Transcription
I was here four years ago, and at that time I talked about the Book of Job, with special emphasis on Blake's engravings for that book, and what I had to say tonight, uh, is a logical continuation of that previous subject. It's the same theme basically, namely the theme of the hero's encounter with the self. You know, this is the one basic feature of Jungian psychology: the ego and, uh, how it relates to reality itself. Jungian psychology is the only psychological standpoint that operates out of an awareness that there are two centers in the psyche. Some other psychologies and some other analytic approaches have an awareness that there are two entities in the psych; there is an unconscious, there is a second entity, but no other psychological standpoint operates out of the awareness that there are two centers. That's unique to Jungian psychology. And since there are two centers, uh, if that comes into conscious realization, then those two centers must collide; they must have an encounter with each other. Um, and that's what happens when the ego, which is the little center, has an encounter with the self, which is the big center. You know, all analysis is no more than prelude to this experience, the encounter with the self.
Here's how Jung put it in his 1925 seminar. He says this quote: "Analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body, such as those things which occurred to the Ancients. If I were going to symbolize it, I would choose the enunciation." End quote. Now it may very well happen that this crucial experience, uh, although is prepared for by analysis, does not take place during the period of regular analysis at all. May very well take place many years after the termination of regular analysis. Um, and in such a case, one is very grateful for his conscious knowledge of Jungian psychology. He's got a road map, so to speak, that helps him get his bearings when this experience falls on him from above. He can say with Job, then, that "previously I'd heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee." That's what happens when this experience falls on one. It can also occur without benefit of any analysis at all. Can happen without any particular preoccupation with the unconscious. And for these reasons, this is why I consider it vitally important to talk about the self in public, because one can never know when he is speaking to an individual who has had or is going to have the experience I'm talking about. And such an individual, now or later, may recall what has been spoken about and may find it immensely helpful in his time of need. I know that for a fact such things do happen.
So we're going to be talking about the self tonight. What is it? As I said, it's the second center of the psyche, the ego being the first. To say a little more about it, one could say that it's the objective center as opposed to the subjective center. It's the transpersonal center, and it's the center and connector with the totality that includes both conscious and unconscious. It's not a theory; it's a fact. One has to use words to describe facts, but, um, I assure you, what we're talking about is a fact that is verified by the experience of many people, um, in and subsequent to analysis. But the self is exceedingly difficult to describe. This is because it's a transcendent entity that is larger than the ego; that means it cannot be grasped, it cannot be totally embraced by the ego, and therefore it cannot be defined. What can be defined has to be smaller than the ego doing the defining. It's contradictory and paradoxical so far as the ego's categories of understanding are concerned. And like the philosopher's stone of the alchemists, it has many different synonyms which express different facets of its complex reality. And one of those synonyms that Jung has proposed for the self is the greater personality, and that's the particular entity I'm going to be talking about tonight.
He introduces this term "greater personality" in his essay concerning rebirth, which is in Collected Works, volume 9, part 1. And in that place he speaks of individuation, quote: "as a long drawn out process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being," and concerning that other being he writes, quote: "This other being is the other person in ourselves, that larger and greater personality maturing within us. It's the inner friend of the Soul; that's why we take comfort whenever we find the friend and companion depicted in a ritual, for example, the friendship between Moses and the sun god. It's the representation of a friendship between two men which, assembling the outer reflection of an inner fact, reveals our relationship to that inner friend of the Soul into whom nature herself would like to change us, that other person who we also are and yet can never attain to completely. We are that pair of dasturi, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. The transformation process strives to approximate them to one another, but our consciousness is aware of resistances because the other person seems strange and uncanny, and because we cannot get accustomed to the idea that we are not absolute master in our own house. We should always prefer to be I and nothing else, but we are confronted with that inner friend or foe, and whether he is our friend or our foe depends on ourselves." That's where he first introduces the term "greater personality." But in that same essay he describes the ego's encounter with the greater personality in these very, very important words. This is especially important quotation in my opinion, quote: "When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, one becomes two, and the greater figure which one always was but which remained invisible appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation. He who is truly and hopelessly little will always drag the revelation with the greater down to the level of his littleness and will never understand that the day of judgment for his littleness has dawned. But the man who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come to lead captivity captive, that is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been confined and held prisoner, and to make his life flow into that Greater Life—a moment of deadliest peril." End quote.
This final phrase comes as a shock. After hearing the beautiful description of the ego's encounter with the greater personality, we learn only at the very end that the encounter is dangerous, deadly dangerous. This danger refers to the wounding effect that the self has on the ego on first encounter. At the worst, the meeting of ego and self can set off an overt psychosis. Even at best, the ego's first decisive meeting with the self brings about a painful humiliation and a demoralizing sense of defeat. As Jung puts it in another place, the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego. This experience of wound or defeat is part of what I have spoken of as the Job archetype. I use that term because the story of Job is a particularly apt example of it, and the chief features of this pattern are four, and I'm going to—this is going to be the subject of my talk tonight—and give examples of this. And so, so get these four features: Number one, there is an encounter between the ego and the greater personality, represented as God, angel, or superior being of some kind. Number two, there's a wound or a suffering of the ego as a result of this encounter. Three, in spite of the pain, the ego perseveres and endures the ordeal and persists in scrutinizing the experience in search of its meaning. And four, as a consequence of that perseverance, there is a divine revelation by which the ego is rewarded with some insight into the transpersonal psychic. So to repeat: four, there's an encounter, there's a wounding, there's perseverance, there's revelation. I'm going to talk about four examples of this, um, of this thing. The examples vary; each example emphasizes one particular aspect, and by taking them all together you get a broader picture of the nature of the phenomenon. But each individual who has this experience has it uniquely, so that his experience will not be exactly Job's, will not be exactly Jacob's, it will not be exactly Arjuna's, it will not be exactly the Apostle Paul's, and it will not be exactly Nietzsche's. But having familiarity with various examples of the species will help you to recognize it when you encounter it for yourself. I'm going to talk about four, and yet there are more than that; quite a list I think could be called out of the cultural history of man. But just to give you a brief list, here's a few: Jacob and the angel of Yahweh, which I shall talk about; Arjuna's encounter with Krishna, which I shall talk about; Paul's encounter with the Christ; Moses in the Quran's encounter with el-khidr, the green one, which you can find in the 18th Surah of the Quran; Faust's encounter with Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust; Captain Ahab's encounter with Moby Dick, the whale; Nietzsche's encounter with Zarathustra, which I shall talk about; and finally, the one closest to us of all, Jung's encounter with Philemon in his confrontation in Beyond the Conscious. But as I say, I shall confine myself to four: Jacob, Arjuna, Paul, and Nietzsche.
In making this kind of overview, you must forgive the summary way in which I treat each example. It's really quite unfair to treat so briefly such profound episodes in the cultural history of the human race. But my justification for it is to give you a sense of the archetype, and I don't know any better way of doing that than to present you briefly with individual examples of the archetype, and that then can give you a sense of the underlying general symbolic image that operates within individual variations. So first, Jacob and the angel of Yahweh. This account is found in the 32nd chapter of Genesis. You will recall that Jacob tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright, and then, conspiring with his mother Rebekah, he stole his father's blessing by fraud—a blessing belonging to Isaac, belonging to Esau, the elder one. He then had to flee the country to escape his brother's vengeance. And many years later, having acquired two wives and considerable wealth, the time had come when he had to return to the land he had fled from. So he returned to his own country, but that return meant that he must now meet Esau, the brother he had wronged many years previously, and naturally he was afraid. We're always afraid of the person we have wronged. And on the night prior to the meeting with Esau, he met the angel of Yahweh at the ford of Jabbok, the river Jabbok. And the Jerusalem Bible gives the following account of this event: "And there was one that wrestled with him until daybreak, who, seeing that he could not master him, struck him in the socket of his hip, and Jacob's hip was dislocated as he wrestled with him. He said, 'Let me go, for day is breaking,' but Jacob answered, 'I will not let you go unless you bless me.' He then asked, 'What is your name?' Jacob. He replied, 'He said, "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have been strong against God; you shall prevail against men," and he blessed him there. Jacob named the place Peniel, because "I have seen God face to face," he said, "and have survived." The sun rose as he left Peniel, limping because of his hip." See, this story contains all four of the features that I spoke of: There's an encounter with a superior being, there's a wounding, there's a perseverance, and there's a divine revelation. Divine revelation in this case is the blessing, first of all, and secondly the investiture with a new name, so a second identity. His collective identity is re-aligned because he now becomes the ancestor of Israel.
What's particularly interesting psychologically about this example is that it illustrates that an encounter with the greater personality may come at the same time as an encounter with the shadow. Jacob experienced the encounter with Esau very much as an encounter with God. Esau became a kind of stand-in for God for him. That's because Jacob's guilty conscience imbues Esau with divine power. The scripture specifically says when Jacob meets Esau he says to him, quote: "I have seen thy face as though I had seen the face of God." So that Esau and God overlap. See, this means psychologically that the shadow, which one is unrelated to, may activate the self. And if one has wronged the shadow, then what's activated is the self in its avenging aspect. Now this motif can operate either internally or externally. If you don't understand this after I've explained that, please inquire during the question period, because I want to try to make this clear to everybody. In an outer, external sense, if I commit a wrong against another person, I will fear that person's desire for revenge. I'll know that he's entitled to revenge because I wronged him, and that condition then constellates the self. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." The whole phenomenon of vengeance belongs to the transpersonal center of the psyche, belongs to the self. And if an individual has been wronged in any serious way, it activates a defensive response from the self. And if one has set the self against you, you're at a sizable disadvantage. [Laughter] And the ego then, in a similar way, if I have wronged the shadow within, if I violated the inner figure that constitutes my shadow in some serious way, it's a violation of totality, which again can arouse the vengeance of the self against the ego, and all sorts of things may happen then. I may cut myself on my electric saw, or I may have an accident with the car; anything of that sort can happen if that constellation has been set up. Now what Jacob is obliged to do in this situation is to encounter the reaction that has been constellated, endure it without succumbing either to defensive hostility or to despair. And if he succeeds, that would correspond to his successful wrestling with the angel. One way of thinking of it is that perhaps Jacob had to wrestle with his rage at Esau before he could arrive at a conciliatory attitude. You know, he did arrive at a conciliatory attitude; he sent Esau gifts, and it worked. But he could not do that until he had overcome his power reaction. Um, and the power reaction could express itself either in rage against Esau for causing him trouble, or in cringing fear of Esau because he knew he had a legitimate complaint against him.
Jung makes a very profound observation here; these things are scattered throughout his works. Here, this is especially important. That can be found in paragraph 524 of volume 5. He says this quote: "The god appears at first in hostile form, as an assailant with whom the hero has to wrestle. This is in keeping with the violence of all unconscious dynamism. In this manner the god manifests himself, and in this form he must be overcome. The struggle has its parallel in Jacob's wrestling with the angel at the ford Jabbok. The onslaught of instinct then becomes an experience of divinity," I've underscored that, and I'm not sure that's my underscoring, but it doesn't matter. I'll repeat it: "If you really get this, you've got the main thing. The onslaught of instinct becomes an experience of divinity, provided that man does not succumb to it and follow it blindly, but defends his humanity against the animal nature. The divine power is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God." End quote. What he's saying there is that intense affects are manifestations of the greater personality. One should never take personal responsibility for an intense affect. One doesn't cook up something like that; it falls out of heaven or it roars up from the depths; it's a manifestation of the self, any intense affect, the onslaught of instinct. And if one can relate to it with that understanding, then it becomes an experience of divinity. And this is what was achieved by Jacob wrestling with the angel. Another aspect of such an encounter is mentioned in this remark of Jung's. This comes from Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He says, quote: "A contemporary Jacob would find himself willy-nilly in possession of a secret that could not be discussed and would become a deviant from the collectivity." End quote. This corresponds to the fact that an encounter with the greater personality is necessarily a secret. One can't talk about it; can't talk about it in its particulars, in the way it happened. It's a secret that both creates the individual as something separate from the collective, and at the same time it's a wound that painfully separates and alienates him from the collective. So it has both a positive and a negative aspect. A striking example of this phenomenon is the figure of Philoctetes in Greek myth. Philoctetes inherited the bow and arrow of Heracles. Heracles is the greater personality, and Philoctetes was an ordinary person like all the rest of us, and he couldn't handle these weapons, and he injured himself on the poison—one of the poison arrows of Heracles—he inherited, and it became an incurable wound. The stench was so horrible nobody could stand to be around him, so he was abandoned on an island. And at the time came when an oracle said that the Trojan War could not be won by the Greeks unless they got the help of Philoctetes. So they had to go back and apologize for ostracizing him and lure him back into the collectivity. It's a beautiful example of a certain aspect of the phenomenon: what happens when one's alienated and becomes an objectionable state to the collective, and yet he's still all right.
I turn now to another example: Arjuna and Krishna. This is a magnificent example of an encounter with the greater personality that's recorded in the Bhagavad Gita. Like the Book of Job, its central feature is a dialogue between a grief-stricken man and a personification of deity. Now I have no scholarly knowledge concerning the Gita. I know it's obviously a composite document that grew into its present form by a series of accretions. But I think, just considering it psychologically, that it's not at all impossible that it might have originated, just as I think Job did, in one individual's actual experience. However that may be, in its present form it's certainly one of the world's finest examples of this experience. The story begins with the despair of Prince Arjuna before a battle. Arjuna does not want to fight because it's a battle against his kinsmen. And as he expresses his anguish, the god Krishna replies to him through the figure of his chariot driver. Let me give you just a few brief tastes of this event, with apologies to Robert Johnson, who is an expert on this subject. First Arjuna speaks: "Oh Krishna, seeing these my kinsmen gathered here desirous to fight, my limbs fail me, my mouth is parched, my body shivers, my hair stands on end, my bow slips from my hand, my skin is burning, burning. Oh Krishna, I'm not able to stand upright, my mind is in a whirl, and I see adverse omens, neither do I see any good in slaying my own people in this strife. I desire neither victory nor kingdom nor pleasures. I do not wish to kill these warriors, even though I'm killed by them." Krishna replies: "Thou hast been mourning for those who should not be mourned for. These bodies are perishable. The truly wise mourn not either for the dead or for the living. The dwellers in these bodies are eternal, indestructible, and impenetrable. Therefore fight, O descendant of Bharata. He who considers this self as a slayer, or he who thinks that this self is slain, neither of these knows the truth, for he does not slay nor is he slain. The self is never born, or does it die, or after once having been does it go into non-being. The self is unborn, eternal, changeless, ancient, that's never destroyed even when the body is destroyed. Therefore, Arjuna, be resolved to fight, regarding alike pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat. Fight the battle thus; sin will not stain thee in it." Though characteristically the greater personality has presented…
An attitude that is too large for the ego to understand. Our journey is confused because what he's presented with is an attitude beyond the Opposites. And in this case, uh, the wounding is represented by his confusion. You see, it's the wounding is not is not so prominent in this Eastern, uh, story as it is in the Western story of Job. Uh, and that I think says something about the difference between Eastern and Western psyche. Anyhow, Arjuna replies, "Oh Krishna, if to thy mind the path of wisdom is superior to the path of action, then why art thou engaging me in this terrible action by these seemingly conflicting words? Thou art bewildering my understanding." See, that's the wounding. Therefore, tell me with certainty that one of these, that I, one of these, by following them I can attain the highest.
And then Krishna proceeds with what can only be called a very patient explanation. I imagine him beginning with a sigh. "In this world, two-fold is the path already described by me. The path of wisdom is for the meditator, and the path of work is for the active. A man does not attain to freedom from action by non-performance of action, nor does he attain to Perfection merely by giving up action. He who restraining the organs of action sits holding thoughts of sense objects in his mind, that self-deluded one is called a hypocrite. But O Arjuna, he who controlling the senses of the Mind follows without attachment the path of action with his organs of action, he is esteemed. Do thou therefore perform right and obligatory actions, for Action is superior to inaction. This world is bound by actions except when they are performed for the sake of religious worship. Therefore, oh, uh, son of Kunti, do thou perform action without attachment."
This is then followed by a magnificent, lengthy description of the religious way of life, and particularly noteworthy is Krishna's description of his own nature. Now, I remind you from the psychological standpoint, uh, what we're listening to is the self describing its nature to the ego. So this is not just a story but of of a remote uh event. It's uh it's an account of of an experience that can be all any one of us. And here's how Krishna describes himself in in part: "Terribly, brutally, I am the origin and the dissolution of the universe." That's the line that flashed into Robert Oppenheimer's mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion: "the origin and dissolution of the universe." "There's naught else existing higher than I. Like pearls on a thread, all this universe is strung in me. I am the taste in waters and the radiance in sun and moon. I am the sacred syllable OM in all the vast sound in the ether, self-consciousness of mankind. I'm the sacred fragrance in Earth and brilliance in fire. I'm the life in all beings and austerity in those settings. Know me as the Eternal sea of all beings, the intellect of the intelligent and the prowess of the powerful. Oh Arjuna, I know the past, present and future of all beings, but no one knows me."
Now I would remind you that what what's being expressed here is the is the nature of the self, what the individual psyche can encounter. This is the way it talks about itself. This this is its phenomenology, that the self uh which has it as its only um available uh manifestation to consciousness uh an individual incarnation of each individual self to the extent that it comes in visibility talks like that. See, has some similarity the way Krishna describes himself to Yahweh has some similarity to the way Yahweh uh speaks to Job out of the Whirlwind. What is is quite different too. See, the the whole style is different. It's much calmer, much more objective. There's no Whirlwind here. One might say it's more civilized, it's more psychological. Uh, the West is uh is a barbarian psychologically in comparison to the East. But what Krishna does then is to explain patiently to Arjuna in this calm, objective way, the difference between the ego and the self, thereby acquainting him with the nature of the greater personality. And this Revelation happened because, like Job or Jonah, he persevered in questioning.
The Christian, another example: Paul in Christ. Here again we return to the scriptures of another world religion. The relevant texts uh are found chiefly in in the book of Acts. And I when read you a compilation of the uh of the essential accounts, I think it's better to hear it firsthand rather than had it um summarized. This is Paul speaking: "I once thought it was my duty to use every means to oppose the name of Jesus the Nazarene. This I did in Jerusalem. I myself threw many of the Saints into prison, acting on Authority from the chief priests. And when they were sentenced to death, I cast my vote against them. I often went around the synagogues inflicting penalties, trying in this way to force them to renounce their faith. My Fury against them was so extreme, I even pursued them into foreign cities. On one such Expedition, I was going to Damascus armed with full powers and a commission from the chief priests. And at midday, as I was on my way, I saw a light brighter than the sun from down from heaven. It shone brilliantly around me and my fellow Travelers. We all fell to the ground. I heard a Voice saying to me in Hebrew, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you kicking like this against the goad.' Then I said, 'Who are you, Lord?' And the Lord replied, 'I am Jesus, and you are persecuting me. But get up and stand on your feet, for I have appeared to you for this reason: to appoint you as my servant and as witness of this Vision in which you have seen me and of others in which I shall appear to you. Get up now and go into the City, and you will be told what you have to do.'"
The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless, for though they heard the voice they could see no one. Saul got up from the ground, but even with his eyes wide open he could see nothing at all, and they had to lead him into Damascus by the hand. For 3 days he was without sight and took neither food nor drink. Paul was initially uh absolutely shattered by his encounter with the greater personality. He was blind for 3 days and uh, according to certain traditions and other accounts, there's reason to believe that uh that he had to retreat uh and recuperate for three years in Arabia. I think that's very likely. The biblical account doesn't say that exactly, but there's a tradition this that implies that. I think it's very likely indeed. Paul's encounter with the greater personality, he identified with Christ, you see, and uh that's the origin of the Christian Church uh as we know it. In a way, that uh may be violently resisted by the conscious ego, as witness the persecution of the Christians that Saul engaged in before before his uh his vision. And this is a this is a psychological phenomenon that is well documented. We can we can see that not so infrequently, and certainly in Paul's case it's very understandable in view of the fact that uh the awareness that was brought to him by his encounter with uh greater personality imposed very rigorous requirements on his life, you see. In the case of Paul, he was obliged to sacrifice his personal life totally. He had no, total no personal life after his encounter with a greater personality. He was turned into a slave of Christ. He begins his letters to the Romans and to the Philippians by calling himself uh Paul the slave of Jesus Christ. He begins his letter to Philemon with the words, "From Paul a prisoner of Christ Jesus," and that's what he was literally.
Paul's experience has given us some of the clearest statements that we possess as to how it feels to have had a major encounter with the greater personality. The state of being captive to the greater one is summed up uh very well in the second chapter of Galatians where Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ and I live now not with my own life but with the Life of Christ who lives in me." Jung made a statement that is not too far from from that, speaking in his memories after his encounter with the unconscious and uh with the personification of the greater personality which was called Philemon. He he says this quote: "It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on my life belonged to the generality. It was then that I dedicated myself to the service of the psyche." The Jungian service of the psyche is analogous to to Paul's service of Christ. They're two different uh two different terms uh put with the same phenomenon actually that that are appropriate to to the context of of different uh cultural and collective psyche backgrounds. All right, there's one more. I'm now going to make a leap of 20 years into modern times and talk about Nietzsche and Zarathustra.
Preceding Jung's example, this is the outstanding modern example of an encounter with the greater personality which led to a literary production. We don't know how many encounters, anonymous Encounters of this nature there may have been, but if the individual was was never able to integrate it sufficiently to give it formulation and transmit it to a larger view uh the experience dies unnamed, insane. But Nietzsche was able to do that. Jung makes a remark that it's only the tragedies of Gerhart Hauptmann and Nietzsche's Zarathustra which mark the first glimmerings of a breakthrough, a total experience in our Western hemisphere. What he means by Western hemisphere is uh Western civilization, and the term breakthrough of total experience will be synonymous with Encounter of a greater personality. He's telling us that only Gerhart Hauptmann and Nietzsche uh they are witness in in modern times to to this encounter with the with the larger sense of the psyche. And Zarathustra is vastly more important in my opinion psychologically because the author lived it totally. Gerhart Hauptmann did not. Jung remained the uh in a sort of Olympian stance above the experience that he was describing. Nietzsche lived out his experience totally to to the bitter end. And uh so it's the first real uh encounter of a modern ego with with a greater personality that uh left a record of the experience. He perished in the attempt, but how could it have been otherwise since he was the first to tread this unknown region? And of course, to be ignorant of its dangers. You can't know about the dangers until you until they're they compass you about, till they've already already got you. I think we owe an immense debt to Nietzsche. Jung only learned from his experience. He learned a a tremendous amount. I'm convinced that without Nietzsche's examples Jung might very likely have been a fatality.
In his Memoirs, Jung writes about discovering Nietzsche in 1898. Here is what he said: "I was curious and finally resolved to read him. Thoughts Out of Season was the first volume that fell into my hands. I was carried away by enthusiasm and soon afterward I read Thus Spake Zarathustra. This I liked. Zarathustra was Nietzsche's number two, number two personality. And my number two now corresponded to Zarathustra. And Zarathustra, there could be no about doubt about that, was morbid. Was my number two also morbid? This possibility filled me with a terror which for a long time I refused to admit, but the idea cropped up again and again at the inopportune moment, throwing me into a cold sweat, so that in the end I was forced to reflect on myself. Nietzsche had discovered his number two only late in life, when he was already past middle age, whereas I had known mine ever since boyhood. Nietzsche had spoken naively and incautiously about this ra tun, this secret, this thing not to be named, as though it were quite orderly. But I had noticed in time that this only leased trouble. That I thought was his morbid misunderstanding, that he fearlessly and unsuspectingly let his number two loose upon a world that knew and understood nothing about such things. He was moved by the childish hope of finding people who would be able to share his ecstasies and could grasp his transvaluation of all values. He did not understand himself when he fell head first into the unutterable mystery and wanted to sing its praises to the dull, god-forsaken masses. That was the reason for the bombastic language, the piling up of metaphors, the hymn-like raptures, all a vain attempt to catch the ear of a world which had sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts. He fell like a tightrope walker that he would claim himself to be, in the depths far beyond himself."
Now actually um we have data that demonstrates that Nietzsche encountered the greater personality for the first time in early adolescence. Evidently Jung was not familiar with this source. Very many people are after Nietzsche uh had his breakdown uh in 1882. He was was hospitalized in a mental hospital and uh was considered insane for the rest of his life. For the next 11 years he was unable to uh to express himself in any kind of coherent way. However, his internal psychological function was much more intact than his outer uh appearance indicated. He wrote a uh manuscript while in the mental hospital and smuggled it out with with a patient who who was leaving. He had to get past the watchful eyes of of his sister. What he destroyed it. And this is a highly dramatic and significant event. Uh, he succeeded in smuggling it out, and it was eventually published and it's available in translation, but nobody knows about it. And the reason is that the Nietzsche scholars uh are involved in a conspiracy of silence, to put it mildly. Because what he talks about is are the psychological facts of of his life, and those facts uh the Nietzsche philosophers imagine belittle Nietzsche philosophers what they do is they enlarge Nietzsche the myth of Nietzsche's being. This this work has been published under the title of My Sister, a very unfortunate title, but the title uh wasn't chosen by Nietzsche, was chosen by his Publishers to capitalize on the most scandalous aspect of this work uh which talks about the the incestuous relations between Nietzsche and his sister since childhood. So needless to say that did have to be smuggled past the [Music] sister. Anyway, it's a marvelous psychological document um because uh Nietzsche has realizations. He uh he has a uh in his in his experience of total defeat uh which uh which apparent insanity of of course would be for a person of such such vast intellectual resources uh he is fulfilled as a as a human being. And this is all communicated uh in in this work. Someday someone is going to do a a full psychological case history of Nietzsche's life um and he'll then take his his place as the uh as a first-rate psychologist. Anyway, this is all uh preface to uh to quote on him I'm going to make from from this work. Here's what he tells us of all the books in the Bible: "He says 1 Samuel, especially in the opening passages, made the profoundest impression on me. In a way it may be responsible for an important spiritual element in my life. It is where the Lord three times wakes the infant prophet in his sleep, and Samuel three times mistakes the Heavenly voice for the voice of Eli asleep near him in the temple. Convinced after the third time that his pry is being called to higher services than those available to him in the house of sacrifices, Eli proceeds to instruct him in the ways of Prophecy. I have no Eli, so I, not even a shadow. When a similar visitation darkened the opening days of my adolescence, I was all of 12 when the Lord broke in on me in all his glory, a glaring Fusion of the portraits of Abraham, Moses and young Jesus in our family Bible. In his second visitation he came to me not physically but in a shudder of Consciousness in which good and evil both clamored before the gates of my soul for equal Mastery. The third time he seized me in front of my house in the grasp of a terrible wind. I recognized the agency of a Divine Force because it was in that moment that I conceived of the Trinity as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil." We're talking about an adolescent here. So this indicates, anything quote, this indicates that Nietzsche's prophetic function was born at the age of 12, and these particular Revelations with their emphasis on the conflict of the Opposites indicate that the self in its modern phenomenology, the way we are acquainted with it, had been constellated in him, so that the core issue for him became the polarity between Christ and Antichrist. When you read his his works carefully, like you can see that to be the basic underlying issue. Consciously Nietzsche sided with with Antichrist. He deliberately identified himself with Antichrist, but unconsciously he identified with Christ. So to, after his breakdown he signed some of his letters "The Crucified One." But either way, you see, he lived his life out of a profound religious attitude.
Jung puts it this way: "The tragedy of Zarathustra is that because his God died, Nietzsche himself became a God." And this happened because he was no atheist. He was of too positive a nature to tolerate the urban Neurosis of atheism. It seems dangerous for such a man to assert that God is dead. He ultimately becomes the victim of inflation. Nietzsche was very important to Jung. Need any further evidence of that? Uh, surely the fact that the uh conducted a yearly seminar on Zarathustra over a period of five years, the notes of which are accumulated in 10 volumes, that ought to suffice to demonstrate the fact that he was seriously concerned with with Nietzsche. I want to read you just a couple of small excerpts from from those notes, from the Zarathustra seminar. Quote: "He was born in 1844, and he began to write Zarathustra in 1883, so he was 39 years old then. The way in which he wrote it is most remarkable. He himself made a verse about it. He [Music] said, which means 'Then one became two, and Zarathustra passed by to me.' That means that Zarathustra then became manifest as a second personality in himself. That showed that he had himself a pretty clear notion that he was not identical with Zarathustra. But how could he help assuming such an identity in those days when there was no psychology? Nobody would then have dared to take the idea of a personification seriously, or even of an independent autonomous spiritual agency. 1883 was the time of the blooming of materialistic philosophy, so he had to identify with Zarathustra in spite of the fact that he felt, as this verse proves, a definite difference between himself and the old wise men. Then his idea that Zarathustra had to come back to mend the faults of his former former invention is psychologically most characteristic. He had an absolutely historical feeling about it, that it filled him with a particular sense of Destiny. Of course, such feeling is most uplifting, and it was the Dionysian experience par excellence. And in the latter part, these Dionysian ecstasies come in. In one of his letters to his sister, he gives the most impressive description of the ecstasy in which he wrote Zarathustra. He says about this way of writing that it simply poured out of him. It was almost an autonomous production, with unfailing certainty the words presented themselves. And the whole description gives us the impression of the quite extraordinary condition in which he must have been, a condition of possession. It was as if he was possessed by a creative genius that took his brain and produced this work out of absolute necessity."
I want to give you an example. This will do it much better than I talk. You can be about the kind of ecstasy that he could fall into. He describes it in this following passage from Ecce Homo. This is Nietzsche speaking: "Has anyone at the end of the 19th century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one's system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely an Incarnation, merely a mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of Revelation in the sense of a suddenly indescribable certainty and subtlety; something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down. That merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek, one accepts, one does not ask who gives. Like lightning, a thought flashes up with necessity, without hesitation regarding its porn. I never had a choice. A Rapture whose tremendous tension occasionally discharges itself in a flood of Tears. Now the pace quickens involuntarily, now it becomes slow. One is altogether beside oneself with the distinct consciousness of subtle shutters and of one's skin creeping down to one's toes. A depth of happiness in which even what is most painful and gloomy does not seem something opposite but rather conditioned. Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree, and the Gale feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity. The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all. One no longer has any notion of…"
What is an image? Or a method? For everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and platter you, for they want to ride in your back, on every metaphor you ride, to every truth. Hear the words and word shrines of all being open up before you. Here all being wishes to become word; all becoming wishes to learn from you how to speak well. He's describing the experience of the unconscious, uh, in its creative rush of, uh, of meaningful image and, uh, very few people can describe it so well because he had such superpowers of expression. See, most of *Thus Spake Zarathustra* was written in this ecstatic state of mind; it poured directly out of the unconscious. And in this book, the greater personality is the figure of Zarathustra, the reincarnation of the, of the ancient proud, and this figure announces a new morality and a whole new worldview. And what he announces, in truth, is the harbinger of depth psychology. *Thus Spake Zarathustra* is an absolutely remarkable psychological document. The way it describes the collective shadow of modern man is breathtaking. It abounds in brilliant psychological truths, but it's also a dangerous poison; it can make you sick. I cannot read very much Nietzsche; it makes me ill, literally. It's because its transcendent insights have not been assimilated by the whole man, and therefore they have been humanized, and, uh, that makes them evil and destructive, and they can kill. But that's the nature of the greater Christianity. See, that's part of what it is; that's why we talk about woundedness. It doesn't exist within the, uh, the categories of, of, of the ego, of human decency. It transcends those categories on both sides—on the good side and the evil side. The woman, but as a phenomenon, it's, uh, it's absolutely remarkable. Many of the ideas that we are familiar with from Jungian psychology, uh, show up in Nietzsche. For instance, I'm going to read you a short section, which is an explicit description of the self. See if you don't agree this sounds familiar. This comes from *Thus Spake Zarathustra*, Part One, and Section Four.
I. You say and are proud of the word, but greater is that in which you do wish to have faith: your body and its great reason that does not say I. That does I. What the sense feels, what the spirit knows, never has its end in itself; but sense and spirit would persuade you that they are the end of all things—that is how vain they are. Instruments and toys are sense and spirit; behind them still lies the self. The self also seeks with the eyes of the senses; it also listens with the ears of the spirit. Spirit always the self listens and seeks; it compares, overpowers, conquers, destroys; it controls, and it is in control of the ego too. Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom; and who knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom? Yourself laughs at your ego and at its bold leaps. What are these leaps and flights of thought to me? It says to itself: detour to my end. I am the leading strength of the ego and the prompter of its concepts. The self says to the ego: feel pain here; then the ego suffers and thinks how it might suffer no more, and that is why it is made to think. The ego says to the ego—the self says to the ego: feel pleasure here; then the ego is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again, and that is why it is made to think. You see. End of quote.
Nietzsche has an intuitive type—intuitive—and has a self associated with inferior function, namely sensation, uh, which is represented by body. So the self is the body to him. That's generally true of intuitives. You know, if you look around at your friends who are particularly interested in body work, they're almost all intuitives. We sensation types don't, won't pay that much attention to the body; we don't have to deify it, understand? But the remarkable point, uh, in this account is the explicit description of the self as a second center of the personality and as a center of the superior ego. Then Nietzsche knows, uh, knows that about the self only because he's had the experience. It wasn't all assimilated at the time he wrote it, but he'd had the experience. It did get assimilated in the middle hospital. That's, that's the, that's the great work of the, of the *postumus* document that demonstrates that.
I want to put in a few words of homage to Nietzsche. I see him as a, as a martyr, uh, in the cause of emerging depth psychology. If one reads him carefully, one gets definite hints that he deliberately chose the way of inflation in order to learn what lies on the other side. He was a man of immense psychological courage—then psychological ration more than courage, but courage too—although he was pushed over the brink of psychosis, uh, by syphilitic, uh, disease. In some sense he also seemed to choose. Here's what he says, uh, in his posthumous autobiography: quote, “The legend makers saw in Empedocles plunging into the belching flames of Aetna; but this fate was reserved not for the great pre-Socratic, but for me alone. Having been separated from the love of my life, Lou Salomé, the love that made me human, I made my desperate plunge into the fires of madness, hoping, like Zarathustra, to snatch faith in myself by going out of my mind and entering a higher region of sanity—the sanity of the raving lunatic, the normal madness of the daemon.” And in the same posthumous work, Nietzsche writes these moving words from his room in the madhouse: “Is my honor lost because women have betrayed me to weakness, or I have betrayed my own strength, seeking the power of true knowledge which alone can save us from approaching doom? Am I completely damned because I am crushed beneath the Athenian dead on the plain of Marathon? Let Delianes, the eloquent defender of Athenian honor, deliver his funeral oration over me. No, you have not failed, Frederick Nietzsche. There are noble defeats as there are noble deaths, and you have died nobly. No, you have not failed; I swear it by the dead on the plain of Marathon.” End quote.
I think now, with this, uh, final work of Nietzsche's available to us, we can see his life, uh, in its, um, entirety as a heroic tragedy, a sacrifice which inaugurated the age of depth psychology and which first brought the greater personality to the awareness of modern man. And after Nietzsche’s experience, the way he was now prepared for Jung.
So in conclusion, you will have noticed, and it's surely significant, that three of the four cases I discussed are to be found in the scriptures of three major world religions. And there was a fourth example that, that was not discussed—that of the story of Moses and Jethro, which is found in the holy book of Islam. What this indicates is that the experience of the greater personality is of such numinosity that it may sometimes bring into being a whole new religion. But now, for the first time in what I would call the Jungian era, we are in a position to begin to understand scientifically and generally these psychological entities that generate religions. This influx of new, new knowledge is pouring into the modern psyche. Of course, it pours into individuals first of all, but it's also pouring into the modern psyche as a collective entity. And this influx presents both a great opportunity and a great danger. It's as if collectively we are about to encounter the greater personality, which, as Jung says, can make our life flow into that greater life, but which is also a moment of deadliest peril. It seems to me that our best chance to be spared a collective catastrophe resides in the possibility that enough people will have individual, conscious encounters with the greater personality and thereby will contribute to the process of immunizing the body social against a mass, uh, atheistic inflation. If each individual can work towards that end by diligently assimilating his projections and seeking his own unique individual encounter, uh, then he will contribute to that immunizing process. To the extent that it, uh, can take place in the arena of the individual psyche, it will not have to take place in that dreadful arena of the collective psyche. In the words of Jung, with which I close, he says this in paragraph 512, right from *The Secret of the Golden Flower*: “One must celebrate a last supper with oneself and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood,” which means that he must recognize and accept the other in himself. Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ’s teaching that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to endure others also?
I would like to have a brief question, comment, period, either right away or after a break, uh, how many want a break? Many don’t. Well, that’s happily decided by fiat. We’ll have a break. I’ve already had the same question asked three times, so, um, I better address myself to it. Very eff—stop for why [Music] one person formatted this way, but the two others asked the identical question. There are no women on your list. Is that because their documents do not exist, uh, how, or would it be different for a woman, the encounter with a greater personality?
Well, I haven’t thought this through very much, uh, but, uh, several women immediately come to mind, so I, I’ll mention as examples, uh, Demeter in Greek myth. Of course, there, there are a number of examples of the, of the feminine encounter, um, with deity. Um, you know, a standing example is Semele, the, the, um, mother of Dionysus. Danaë, the mother of Perseus, is another example. Um, Mary’s encounter with the angel of the Annunciation is, is another example. Um, I haven’t thought this through carefully, so I don’t want to state it too explicitly. It’s something we can all reflect on, but, uh, it’s my impression that, um, when the woman has the, when the feminine entity has the encounter, the, the greater personality, uh, it has a, has a somewhat different quality to it. We don’t hear about wrestling; sometimes we hear about fleeing, uh, but we don’t hear, hear about wrestling. Uh, certainly, wounding may be a part of it, uh, when the femininity, uh, is the seeking one. And now a standing example, of course, is Semele, who, um, who through her own insistence, but also she was goaded by, by Hera into it, so that complicates matters. It’s not exactly the fault of the ego, uh, if an archetypal entity goads her into a stupid action, but, but nonetheless, Semele insisted on, uh, Zeus’s, uh, appearing to her in his full glory, and then, then she was, uh, consumed by the, the fire of the lightning created.
Now, in the, in the mythological material, whether, uh, it is a woman figure, feminine figure, or a masculine figure who encounters the greater personality, I don’t think should be too rigorously translated into the experience of women and men specifically. Uh, you must remember that, uh, each individual has a masculine and feminine component. These, these are one of the basic pairs of opposites, and to the extent that one is dealing with, with authentic individuation symbolism, then the, the question of “is it a man or is it a woman?” recedes in importance because one’s dealing with the opposites and one is, uh, holding both the opposites. Now, uh, we’re living in a time when women are realizing their, their need to realize adequately their, um, their feminine reality, their feminine dimension, and they’re therefore seeking, um, models and, um, images and, and myths that, that speak to feminine experience, and that’s all understandable and appropriate, but strictly speaking, that does not refer to the actual individuation process; that refers to a prelude to the individuation process, you see. But certainly there are examples of, of feminine figures having that encounter, and there’s a lot more. And, of course, Psyche in the onward Psyche story is again a prime example, too—not to mention Hades and Persephone, about self.
I, I am, um, had the impression you were saying—you’re saying that in Jungian psychology that there isn’t a personal self; it sounded like it was very sort of impersonal, non-personal. So that, uh, I wonder if this is shared by everyone, or, or, or whether it really is, uh, a personal self that goes through the individuation process. The question is, is the self personal or is it impersonal?
Um, such questions are not answered theoretically; they’re answered, um, experientially, on the basis of what the accumulated data, uh, indicates. And the accumulated data indicates that it’s both; it’s personal and it’s transpersonal. And under different circumstances, uh, one or the other aspect might, might predominate. Um, in cases where the ego is very much, uh, in, in need of, uh, succor, sustenance, um, the personal aspect of the self, um, may, may manifest itself with special prominence. One sees that phenomenon, for instance, in the birth of Christianity, uh, the image of the Christian God that emerged was a loving, personal God. That’s not the whole picture of the, of the psychological innate, but it’s one part of it. So that, uh, what emerges from the unconscious tends to, to some extent, compensate the conscious situation. And what tends to be evoked is what’s needed or what’s being neglected.
Yes, sir. I’m curious. You said the ego is per se the little center, and the self is the big center. I’ve been curious, interested in the use of the word “union.” Would “union” refer to the ego or the little self of Carl Jung, the man per se? If we’re ascribing, uh, a greater or a higher glory to the self, why don’t we call ourselves, uh, Brahmins or some such thing? The ego—self of Carl Jung—doesn’t, doesn’t strike me that we should concentrate on that, but perhaps show and light—no, no [Laughter] light, light, think, miss it. I’ll let that stand as a comment; I won’t, I’m not saying anything about it.
Yes, we sent something at the end that’s very important to me, and I would like you to have the mind to understand it more deeply. When you talk about the inflation of the social body—true—the full inhibition of poor individual, ual—I would like you to be more specific, this process, and on the balance, and what kind of, um, um, information are you referring to? If I had a blackboard, I’d try to illustrate what I mean. What I would, what I would do, I would draw on the blackboard a great circle, and then at the circumference of that circle, I would draw a lot of little tiny circles, each of which is intersected by the circumference—the great circle. Some, some of the little circles are more below the line, and some are more above the line, indicating degrees of consciousness. I would use that image to, to try to visualize for you, uh, how I conceive the nature of the collective psyche. The collective psyche, uh, is made up of the sum total of individual human psyches, um, and we are all, therefore, all of us as individuals, are connected by virtue of our lower psychic depths with the collective psyche and with each other individually. Um, in that collective psyche, we are all part of the larger organism that can be demonstrated. It’s not very difficult; you need only have, uh, somebody, uh, rush into this room, uh, under the influence of some intense affect. We’ll all have it; it’ll, it’ll spread like wildfire. We’ll all have it; we may not all act on it, but we’ll all have it; we’ll all feel it. It demonstrates the fact that we’re all cells of, of this one great organism, and we’re affected not just by things we’re conscious of, but we’re affected by things we aren’t conscious of too. And so it sometimes happens that, uh, what somebody’s experiencing on the other side of the planet, uh, uh, connects with us and shows up in our dreams, for instance. So this is what the nature of the collective psyche is. Now, once that is perceived—that’s a matter of perception, being able to see it as I described to you—this probably sounds just like a theory, but you have a body; you experience it; it’s not a theory anymore; it’s a fact because you have enough data to, uh, establish it. And once, once that’s, uh, recognized as a fact, uh, then, uh, it’s evident that the, the way one, if, if one hopes to, to do anything at all to, to alter the great, great collective organism, uh, he has to do it by cultivating that part of the collective organism that is available to him. And that part is his own psyche; not somebody else’s psyche; it’s his own psyche that’s available. And as you cultivate that little island that, that is your own, you are, uh, influencing, at least infinitesimally, uh, the, the state of the, of the great collective organism that is called casting the bean out of your own eye, right? You, it’s, see, the Last Supper, eating your own, own, but, your own blood. Yes, uh, Martin, speak up, please. If the self is called on, and also the whole universe and, um, all the galaxies from Earth, and, um, how do you think, um, light and we and the Hebrews have any importance in the self? For that’s just the self important for, I mean, if you would go, um, um, mankind with blowing himself out, make change of itself. What’s the importance of the ego?
The importance of the ego is that the, the ego is the carrier of consciousness, and to the extent that that, uh, consciousness, uh, is, is valuable in a cosmic sense—and it is supremely valuable—it, uh, requires, uh, an ego to, to manifest within, to be the vessel, uh, to carry it on. You by yourself and Nietzsche saying, but Nietzsche went insane. Yes, he did. Can you give any idea why Nietzsche went insane and Jung didn’t?
Yes, yes, I do have one idea. You want me to tell it? They both had the experience of the encounter with, with the greater personality, with the [Music] overwhelming, uh, archetypal self. Um, Jung only integrated his experience and Nietzsche during his, um, during his work of mind didn’t. As I suggested, he, he did integrate it, in, in my opinion, uh, in his final, silent last years, um, but so far as his, his known, uh, work is concerned, during that period was not integrated, and Jung did integrate. And, uh, what does it mean to integrate it? It means, uh, to have achieved, um, a sizable enough, uh, ego—referring to the gentleman’s other question—that it doesn’t drown. The way you can tell it’s drowned is, is when, uh, one lives in and functions and, and speaks, uh, in a nonhuman way; when, when he’s lost his, his limited, uh, human, uh, dimensions. Uh, and we all have a good instinct, uh, to tell us, uh, when we’re encountering that sort of thing. You don’t have to learn it with, with your head; innate tells you, there’s something smells bad. You, when you—we—at nature, you knew right away it’s morbid. And if you’re in good connection with your instincts, when you read *Thus Spake Zarathustra* and you feel sick, you’ll know something’s wrong. Your own, of course. If you’re not in good touch with your instincts, then you won’t. Um, but, uh, Jung, we’ve, we’ve got built-in the, the equipment to tell us what’s good for us and what’s, what’s poisonous. But the, the, the difference is the, is the development of the ego that’s, that’s able to, to have the experience and relate to it without identifying with it. And then, if one succeeds in that, then one becomes an initiate. One, when one has been—becomes a privileged participant in a level of wisdom of the psyche that isn’t generally available, but one doesn’t go around spouting out that, that fact, uh, because the preaching about it, uh, is just, is just an expression of the identification.
Do you think that the ego is, uh, when somebody does cocaine or alcohol or drugs, is actually—it’s starving for attention so it can activate the self, and that, uh, it’s desperately looking for a stir, to awakening? Ego—people that are doing cocaine or alcoholics or whatever—they might have this, uh, genetic predisposition, vulnerability, and in effect, it’s been carried on their family collectively, and that what they’re trying to do is trying to kind of like—the ego is starving for so much attention that it’s willing to kind of like sabotage itself to the self in order for it to kind of like reaffirm the fact that it’s not alone.
Yes, I think you’re absolutely right; that, uh, it’s a, a concrete, uh, misapplication of the hunger for connection with the autonomous psyche. Move on. Yes, earlier you mentioned Jung, but, um, is the term “Jungian” used because of his caring the Shadow, and then the violation which, to give an example—well, the part—somebody asked me a question, but I think she didn’t bring it up; I, I’ll bring it up; it’s relevant here. I’m going to bring up the, um, that particular event in Nietzsche’s life, that he—lose—to somewhere where he had the image of a toad. Is that the one thing? Yes, it was Freud, on his—
Hand on his, on his hand; that an ugly, ugly toad or frog. When his seed—that um—that he was obliged to eat, and get a variation of that same image in in the spoke s Christa, where a snake crawling into the mouth of of a Shepherd. Uh, you almost thought about that—was that it was probably an image of of his—cus—that needed to be assimilated. My notion is that it was probably uh an image of his incest experience that need be a similarity, but um there's a lot of talk in in thus book Z thr about the what in she calls the ugliest man. Uh um, and Adam Time s TR, the ugliest man is rejected; he isn't accepted. So that nii is an is a an excellent example of the concerning the very question you asked. Um, because because he did not, at least in his working life—this was all corrected—I want to repeat, uh, in his years in the asylum, that's what makes this final document so important. Uh, it it redeems him psychologically; it damns him philosophically. So the philosophers will have nothing to do with it, but it redeems him psychologically. Um, but so far as his working life was concerned, uh, he did not uh he did not assimilate the shadow; he uh he committed a crime against the shadow; he was inl horribly inflated—read such science as e eomo—shocked, and and therefore the uh Vengeance of the self—they had destructive effect. So that that's that's first example; it comes to me on that question. Were there other examples that you have mentioned? Uh, also finally assimilated exper—you mean Jacob, Jacob, St. Paul? And yes, yes, they were; they were simulated; yes, they were. See nii—nii is the modern example; he's the he's the first man I think of—of nii nii and and Yung as something like um Saul and David. Saul was the first first king of the Hebrew kingdom, and he was a failure; he was he was rejected by God, and the spirit of God was taken away from him, and uh Davood was given—and he couldn't do anything wrong. We was it—that's an archetype—that Saul-David conjunction—in the N own combination. I see as some noce. I think it's time to stop, so uh thank you.