. According to another Jewish tradition, the whole of mankind was contained in Adam from the beginning, which meant the soul of everybody who would ever be born. The soul of Adam therefore was like the wick of a lamp composed of innumerable strands. In this symbol, the idea of a total oneness of all human existence beyond all individual units is clearly expressed. In ancient Persia, the same original first man called Guyomart was depicted as a huge figure emitting light. When he died, every kind of metal sprang from his body, and from his soul came gold. His semen fell upon the earth, and from it came the first human couple in the form of two rhubarb shrubs. It is striking that the Chinese panku was also depicted covered by leaves like a plant. Perhaps this is because the first man was thought of as a self-grown living unit that just existed without any animal impulse or self-will. Among a group of people who live on the banks of the Tigris, Adam is still, at the present time, worshiped as the hidden super-soul or mystical protective spirit of the entire human race. These people say that he came from a date palm, another repetition of the plant motif. In the east and in some gnostic circles in the west, people soon recognized that the cosmic man was more an inner psychic image than a concrete outer reality. According to Hindu tradition, for instance, he is something that lives within the individual human being and is the only part that is immortal. This inner great man redeems the individual by leading him out of creation and its sufferings back into his original eternal sphere. But he can do this only if man recognizes him and rises from his sleep in order to be led. In the symbolic myths of old India, this figure is known as the Purusha, a name that simply means man or person. The Purusha lives within the heart of every individual and yet at the same time he fills the entire cosmos. According to the testimony of many myths, the cosmic man is not only the beginning but also the final goal of all life, of the whole of creation. All serial nature means wheat, all treasure nature means gold, all generation means man, says the medieval sage, Meister Eckhart. And if one looks at this from a psychological standpoint, it is certainly so. The whole inner psychic reality of each individual is ultimately oriented toward this archetypal symbol of the self. In practical terms, this means that the existence of human beings will never be satisfactorily explained in terms of isolated instincts or purposive mechanisms such as hunger, power, sex, survival, perpetuation of the species and so on. That is, man's main purpose is not to eat, drink, etc., but to be human. Above and beyond these drives, our inner psychic reality serves to manifest a living mystery that can be expressed only by a symbol, and for its expression, the unconscious often chooses the powerful image of the cosmic man. In our western civilization, the cosmic man has been identified to a great extent with Christ and in the East with Krishna or with Buddha. In the Old Testament, this same symbolic figure turns up as the son of man, and in later Jewish mysticism is called Adam Kadmon. Certain religious movements of late antiquity simply called him Anthropos, the Greek word for man. Like all symbols, this image points to an unknowable secret, to the ultimate unknown meaning of human existence. As we have noted, certain traditions assert that the cosmic man is the goal of creation, but the achievement of this should not be understood as a possible external happening. From the point of view of the Hindu, for example, it is not so much that the external world will one day dissolve into the original great man, but that the ego's extroverted orientation toward the external world will disappear in order to make way for the cosmic man. This happens when the ego merges into the self. The ego's discursive flow of representations, which goes from one thought to another, and its desires, which run from one object to another, calm down when the great man within is encountered. Indeed, we must never forget that for us outer reality exists only in so far as we perceive it consciously, and that we cannot prove that it exists in and by itself. The many examples coming from various civilizations and different periods show the universality of the symbol of the great man. His image is present in the minds of men as a sort of goal or expression of the basic mystery of our life. Because this symbol represents that which is whole and complete, it is often conceived of as a bisexual being. In this form, the symbol reconciles one of the most important pairs of psychological opposites, male and female. This union also appears frequently in dreams as a divine, royal, or otherwise distinguished couple. The following dream of a man of 47 shows this aspect of the self in a dramatic way. I am on a platform, and below me I see a huge black beautiful she-bear with a rough but well-groomed coat. She is standing on her hind legs, and on a stone slab she is polishing a flat oval black stone, which becomes increasingly shiny. Not far away, a lioness and her cub do the same thing, but the stones they are polishing are bigger and round in shape. After a while, the she-bear turns into a fat naked woman with black hair and dark fiery eyes. I behave in an erotically provocative way toward her, and suddenly she moves nearer in order to catch me. I get frightened and take refuge up on the building of scaffolding where I was before. Later I am in the midst of many women, half of whom are primitive and have rich black hair, as if they are transformed from animals. The other half are our women of the same nationality as the dreamer, and have blonde or brown hair. The primitive women sing a very sentimental song in melancholy high-pitched voices. Now, in a high elegant carriage, there comes a young man who wears on his head a royal golden crown set with shining rubies, a very beautiful sight. Beside him sits a blond young woman, probably his wife, but without a crown. It seems that the lioness and her cub have been transformed into this couple. They belong to the group of primitives. Now all the women, the primitives and the others, intone a solemn song, and the royal carriage slowly travels toward the horizon. Here the inner nucleus of the dreamer's psyche shows itself at first in a temporary vision of the royal couple, which emerges from the depths of his animal nature and the primitive layer of his unconscious. The she-bear in the beginning is a sort of mother goddess. Artemis, for instance, was worshiped in Greece as a she-bear. The dock oval stone that she rubs and polishes probably symbolizes the dreamer's innermost being, his true personality. Rubbing and polishing stones is a well-known exceeding the ancient activity of man. In Europe, holy stones, wrapped in bark and hidden in caves, have been found in many places. As containers of divine powers, they were probably kept there by men of the stone age. At the present time, some of the Australian aborigines believe that their dead ancestors continue to exist in stones as virtuous and divine powers, and that if they rub these stones, the power increases, like charging them with electricity, for the benefit of both the living and the dead. The man who had the dream we are discussing had hitherto refused to accept a marital bond with a woman. His fear of being caught by this aspect of life caused him in the dream to flee from the bear woman to the spectator's platform where he could passively watch things without becoming entangled. Through the motif of the stone being rubbed by the bear, the unconscious is trying to show him that he should let himself come into contact with this side of life. It is through the frictions of married life that his inner being can be shaped and polished. When the stone is polished, it will begin to shine like a mirror so that the bear can see herself in it. This means that only by accepting earthly contact and suffering can the human soul be transformed into a mirror in which the divine powers can perceive themselves. But the dreamer runs away to a higher place, that is, into all sorts of reflections by which he can escape the demands of life. The dream then shows him that if he runs away from the demands of life, one part of his soul, his anima, will remain undifferentiated, a fact symbolized by the group of nondescript women that splits apart into a primitive half and a more civilized one. The lioness and her son, which then appear on the scene, personify the mysterious urge toward individuation indicated by their work at shaping the round stones. A round stone is a symbol of the self. The lions, a royal couple, are in themselves a symbol of totality. In medieval symbolism, the philosopher's stone, a preeminent symbol of man's wholeness, is represented as a pair of lions, or as a human couple riding on lions. Symbolically, this points to the fact that often the urge toward individuation appears in a veiled form, hidden in the overwhelming passion one may feel for another person. In fact, passion that goes beyond the natural measure of love ultimately aims at the mystery of becoming whole, and this is why one feels when one has fallen passionately in love that becoming one with the other person is the only worthwhile goal of one's life. As long as the image of totality in this dream expresses itself in the form of a pair of lions, it is still contained in some such overwhelming passion. But when lion and lioness have turned into a king and queen, the urge to individuate has reached the level of conscious realization and can now be understood by the ego as being the real goal of life. Before the lions had transformed themselves into human beings, it was only the primitive women who sang, and they did so in a sentimental manner, that is to say, the feelings of the dreamer remained on a primitive and sentimental level. But in honor of the humanized lions, both the primitive and the civilized women chant a common hymn of praise, their expression of their feelings in a united form shows that the inner split in the animal has now changed into inner harmony. Still another personification of the self appears in a report of a woman's so-called active imagination. Active imagination is a certain way of meditating imaginatively, by which one may deliberately enter into contact with the unconscious and make a conscious connection with psychic phenomena. Active imagination is among the most important of Jung's discoveries. While it is in a sense comparable to Eastern forms of meditation, such as the technique of Zen Buddhism or of tantric yoga, or to Western techniques like those of the Jesuit Exochitia, it is fundamentally different in that the meditator remains completely devoid of any conscious goal or program. Thus the meditation becomes the solitary experiment of a free individual, which is the reverse of a guided attempt to master the unconscious. This, however, is not the place to enter into a detailed analysis of active imagination. The reader will find one of Jung's descriptions of it in his paper on the transcendent function. In the woman's meditation, the self appeared as a deer, which said to the ego, I am your child and your mother. They call me the connecting animal because I connect people, animals, and even stones with one another if I enter them. I am your fate, or the objective I. When I appear, I redeem you from the meaningless hazards of life. The fire burning inside me burns in the whole of nature. If a man loses it, he becomes egocentric, lonely, disoriented, and weak. The self is often symbolized as an animal, representing our instinctive nature and its connectedness with one's surroundings. That is why there are so many helpful animals in myths and fairy tales. This relation of the self to all surrounding nature and even the cosmos probably comes from the fact that the nuclear atom of our psyche is somehow woven into the whole world, both outer and inner. All the higher manifestations of life are somehow tuned to the surrounding space-time continuum. Animals, for example, have their own special foods, their particular home-building materials, and their definite territories, to all of which their instinctive patterns are exactly tuned and adapted. Time rhythms also play their part. We have only to think of the fact that most grass-eating animals have their young at precisely the time of year when the grass is richest and most abundant. With such considerations in mind, a well-known zoologist has said that the inwardness of each animal reaches far out into the world around it and psychifies time and space. In ways that are so completely beyond our comprehension, our unconscious is similarly attuned to our surroundings, to our group, to society in general, and beyond these to the space-time continuum and the whole of nature. Thus the great man of the Nazcape Indians does not merely reveal inner truths, he also gives hints about where and when to hunt, and so from dreams the Nazcape hunter evolves the words and melodies of the magical songs with which he attracts the animals. But this specific help from the unconscious is not given to primitive man alone. Jung discovered that dreams can also give civilized man the guidance he needs in finding his way through the problems of both his inner and his outer life. Indeed, many of our dreams are concerned with details of our outer life and our surroundings. Such things as the tree in front of the window, one's bicycle or car, or a stone picked up during a walk, may be raised to the level of symbolism through our dream life and become meaningful. If we pay attention to our dreams instead of living in a cold, impersonal world of meaningless chants, we may begin to emerge into a world of our own, full of important and secretly ordered events. Our dreams, however, are not as a rule primarily concerned with our adaptation to outer life. In our civilized world, most dreams have to do with the development by the ego of the right inner attitude toward the self, for this relationship is far more disturbed in us by modern ways of thinking and behaving than is the case with primitive people. They generally live directly from the inner center, but we, with our uprooted consciousness, are so entangled with external, completely foreign matters that it is very difficult for the messages of the self to get through to us. Our conscious mind continually creates the illusion of a clearly shaped, real outer world that blocks off many other perceptions. Yet through our unconscious nature, we are inexplicably connected to our psychic and physical environment. I have already mentioned the fact that the self is symbolized with special frequency in the form of a stone, precious or otherwise. We saw an example of this in the stone that was being polished by the she-bear and the lions. In many dreams, the nuclear center, the self, also appears as a crystal. The mathematically precise arrangement of a crystal evokes in us the intuitive feeling that even in so-called dead matter, there is a spiritual ordering principle at work. Thus, the crystal often symbolically stands for the union of extreme opposites, of matter and spirit. Perhaps crystals and stones are especially apt symbols of the self because of the just sonus of their nature. Many people cannot refrain from picking up stones of a slightly unusual color or shape and keeping them without knowing why they do this. It is as if the stones held a living mystery that fascinates them. Men have collected stones since the beginning of time, and have apparently assumed that certain ones were the containers of the life force with all its mystery. The ancient Germans, for instance, believed that the spirits of the dead continued to live in their tombstones. The custom of placing stones on graves may spring partly from the symbolic idea that something eternal of the dead person remains, which can be most fittingly represented by a stone. For while the human being is as different as possible from a stone, yet man's innermost center is in a strange and special way akin to it, perhaps because the stone symbolizes mere existence at the farthest remove from the emotions, feelings, fantasies, and discursive thinking of ego consciousness. In this sense, the stone symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience, the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable. The urge that we find in practically all civilizations to erect stone monuments to famous men, or on the site of important events, probably also stems from this symbolic meaning of the stone. The stone that Jacob placed on the spot where he had his famous dream, or certain stones left by simple people on the tombs of local saints or heroes, show the original nature of the human urge to express an otherwise inexpressible experience by the stone symbol. It is no wonder that many religious cults use a stone to signify God or to mark a place of worship. The holiest sanctuary of the Islamic world is the Kaaba, the black stone in Mecca to which all pious Muslims hope to make their pilgrimage. According to Christian ecclesiastical symbolism, Christ is the stone which the builders rejected, which became the head of the corner, Luke 2017. Alternatively, he is called the spiritual rock from which the water of life springs, 1 Corinthians 10.4. Medieval alchemists who searched for the secretive matter in a pre-scientific way, hoping to find God in it, or at least the working of divine activity, believed that this secret was embodied in their famous philosopher's stone. But some of the alchemists dimly perceived that their much sought-after stone was a symbol of something that can be found only within the psyche of man. An old Arabian alchemist, Morienus, said, This thing, the philosopher's stone, is extracted from you. You are its mineral, and one can find it in you, or to put it more clearly, they, the alchemists, take it from you. If you recognize this, the love and approbation of the stone will grow within you. Know that this is true without doubt. The alchemical stone, the lapis, symbolizes something that can never be lost or dissolved, something eternal that some alchemists compared to the mystical experience of God within one's own soul. It usually takes prolonged suffering to burn away all the superfluous psychic elements concealing the stone, but some profound inner experience of the self does occur to most people at least once in a lifetime. From the psychological standpoint, a genuinely religious attitude consists of an effort to discover this unique experience and gradually to keep in tune with it. It is relevant that a stone is itself something permanent, so that the self becomes an inner partner toward whom one's attention is continually turned. The fact that this highest and most frequent symbol of the self is an object of lifeless matter points to yet another field of inquiry and speculation, that is the still unknown relationship between what we call the unconscious psyche and what we call matter, a mystery with which psychosomatic medicine endeavors to grapple. In studying this still undefined and unexplained connection, it may prove to be that psyche and matter are actually the same phenomenon, one observed from within and the other from without.