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There was a great drought where Wilhelm lived; for months there had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally the Chinese said: We will fetch the rain maker. And from another province, a dried up old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day clouds gathered and there was a great snowstorm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumors about the wonderful rain maker that Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it. In rue European fashion he said: “They call you the rain maker, will you tell me how you made the snow?” And the little Chinaman said: “I did not make the snow, I am not responsible.” “But what have you dont these three days?” Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordnance of heaven. Therefore, the whole country is not in Tao, and I am also not in the natural order of things because I am in a discorded country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao, and then naturally the rain came.”
Taken from Vision Seminars, pp. 333-334
This story implies that we are dealing with some very mysterious material when we talk about psyche and nature. The story gives the sense that there is a confluence between “inner” and “outer” realities and that psyche extends into both. In modern culture, we are indoctrinated to think of psyche as an inner phenomenon, and nature as an outer phenomenon, but, according to this story, psyche extends to all things and nature is inseparable from psyche.
In his commentary about the Rainmaker story, Jung writes: “…but if one thinks psychologically, one is absolutely convinced that things quite naturally take this way [speaking of the rainmaker’s ability to create rain]. If one has the right attitude then the right things happen. One doesn’t make it right, it is just right, and one feels it has to happen in this way. It is just as if one were inside of things. If one feels right, that thing must turn up, it fits in. It is only when one has a wrong attitude that one feels that things do not fit in, that they are queer. When someone tells me that in his surroundings the wrong things always happen, I say: It is you who are wrong, you are not in Tao; if you were in Tao, you would feel that things are as they have to be. Sure enough, sometimes one is in a valley of darkness, dark things happen, and then dark things belong there, they are what must happen then; they are nonetheless in Tao”.
Jung offers a pretty radical idea that if one is in Tao, right things happen. The question is, what does it mean to be in Tao? Tao means literally "the path" or "the way of nature."
Tao does not imply a passive acceptance, rather as Jung writes, Tao is “The state in which ego and non-ego are no longer opposed”, “the middle way”, and “the irrational third”, thus it is tied into his idea of the transcendent function and the resolution of the tension of the opposites. The workings of Tao are vast and often beyond human logic. In order to understand Tao, reasoning alone will not suffice. For our purposes, Tao is that condition in which psyche and nature, or mind and matter, are no longer perceived as opposites but exist in a continuum.
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