The Rainmaker Story:Lecture by Robert Johnson
Introduction
My first meeting Robert Johnson was in 1970/71, where I joined in with a group of friends to participate in Robert’s weekly ‘young men’s group’. At that time, he was living on his cliff side home in Encinitas, and we would carpool up and back from San Diego. Each week, for several years, we would engage under Robert’s wise guidance in sharing dreams, studying fairy tales and myths, with Jungian views and insights. Reflecting back to this time, I see what a rare and special time, where, through Robet’s quiet guidance and wisdom these small intimate gatherings facilitated our inquiry into the heart of the nature of our inner life. One of the stories he shared with us, The Rainmaker Story, he would later give as a formal presentation to the San Diego ‘Friends of Jung’ group. What follows is an unedited transcript of this lecture. – Ken Small
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We are indebted for our story tonight to Richard Wilhelm, who is best known to us as a translator of the I Ching from Chinese into German and then from German by Cary Baynes into English for us. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Richard Wilhelm because he brought us a treasure from ancient China. Wilhelm was an interesting man, and grew up largely in China, the son of German missionaries. Chinese was really his native tongue, but he knew German very well of course, also. So, he was superbly equipped to bridge Chinese and a western tongue for us. He brought back from China this simple, brief, short, beautiful, beautiful story. It enchanted Dr. Jung so much that on several occasions Dr. Jung said, “This story embodies my philosophy entirely and more completely than anything else one could have said.”
Jung once told Barbara Hannah, “Don’t you ever dare give a lecture in public without telling the rainmaker story.” And she took him quite literally and the rainmaker story is everywhere. It’s a beautiful story and if one can comprehend it, there is a great deal to learn from it. The story is utterly simple.
It seemed that there was a Chinese village which was besieged with drought, the crops were drying up and there would have to be rain very soon or the village was faced with disaster. The village deliberated and finally decided to send for the great rainmaker. And then, as now, as always, the great people are always someplace else. They are never close to home. So, the rainmaker was sent for. He arrived, looked about and said, “Please build me a little straw hut outside the village and give me five days of food and water in the hut and leave me alone.” So, they quickly did this. The man disappeared into the hut and was not seen again, no one bothered him and at the end of four days it rained, just in time so that the crops were saved. The people went to the hut, dragged the poor man out, blinking into the light, congratulated him, poured gifts upon him, gave him his fee, made much of him because he had literally saved the village for them. And someone said, “Tell us, how did you make the rain? What, what is the rainmaking ceremony?” And he said, “Oh, but you must understand. I hadn’t gotten to the rainmaking ceremony at all. I felt so out of sorts with myself inside when I came into your village that I had to go and sit in the hut for four days just to get things right inside and I never made the rainmaking ceremonies.” And that is the story.
It would be astonishing enough if one said that a great man, a powerful man had made ceremonies and brought the rain. That would be saying a very great deal. But Dr. Jung felt that it was saying even more and even a deeper truth that man had to put things right inside himself before he could get to the rainmaking ceremonies and the ceremonies, then, were not necessary. The impact of the story is that if you get things right inside yourself the outside will come right. Magic is not necessary. Only the inner work. This is what pleased Dr. Jung so much about the story. It says that if you will work inwardly, the outside will respond. It’s not magic. It doesn’t have to be ceremony. It is work. And the rainmaker, the great man that he was, knew this. And he did the correct thing. He put his inside world right, and the outside world came right. This opens up that enormous question, which will occupy us for the evening now. What is the relationship between the inner world and the outer world, the inside world and the outside world, that private, subjective, personal, hidden, very difficult world which we all carry around inside us and the outside world that we grace with the word the real world? I am always amused because India puts it the other way around, the real world is the inside one and the outside world is the illusory. Have it, as you will, there are two worlds. We all make two worlds. What is the relationship between the two worlds, the inside world, the rainmakers feeling out of sorts with himself in this case, and the outside world, the parched crops which were threatening to dry up very quickly. What is the relationship between the inner world and the outer world? Substitute whatever terms you may make wish for inner and outer. It is the duality which all of us live in. I would like to suggest that there are four possibilities, four different ways of relating inner and outer.
The first way, which is the easiest for us to see is that we are at odds with our environment. And this is the case with most Westerners and, indeed, most Americans. Discontent is the lot of most Westerners; we don’t like our relationship to the outer world. We are discontented with the bank balance at Bank of America. We don’t much like our jobs. We don’t like our age, whether it’s too young or too old, or getting too old or something or another. One doesn’t like the shape of one’s nose particularly. One doesn’t like the fact that one’s hair is doing something or not doing something. One is at odds with one’s environment. Discontent seems to be the lot of most Westerners. We are probably the most discontented people that history has ever seen. Somebody once called Madison Avenue “the purveyors of discontent.” Most people live at odds with their outer world. That is their inner inclination, their wishes, the fantasy, the interior life does not coincide well with the outer world. Most people are discontented.
Content is an interesting world. It comes from the same root as contained. And to be contented is to consent to be contained, that is, to be at peace with the environment as you find it, to be contained in the circumstances of your life and to concede to this. That is contentment. Not very many people are contented in that sense. Discontent seems to be a characteristic of Western man. One wishes so much for something, but the director of Internal Revenue seems to be wishing exactly the opposite. One wishes so much for something but the boss at work has other ideas. One wishes so much for something, but inflation is speeding one’s ship off in quite another direction. This is the relationship of the inner world and the outer world. Discontent is the first relationship or the first possibility of relationship with the outer world. I delight occasionally in going down to Tijuana and looking in at the glassblowers. These young men work with such happiness and such joy. They work. They work hard. They are pleased. They are contented people in that they seem to be contained. Just the language they use, the movements they make with their body speak of contentment, and a containment. They are there and one has a feeling that they consent to be there. One looks almost in vain on this side of the border for this kind of contentment. Our chief relationship of the inner world and the outer world in this society is resentment, or restlessness, or discontent. Startling idea. Somebody once said, “You have to run very hard up the down escalator to stay still.” That seems to be many people’s attitude toward the inner and the outer. “I’m going up but it’s going down and if I rush fast enough, I might be able to stay still.” What a dreadful philosophy when one gets it out and has a look square at it.
Have you ever had a delicious fantasy, a time of great joy, of peace, of inspiration, and then you focused your eyes again on what we call reality, and you went out and the whole thing was disillusioned, and the whole thing became sad and not true? This is one possibility of relationship between inner and outer.
The second possibility, you could predict, is the reverse of this and it’s very interesting to look at. It’s increasingly popular in the Western world. And that is to take the attitude that the outer world doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. Bills are there not specially to be paid for. Watches go clockwise for no particular reason. And it’s no virtue to be on time or get anything done. It’s a kind of laid back, relaxed, take it easy attitude. This attitude has a very interesting origin in our culture. It was virtually unknown until the impact of the Eastern world fell upon us. A little bit of it came as early as the twelfth century when some ideas and attitudes crept into the Western world from Persia. And the *Cathers sprang up who took just this point of view. The outside world is a big illusion and the sooner we shut it down, the sooner we get ourselves free of it the better. Now, beginning mid-nineteenth century and endemic which is now the philosophies of India, principally, are permeating, enlightening, or contaminating, however you wish to look at it, our point of view. The Eastern scriptures are now translated into Western tongues. And many people, especially young people, a kind of hippie philosophy, has (have) taken the readings of India and said, “Look, it isn’t out there. It just isn’t very important. There isn’t anything to be done. It doesn’t make any difference anyway. So why, why…No sweat.” This is the pendulum swinging way, way over from the first point of view which we talked about.
This has a very interesting origin, which fascinates me. I found out to my great surprise that the early readings of Hindu scriptures were badly translated and vastly misunderstood and still are. What people think the Hindu scriptures to say, that is, that the objective physical world out here is illusive and doesn’t exist is not true. That is not the Hindu teaching. The teaching is that our relationship, chiefly our projections on that outside world, our psychological muddles, and the things that we make out of the outside world and our poor relationship with it is the illusory world which Hinduism would like to say this from. There are echoes of that in Christianity once I got to thinking about it. Christianity would like to save us from the world of flesh and the devil. I don’t think it is this world. I don’t think it’s the physical world. I think it is the psychological, illusory world, constructed, projected world that Christianity would like to save us from. I would like to be saved from that, too, when I have a good look at it. So, there is a big misconception loose which is having a vast effect on our Western world; that the world outside there doesn’t exist. India does not say this. Our projections on the world out there don’t exist or are illusory. And it is that which India would like to save us from. But this misunderstanding persists and many people unconsciously, by way of Christian Science, by New Age Thought, by Theosophy, or a host of isms like that which are endemic in our culture now, would tell us that world out there isn’t real, and it isn’t worth much fuss. Not true. So, I see two points of view, which are pendulum swings. One, you have to struggle hard, just to survive in that hostile world out there. The second, that that world doesn’t really exist, and just lay back and take it easy and things will go all right.
Then, there is a third point of view. And this is mostly where intelligent or trained or responsible people are now. And that is that the inside world exists, and the outside world also exists and that they can influence each other. This is essentially the doctrine of prayer. If one exercises one’s intelligence in an inner sense, one can influence objective fact. And I don’t have to talk a lot about this tonight because Christianity teaches this, one has heard many, many sermons on the subject of prayer. And it’s where our Western culture is at this moment. The inner world can influence the exterior world. If someone is ill, one’s petitionary prayers can have some effect on that person. If the weather is bad and something is dangerous about it, a group of people will pray about it. The belief that the inner world is strong enough and real enough so that it can influence the outer world, which is there and real. This is so much our point of view. This is so much our western Christian heritage that it doesn’t take any more discussion really. Everyone knows this point of view, whether one agrees with it entirely or not. In one way, as I talk about these four ways of inner and outer relating to each other, I’m talking about an evolutionary pattern. And when we discuss this third way of relating inner and outer, I think we are up to the present moment in psychic evolution.
But there’s another possibility, which is not much known about us. People don’t think about it very often but just the beginning, rudimentary possibilities of it lie within the bosom of every modern person. And it’s that that I want to talk about at some length tonight. In the third way of relating inner and outer, one can describe prayer as being of three stages according to Christian theology. The first is the prayer of petition. That is, one asks God, or asks the power to be, to do what one wishes. Please heal so and so so that he will not be sick. Please relieve my poverty, or please further this particular thing, or put blessings on somebody, or relieve the suffering or the loneliness or the pain of somebody or another. One is asking a level other than oneself something outside oneself. One would be inclined to say something deeper than oneself but it’s still outside oneself, something other, to do something about this situation.
The second level of prayer is a prayer wherein one asks to be a vehicle for the will of God, he, one does not ask for anything specific. He says….one says, “Please make me a vehicle for your will.” This is a highly disciplined kind of prayer and not terribly popular because one doesn’t get much out of it.
There is still a third level and that is contemplative prayer. And it’s something other than either of these two levels and it gives us the clue for the fourth possibility of relating inner and outer. The prayer of contemplation where oneself and God are made identical/united. It is the prayer of seeing; it is the prayer of identification. It’s as if one takes one’s little circle which is oneself and puts it on the same axis as the great circle which is God. It’s not to say that one becomes God but here language gets very difficult because our evolution hasn’t gone this far and a dead giveaway to that is that we have no terms for this experience. It is the process of making oneself identical with…. I don’t know how to finish the sentence, maybe it doesn’t need finishing. But that is the fourth way of relating the inner world to the outer world. And it is best exemplified by the Christian device of a mandorla. Thank heaven we have a term for it. Hardly anybody’s ever heard of it. Almost everybody knows what a mandala is. We’ve gone to Sanskrit and borrowed that terminology. But in our own Christian culture, from medieval times, comes the term, comes the description of the mandorla, which is just what it looks like, and is spelled exactly as it sounds. A mandorla is that almond shaped segment which occurs when two circles partly overlap. It is said in midieval theology that when heaven and earth partly overlap a mandorla is formed. It is said in our Christian theology that only Christ or the Virgin may be portrayed within a mandorla. One sees it most commonly in the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, where Christ or the Virgin will be seated in majesty surrounded by the almond shaped framework of the mandorla over the entrance, the main central entrance to the Gothic building. If one could comprehend this, he would be well on his way to understanding a new relationship between the inside world and the outside world. In Christianity the mandorla is the overlapping of heaven and earth. In our rainmaking story it would be the consciousness in the rainmaker which understood that his interior, private personal life overlapped, to some degree at any rate, the exterior situation of crops dying for lack of rain. And it is in this overlap where something can be done. and it is not an influence of the inside over the outside. It is an understanding of the identity of the inside and the outside. There now, it is said as well as I can say it. The identity, the non-duality of inside and outside.
Somebody once asked Dr. Jung in a private seminar, “Dr. Jung, do the happenings of the inside world, one’s meditations, one’s dreams, or one’s fantasies, have any effect on the outside world?” And he said, “No, Madam, they have no effect. They are identical.” More than effect. It is identity. That is, one is looking at the outside world when one looks at the inside world. The rainmaker knew this. And that’s the import of the story. If one puts one’s inside world right, he has also put the outside world right because they are not different. That is, if you’ve come to that point of evolution where one understands this. The greater the overlap of the two worlds, whatever one wants to call them, the rainmaker in his hut and the dry crops or whatever definition of this one might choose the overlap and the greater the overlap is the identity or one’s concept or consciousness of the identity. and the more one’s interior life affects the exterior world around one. And if someone were well conscious of Tahiti would object to that very language and he would say, “It would be the consciousness that the two are the same, not that they affect each other.”
The art of the mandorla, which is this fourth possibility, is the means by which we may draw duality back to something of a unity, wherein the director of Internal Revenue and my account at Bank of America might be reconciled somehow or another. It seems a Herculean task. But according to this possibility the directive of Internal Revenue and my balance at the bottom of the page at the end of the month at Bank of America are not different from each other. You recognize very quickly this is not our common mentality, however, and we don’t behave that way. In this consciousness, which I think is just budding in mankind now, and there are small moments of it, it is our task to make a mandorla of the opposing elements of our life. I don’t know any better way to do it than the rainmaker way. Build yourself a little straw hut somehow or another on some level or another and go off and be alone until you’ve put things back together again inside yourself.
A mandorla could be called a process of integration for it involves reconciliation or the fusion of apparent opposites. Actually, mystic and religious doctrine tells us there is only one circle but having two eyes we see it as two circles. If we begin to focus those back [together] again, we approach the one circle again. An example of this – suppose one sees and hears a man ringing a bell. And if one were not capable of high synthesis within one’s faculties, he would not know that the two faculties were looking at the same event. One would see the bell ringing with one’s eyes and would describe it as well, a man is doing this with something, and the bell is shaped thus and so, and one would describe a visual event. One’s ears would describe a totally different event. The sound is thus and it’s rhythmic in this particular way and the tone quality is thus and so. If one did not have the process, the ability at synthesis, which all of us do, our evolution has taken us this far, one would never put those two events together. In the same way, should one’s evolution go far enough, the wise people of the world tell us that we would see the director of Internal Revenue and my bank account at Bank of America as a single identity. I look at them through different faculties and I don’t yet have that faculty of synthesis, which could draw these two together and make meaning out of it. Every time one has a big flood of meaning in one’s life it’s because some synthesis took place and one says, “Aha, now I see, that and this….” And then he runs out of language because we have none and he can’t say what has happened. But a powerful thing has happened to him. In our scriptures there’s a beautiful phrase, “If thy eye be single thy whole body shall be filled with light.” If one stops looking at two circles, generally not overlapping at all, but if “thy eye were single” so that one saw that there were only…. there was only one circle or that the two circles which we indulge in are overlapping considerably “thy whole body shall be filled with light.” One of the most beautiful things out of our scriptures.
I take delight in talking about some of the mandorlas which exist for us. They do exist. They are present for us. One of the most curious that I’ve run into, is the mandorla of syntax, that is our verbal forms. Every sentence which is properly put together, and that’s probably why syntax is so important an issue in a culture, every sentence is an equation. It says this is that or it makes an identity. Every statement of syntax is as exact an equation as a mathematician uses when he puts down something and an equal sign and he puts down the right-hand side of the equation then. All sentences are equations, and all sentences properly said are synthesizers. All sentences are mandorlas with the verb as the middle point. Chinese consists almost entirely of verbs. A noun is rare in Chinese. There is now rod for ship in Chinese. There are only many words of a ship doling something. A ship going down the river or a ship at anchor or a ship being built or a ship burning down. There’s no concept that static concept, of a ship. There’s no such thing in the Chinese language. Somebody pointed out that the great lines of Shakespeare are based on verbs. The lines of almost everybody else consists of nouns and when it consists of adjectives, you’ve lost your way.
A sentence correctly done in syntax is a mandorla. And I think this is the reason why it is so good to talk and why it is so pleasurable to talk. All sentences are statements of identity, and all sentences are healing. One is bridging one’s world; one’s split world, one’s double word, every time one makes a coherent sentence, one that’s well put together. I think maybe this is the reason that one’s nerves are so badly jarred when one hears bad syntax in a statement. Some equation of the nature of reality has been insulted. And one doesn’t like it. Sentences are healing. I correspond by tape with a friend of mine, and I sometimes start out a tape to him by saying, “I need some talking cure today. Will you listen for awhile?” And I’ll talk for an hour. Generally, I have something put together by the time I’m finished. He asked me one day when we met, which is rare since he lives a long way away, “Why are you so much more intelligent on tapes than you are when we meet?” He said, “Wait, I know, I don’t interrupt.” The talking cure. One has done argent service for another person if you will allow them to talk and give them that backing wherein, they may make good sentences because a/the* sentence is a mandorla, and it is healing.
It’s as if God having suffered multiplicity, I think it was his own idea, he delights in endless statements of unity. And that’s why we like to talk so much. We have to put things together. We even say the same thing over and over again, like a child needs to hear a fairy tale told over and over again, just to be reassured that this is that and that this is in coherence with that. And if one has a poetic mind and sufficient ear, this hearing that ‘this is that’ is the best of all. The verb to be, which is the root of every language is a special case and it’s the greatest of the verbal mandorlas. And it’s such a puzzle. Everybody suffers through schooling with this, and people still get it wrong. The verb to be takes the nominative case after it instead of the expected objective case. And why? Just to torture high school students. No. This, the verb to be, that holy verb, is a statement of identity. And when I answer the phone and somebody asks, “I want to speak with Robert” poor English would say, “Yes, this is whim.” It’s not so, “this is her.” Because this and he are the same and they need the same case. It’s a verbal expression of the essential unity and identity of our world. The verb to be needs special care because it is the one holy verb. Plato said the verb to be is non-temporal. It is a statement of infinity. This is that. It isn’t like that. It’s not related to that. This is that. And that’s why it is the holy verb. The verb to be is the mandorla maker. The verb to be is not a statement of relatedness as virtually all other verbs are. It is a statement of identity and thus it is outside time, it is outside space and, I think, however language evolved has honored this fact by making the conjugation of the verb to be the hardest of all in every language that exists. It’s a special case in every language.
Another aspect of mandorla. It is the world of the poet or the artist or the musician. To put our fractured world back together again, by making a whole series of mandorlas. Mandorla is the art of poetry. Metaphor is a statement of identity. The daffodil in the spring is like the first rays of sun of the golden light. The poet, much better than I, can say this in a way, and he can say this is that. And he has told us something. He has healed us. Metaphor is mandorla making. In wise hands it is healing. That’s why a line of poetry which may not stimulate one all that profoundly in an intellectual way pleases one so much or heals one or settles one or satisfies one. Or when* one is writing to a lover, one’s beloved, you can’t sit down and just right facts to her you sit down and write poetry to her because that’s all that will express the identity between the two of you. We all wax poet when we love someone. The greater the overlap of the mandorla the greater the poetry. Poetry happens at the meeting of two worlds. Poetry happens in that almond shaped section of the overlap of two worlds. It is the poetic world. And only he of Christ-like nature or Virgin-like nature is welcomed into the mandorla or can understand it. Poetry happens with a realm of insight and vision. That’s one of the circles. Intersect and coincide with the realm of sense and object. That is the place of poetry. That is another way of saying the overlap of heaven and earth, the overlap of vision and the overlap of reality. Mandorla.
One looks at the people, and when I say poet, I mean musician, I mean artist, I mean seer, I mean the whole poetic world, and when one looks at the poet of the world one discovers a very strange thing. The near great are often eccentric people. They live odd lives. One is used to … well, genius is always a little bit odd or off. But if one observes, the very great of the world have been the plainest and the most ordinary of the people, they have married, they have earned, they have worked, they have raised families, they have taken the most ordinary place in the world, but they have overlapped this ordinariness with a vision of heaven and given us the greatest works of art in the world. One thinks of Dante, one thinks of William Blake, one thinks of Shakespeare, one thinks of Bach. All of these people married; all of them lived the most ordinary lives. When one reads the biography of Bach, if one reads naively or without preparation one is horrified to see in his handwriting a letter complaining that it has been a mild winter that year and not enough people died so the funeral fees were low. **I think he is the greater for this. The near great won’t have anything to do with that. One thinks of Nietzsche who went off on such a one-sided thing that the mandorla broke. And while it lasted, one-sided as it was, he gave us genius, but that mandorla out of shape broke. But the Bachs and the Shakespeares and the Dantes and the Blakes of the world lived the most ordinary, and lived the most sublime, just another way of saying the overlap of heaven and earth.
I had a precious interview with Maezumi Roshi[ii], the precious Zen master in Los Angeles, once. We talked about fish and water lilies most of the time. But when he did get around to giving me a gem of wisdom or a crumb of something to send me home with, he said, “Please understand, ordinariness, that is your word. And he said, I hope you understand that the word ordinary in English comes from the root order.” Well, I went home with my jewel. The poetic secret is to find in nature the image that corresponds with the eternal world of the soul. Probably nobody was better at this specific art than Wordsworth. He didn’t have to take mythology, he didn’t have to take folklore, he didn’t have to take anything. He simply juxtaposed and overlapped the most ordinary things. Here are two lines of poetry from Wordsworth, oh, sorry, this is William Blake. But it will do for Wordsworth. This is /William Blake now, but it will do. “An intermingling of heaven’s pomp is spread on ground which British shepherds tread” Heaven’s pomp on ordinary ground where British shepherds tread. And two lines have told you that heaven and earth are not alien to each other, but they overlap. And a chill goes down one’s back and one has been nourished and one’s world has been put back together a little bit.
Modern minds tear asunder the pairs of opposites, such as mundane and visionary, material and spiritual, temporal and eternal. A true poet quietly makes these overlap and gives one the ecstatic experience of a brief vision of oneness. Stories do this for one. Most stories are mandorlas. A great storyteller who was a true poet tells a story of a man who gave a better a cup of cold water. When correctly told and correctly heard this is action and contemplation overlapping in a mandorla and is a glimpse of the nature of heaven. And that’s why that story, and a thousand like it, lives forever. Because they are saying this is that. They say it in story form, not quite so obvious. But our cultures don’t let these stories die. Because we need them so much. They are healing agencies. It’s said that the Christian mass is the intersection of time and eternity. The intersection, another way of saying mandorla. A mass rightly heard, understood, is the intersection of the earth with physical elements, an eternity which is the spirit. At the intersection we may touch.
The story of Moses and the burning bush. A great mandorla. There is plenty of burning going on in the world. That’s not hard to come by. There’s much emotion; there’s much fieriness. OK, we’re used to that, no trouble. And bushes are easy to come by. There are lots of those. But the overlap, the bush which burns but is not consumed is a visual mandorla. And when this occurs it is a religious experience, which indicates that God is nearby. And in the story of Moses and burning bush it’s true, God appeared, and the rest of the story is instruction about…and how man can stand such a visitation. It came spontaneously but we need a lot of instruction on how to stand such a thing. Because a mandorla is a high tension and often involves a great deal of suffering. It takes considerable suffering to stand the overlap of two things. One would much rather go dashing off with one of them and down the other one. Moses asks if he can’t see God directly and God replies, “No, you couldn’t stand it.” So, he is instructed to go and put his face in a crack in a rock while God walks by. And after God has gone by, he may look up and see just the back of God disappearing. The mandorla we can stand; the burning bush one can’t stand; though one immediately takes his shoes from off thy feet because one stands on holy ground. But the vision of God, which would be the total overlap of the two circles, man can’t stand. He’d better not try. It was explained to me that a great deal of the art of Yoga consists of preparing the human being, both physical and spiritual, for the enlightenment, which is coming. It’s not at all hard to get one’s enlightenment. That’s fairly easy to come by. But to stand it is another matter. And most of the practice of Yoga is to get oneself sufficiently purified so one can stand the vision when it comes, so that the overlap won’t go too far and simply burn one in one’s inability to take it.
I hear the world of the mandorla most vividly in music because of my temperament, and because of my faculties and because of my training. And it is the hardest of all to talk about. But I can bring one example for you. In the…almost at the end of the St. Matthew Passion of Bach there is an alto solo; it is to the worlds of, “Jesus stretches out his hand to us.” It is after the crucifixion. And it is one of those sublime, tranquil, commentaries, which Bach often reserves for the alto voice. The alto sings a very quiet, serene, singing line and at the other end of it, the bass line, is a contra frugato* constantly breaking the primary law of counterpoint. And that is making a leap of a natural seventh. If you don’t know counterpoint, you need only to know that this is the worst law to break that you can in counterpoint. The leap of a natural seventh would be, say from C up to B. Not only does this happen but it happens repeatedly. And the contra frugato* bounces back and forth between B, C and B and C and B and C and B and C and B, as if pounding it home, and then it bounces between G and F#, nearly an octave apart. And this is absolutely forbidden in counterpoint. A friend of mine sent in his counterpoint exercise to Sir somebody or another in England where he was studying, got a blistering note back, “The leap of a natural seventh is reserved for donkeys.” Ferddie* Grofé in his composition “The Grand Canyon Suite” has the donkey hee-haw on the leap of a natural seventh. My friend got angry at this note, “The leap of a natural seventh is reserved for donkeys” and penciled in underneath “and Bach” and sent it back and the man threw him out. And that was the end of the … of his student days with that man. So, you see what Bach has done. Here is this singing, serene, alto voice, and here is a grotesque buffoonery of the donkey bray going on underneath; and it is the most sublime piece of music that I’m aware of anywhere. And for the specific reason which you begin to understand now. It is a mandorla; the buffoonery of the world and the singing line of heaven have overlapped. And that’s what pleases one so much. I never get enough of that alto solo. The two woodwinds weaving around in between these two things which help weave it together also. Great music is mandorla building and that’s why it is so healing to us.
I can tell you the story from Mahatma Gandhi* which somebody told me in this room two weeks ago and I’d never heard it before. I’m very grateful. The story was that a mother brought a boy to Ghandi and said, “He has an inordinate like of sugar. Can you cure him? Gandhi took him and kept him for quite a while. Brought him back to the mother and the boy’s need for sugar was solved. And the mother was grateful, but she said, “Why did it take you so long?” And Ghandi said, “I had to go and conquer my own need for sugar first.” The rainmaker story in much less poetic form. Again, Gandhi had to make an overlap inside, in an interior way, before he could do anything outside.
India distorts their mandorla badly. Because they talk mostly about one of the two circles, and the other circles fall apart. They talk constantly about spirituality while the well is contaminated, and the trains are late, and everything is going to hell in general. The Western world distorts its mandorla in exactly the reverse way. Our trains work, the airplanes are going to fly, and we forget the sublime circle and…and it falls apart. It would be good to observe mandorlas in your own life and see if you can bear that exact overlap which seems to be the point of genius, and the more they overlap the greater is the genius.
Back to the poet for a moment, because that’s the most demonstrable of all the subjects. I stretch my vocabulary all out of shape to try and say what that alto solo, sounds like. But here Shakespeare has said it directly:
“The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling doth glance from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown, the poet’s hand turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” The overlaps, the area nothing and local habitation, and there is Shakespeare. Shakespeare told you how he pulls the miracles, the magic of his way, the magic of any poet. A quote from the I Ching, which knows all about this subject, of course. It is the second changing line of hexagram number 61 called inner Truth. It says:
“The superior man abides in his room if his words are well spoken, he meets with ascent at a distance of more than a thousand miles. How much more then, from nearby. If a superior man abides in his room, and his words are not well spoken he meets with contradiction at a distance of more than a thousand miles. How much more than from nearby.”[iii] …
And the point is well taken. A good friend said, “You make it sound as if when you put things right inside everything goes fine outside and there would never be troubles, we would have it made, so to speak.” That is not implied in the rainmaker story. I didn’t mean to imply it also. If the rainmaker puts things right inside himself and the rain doesn’t come, that’s just as good. But that’s hard. There’s no place for sentimentality in such a point of view. One puts oneself right and if it rains, God be praised, and if it doesn’t rain, God be praised. There’s no place for sentimentality in such a view. That’s one of the reasons that many people refuse to take an attitude like this because it doesn’t always come out right. Nothing ever comes out right anyway, alright. But many systems presume that it will come out all right and they sell beautifully.
Questions?
Audience member: Is a mandorla a spontaneous image that has arisen from the unconscious at any particular point in the world history or human history or is it an imaginative construct? I don’t really know what I’m asking. I’m just asking about the origin of the mandorla.
I don’t know about the origin of the mandorla. I doubt if it had an origin. It’s like the archetypal world. And I don’t see it appearing at any point in history or any place in the world. It is everywhere. It seems to be an archetypal given. And one can work on it. One can take one’s two circles back to the Bank of America and the director of Internal Revenue. And one can work on it. The two circles that perhaps impinge on my life on April 15th. And that’s the makings of a mandorla if I’ve got courage enough. But it’s hard. I think it is a spontaneous offering of the inner world. The possibility is there.
When we come to the fourth possibility, I was speaking of are we not in the realm of love?
I would like to say that, and there’s enough poet in me so that that would be a valid expression to me. It’s difficult though because so many people mean such different things by the word love. There are half a dozen or so sublime words which have gotten so contaminated in this culture and mean so many things that they’ve ceased to mean anything for me. And I’ve deleted them from my vocabulary. And even though they are statements I agree with what you say. If one has a vision of sublime love, yes, that’s what we are talking about. But the language isn’t useful…isn’t useful to me. And I don’t find it very useful to other people. Tell somebody, “Well, if you could have a vision of love with this, it would solve everything,” it just doesn’t seem to register much with people. It should, however. Jack Sanford* and I were speaking for a moment at intermission and it* recalled the idea that all heresies are a distortion of the mandorla of the nature of Christ. The incarnation is defined, as the incarnation of God upon the face of the earth partaking of both, of the heavenly nature and of the earthly nature and the overlap must be exact. And anything which disturbs that exactness is heresy. Heresy can be defined as a distortion of the true nature of Christ. This is a nice illogical statement. If one says that Christ was all God and no man, then one has distorted the mandorla and there is no overlap then. One has wrecked the whole thing. Or if one says that he is all man and just was having a vision of heaven, maybe more extraordinary than most people, then one has distorted again. The incarnation of God upon the face of the earth is probably the most powerful statement of mandorla that we have in our culture. I love heresies. They’re sublime things because one can learn so much from them. One discovers one’s own heresies. And when you can define it then one can learn so much. One can put a heresy right, which means to put the proportion correct. And if I try to throw out the director of Internal Revenue and just take refuge in the Bank of America it won’t do. Because it’s a theological heresy. And if I go the other direction, then the Bank of America will have me in jail and that won’t do. So, one can learn many things from the collisions of one’s life. Because it generally means that the potentiality of a mandorla has gotten distorted somewhere. Look for the distortions and see what you learn.
I understand that I haven’t said much tonight. And this is difficult because one can’t get hold of it. You can’t even argue with me.
The comment is that I mentioned that India had distorted its mandorla and would Karma* Yoga be a way of overlapping or of bringing the distortion to balance again?
The word Yoga means Union. It comes from the same Indo-Germanic root from which we get our world “yoke” or “union”. And all of the efforts of the world, all of the devices of the world for union are mandorla making. So, Karma Yoga, which is the Indian device of – live out the residue of life, which is given to you fatefully. And that is your entrée to heaven would be a legitimate device. The four basic yogas corresponding beautifully to the four basic psychological types as Jung conceived of them and the four elements as the Greeks conceived of them, earth, air, fire and water. And there is a yoga for each temperament of person. This delights me enormously. Bakti yoga for the feeling type. Jnana Yoga for the intellectual type, you think your way through it with JnanaYoga. Hatha Yoga for the sensation type, you sit on your mat, and you train your body to do things; it’s a pure physical expression, and a perfect one. And Raja Yoga for the intuitive who sits and listens for the unsayable and when he finds it, that is God. Karma Yoga is a fifth possibility. Just go live your life out as consciously and with as much integrity as you can, and all strands will weave themselves into a coherent whole finally. Any of the great systems of yoga or any of the systems of union, which the world has devised, are mandorla making. With integrity any one of them will work for anyone who tries it.
Do you perceive why the Western World emphasizes the external circle at the expense of the interior one?
I don’t know why, I really don’t. I only observe that it’s so. India and America are identical twins in a way, back-to-back. Each distorting in the opposite direction and each needing the other desperately. I travel back and forth trying to bridge these two things in myself. … (tape ends here)
[i] Robert A. Johnson 1921 – 2018. American Jungian analyst and author. An unedited transcript from his presentation St. Paul’s Hall, San Diego, June 4, 1980
[ii] Maezumi Roshi – Japanese Zen Roshi, founder of Zen Center Los Angeles - 1931-1995
[iii] I Ching – Book of Changes - The Master said: The superior man abides in his room. If his words are well spoken, he meets with ascent at a distance of more than a thousand miles. How much more than from nearby! If the superior man abides in his room and his words are not well spoken, he meets with contradiction at a distance of more than a thousand miles. How much more than from nearby! Words go forth from one’s own person and exert their influence on men. Deeds are born close at hand and become visible far away. Words and deeds are the hinge and bow spring of the superior man. As hinge and bow spring move, they bring honor or disgrace. Through words and deeds the superior man moves heaven and earth. Must one not, then, be cautious?