of this should not be understood as a possible external happening. From the point of view of the Hindu, for example, it is not so much that the external world will one day dissolve into the original Great Man, but that the ego's extraverted orientation toward the external world will disappear in order to make way for the Cosmic Man. This happens when the ego merges into the Self. The ego's discursive flow of representations (which goes from one thought to another) and its desires (which run from one object to another) calm down when the Great Man within is encountered. Indeed, we mllst never forget that for us outer reality exists only in so far as we perceive it consciously, and that we cannot prove that it exists "in and by itself." The many examples coming from various civilizations and different periods show the universality of the symbol of the Great Man. His image is present in the minds of men as a sort of goal or expression of the basic mystery of our life. Because this symbol represents that which is whole and complete, it is often conceived of as a bisexual being. In this form the symbol reconciles one of the most important pairs of psychological opposites-male and female. This union also appears frequently in dreams as a divine, royal, or otherwise distinguished couple. The following dream of a man of 47 shows this aspect of the Self in a dramatic way: I am on a platform, and below me I see a huge, black, beautiful she-bear with a rough but well-groomed coat. She is standing on her hind legs, and on a stone slab she is polishing a fiat oval black stone, which becomes increasingly shiny. Not far away a lioness and her cub do the same thing, but the stones they are polishing are bigger and round in shape. After a while the she-bear turns into a fat, naked woman with black hair and dark, fiery eyes. I behave in an erotically provocative way toward her, and suddenly she moves nearer in order to catch me. I get frightened and take refuge up on the building of scaffolding where I was before. Later I am in the midst of many women, half of whom are primitive and have rich black hair (as if they are transformed from animals); the other half are our women [of the same nationality as the dreamer] and have blonde or brown hair. The primitive women sing a very sentimental song in melancholy, high-pitched voices. Now, in a high elegant carriage, there comes a young man who wears on his head a royal golden crown, set with shining rubies 216
-a very beautiful sight. Beside him sits a blonde young woman, probably his wife, but without a crown. It seems that the lioness and her cub have been transformed into this couple. They belong to the group of primitives. Now all the women (the primitives and the others) intone a solemn song, and the royal carriage slowly travels toward the horizon. Here the inner nucleus of the dreamer's psyche shows itself at first in a temporary vision of the royal couple, which emerges from the depths of his animal nature and the primitive layer of his unconscious. The she-bear in the beginning is a sort of mother goddess. (Artemis, for instance, was worshiped in Greece as a she-bear.) The dark oval stone that she rubs ami polishes probably symbolizes the dreamer's innermost being, his true personality. Rubbing and polishing stones is a well-known, exceedingly ancient activity of man. In Europe "holy" stones, wrapped in bark and hidden in caves, have been found in many places; as containers of divine powers they were probably kept there by men of the Stone Age. At the present time some of the Australian aborigines believe that their dead ancestors continue to exist in stones as virtuous and divine powers, and that if they rub these stones, the power increases (like charging them with electricity) for the benefit of both the living and the dead. The man who had the dream we are discussing had hitherto refused to accept a marital bond with a woman. His fear of being caught by this aspect of life caused him, in the dream, to flee from the bear-woman to the spectator's platform where he could passively watch things without becoming entangled. Through the motif of the stone being rubbed by the bear, the unconscious is trying to show him that he should let himself come into contact with this side of life; it is through the frictions of married life that his inner being c~n be shaped and polished. When the stone is polished, it will begin to shine like a mirror so that the bear can see herself in it; this means that only by accepting earthly contact and suffering can the human soul be transformed into a mirror in which the divine powers can perceive themselves. But the dreamer runs away to a higher place-Le., into all sorts of reflections by which he can escape the demands of life. The dream then shows him that if he runs away from the demands of life, one part of his soul (his anima) will remain
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