The 1944 Vision

During a near-fatal heart attack, Jung recorded a sequence of visions he called "the most tremendous things I have ever experienced" — among them, an episode in which he recognized himself as Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the Zohar's traditional author, and witnessed what he understood as the mystical marriage of Tiferet and Malkhut.

⭐⭐⭐ THE EPISODE THE WHOLE WING TURNS ON. Jung recorded this in Memories, Dreams, Reflections as a direct, unwilled encounter with Kabbalistic symbolism he had not gone looking for — arriving, on his account, from inside rather than from Knorr's Latin volume on his shelf. ⚠⚠ That is exactly the kind of claim this app treats with the most caution anywhere: a mystical experience is not independent confirmation of a doctrine, and Jung had read enough Kabbalistic material by 1944, however indirectly, that the vision cannot be called uncontaminated by his reading. He himself, ten years later, called the shevirah and tikkun material he then encountered a revelation — which suggests the 1944 vision came before the doctrine that would have explained it to him, not after.