Awaiting the Unifying Symbol - an interview with Siegrun

Auroville Today: Siegrun, what brought you to Auroville?

Siegrun: My love for India started with a book, ‘Anjana’ which I read aged 12. It spoke of the Indian legend of Savitri and I was fascinated. With a craving to understand more, at 18 I started to read the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and joined a German-India society.

Then in 1968, I heard about Auroville, but it was too early for me. I had started my studies and work as a doctor. Later I had a patient who had a house in Stuttgart, and rented a floor to a young Indian couple. The father of the son, Arjun, was General Ashok Chatterjee, who is a long time Aurovilian. Unfortunately, Arjun died, and my friend insisted that I meet Ashok Chatterjee when he came to Germany. We spoke about Auroville and he invited me to visit. I came at the end of 2001, exactly on my birthday, which was on Diwali. I wanted to stay a few weeks and ended up staying three months. I realized that this was my place: it was full of energy and love. Love in the sense of the everlasting love of Savitri, the ‘lovers everlasting yes’. I felt I was saying ‘Yes’ to life, to intentional community. I found Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri and read it in one go; days and nights, days and nights.

Later, I went to the Entry Service and was able to find an apartment being constructed in Arati. On the first night in Arati, with no electricity, I stepped on a big scorpion. I didn’t know what to do. The pain stays for one or two days with the same intensity but I survived. It was my initiation into Auroville and I remembered a sentence of Jung. ‘Was mich durchkreuzt macht mich zur ganzheit.’ (roughly translated as: ‘What crosses/challenges me takes me to wholeness’). When I stepped on the scorpion I could have thought this is not my place, but didn’t.

How did you become interested in Jung?

I was born in 1942 during World War Two in Czechoslovakia. My family was deported at the end of the war and I was traumatised. At the age of 18 shortly before my German school leaving exams, I more or less collapsed. I felt everything was over. However, I had the good luck to be a patient of a Jungian therapist for a year. So I had an approach to Jung which opened the way for me. My studies continued, I stopped being so lost and a new world opened.

After graduating in medicine, I had first wanted to become a gynaecologist or eye doctor, but in the end I was too interested in Jung. I began work in a psychotherapeutic hospital clinic and in parallel studied Jungian psychology for about seven years. In that clinic I worked with other therapists who were Freudians, Adlerians, and we had a good exchange. Then I opened my own clinic and found my partner, who was also a Jungian.

The tool which helped me get out of trouble was Jung’s mythology and his concept of active imagination, which I found so powerful. ‘Active imagination’ means imagining yourself into new situations and how you would respond. With Jung there is a lot of drawing but what is most important is rubbing out and starting again.

You can go into a situation and using active imagination or dreams, you can change the situation and be in exchange with what comes up. It’s a big danger, when your persona says, ‘I am a person who…’. Be someone with opposites as Conrad Meyer said “ich bin kein ausgeklügelt Buch, Ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch. (I am not a sophisticated book, I am a person with his contradictions).

Recently I imagined I met someone who had said “I have more power than you”. I worked with this and in my imagination I responded that “I have a power, but the power of love, of receptivity, the power of friends and I would not like to change with you.” It was an act of imagination, that just came to me. That helped me to feel the reality of where my power is. 

Jung introduced the Transcendent Function, a concept where difficulties are polarised till a solution or symbol emerges which transcends and unites the opposites. Do you see the Transcendent Function working in Auroville in this time of crisis as a way of integrating opposites?

The Transcendent Function is a psychic dynamic, if you want to transcend something you have to bring the opposites together. It can change everything, it is a transforming power and can be activated by sandplay, dreamwork, active imagination and other techniques which brings you to a different and wider levels of consciousness. In the end, archetypal opposites can belong together. There is never a one-sided archetype. The devil is an archetype but in the end he’s a part of our godly strength and takes this form to develop ourselves.

We have a creative power in us to find something new. To find the unifying symbol, by, for instance, creative writing, we should just begin and let something new come up, because, in the end, something you didn’t know before emerges. Meanwhile, you need to accept the polarities. One should not exclude the other.

Jung talked about teleology, the sense that events have a meaningful direction.

When we have a crisis, an illness, it’s not because something went wrong, but because it’s a wake-up call to see it on a different level, to not be too identified with what you think it is. It’s the same with Auroville. When the crisis started, I worked with the i-ching, which for the Jungians, is the Bible. My throw came to ‘Umwälzung’ translated as ‘radical change’. You can’t and should not avoid the change and need to accept it.

I wouldn’t say our conflict happened because we made mistakes, because we always make mistakes. It’s the learning process which is important.

I ask everybody who comes to me: What is your part in this story and conflict? Why did you come here and what can you contribute? We need to find a way to bring opposites together and to have a motivation to change, both on the inside and outside.

Therapy is a way of opening up to the ‘Self’, not the enlarged self, but what Jung called the ‘opus contra naturam’. You have to open up, feel that Self attracting you like a magnet, and this is easier if you can give up your previous identities. For me, the magnet now is Sri Aurobindo, to open up and feel this force of Sri Aurobindo’s supramental consciousness. When I came here and knew more about Sri Aurobindo, I could see that this path was the next step beyond Jung.

What would Jung advise us to do as a community?

To do the next step and not think you have to reach a goal. Sri Aurobindo says there is no end. The goal is to be in the process of yoga. With Auroville there is always a beyond. The divine is creative. As a therapist you should be capable of motivating the client to take the next step by working on their polarities.

Also with the working groups, I would ask, what is our next step? Unity is far away. What can and can’t be integrated? Where do we need to make sacrifices and where do we need to say ‘no’?

Many people here won’t speak to others on different sides. But I don’t want to say ‘you are bad and I am good.’ If I say something about a person, I say more about myself than about the person. We have to integrate, to have acceptance, without condoning. Nothing has to be rejected, all has to be raised to the level of divine consciousness, which is very difficult. People want to get rid of pain, but the next step after that, to bring it to the spiritual level, is hard.

Can we find a new answer to what kind of identity we have now in Auroville? If we give up our identity, something bigger can come. I felt something special with the Matrimandir and did duty there from my arrival. And just now on my birthday, I was told we have enough people, so I should stop working there after 20 years. That felt very uncomfortable, but then I read a quote from Sri Aurobindo ‘Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all’.

Auroville lies in my heart, but I would like that it doesn’t go kaput but gets to another level. It doesn’t work that only one side ends up winning.

At the moment, I think the individual work or work in small groups is the way to go. Talk with each other, and create something that is beyond this conflict. Go into your dreams and change the situation there.

The goal here is to be in the process. Mother said ‘once the city is built then it will be like any other city,’ so it’s how we build the city. We should do it in a different way from the rest of the world, with more consciousness, truthfulness and love.

I wait for a unifying symbol – this comes from Jung – but I have not yet seen it with my patients or in their dreams – we are still in the middle of the mud. But I believe it will come.