The Temple of the New Religion

In 1938 Max Zeller was released after 5 weeks in a Nazi concentration camp due to an unprecedented error. He was a very lucky man. He and his wife escaped Germany for London in 1939 just three months before war broke out. With his family he moved to the USA in 1941 to work with Hilde and James Kirsch, who started the C.G. Jung Institute in Los Angeles. After the war Zeller studied in Zurich with Jung.  Just before returning to the USA (in 1949), Zeller was concerned about the seemingly tiny effect he and other psychoanalysts would have on the few clients, whom he would see during his lifetime. The night before he left he had a dream.  He reports Jung’s reaction to sharing his dream in The Dream: The Vision of the Night, (1975) edited by Janet Dallett. Zeller said,

And this was my dream:
A temple of vast dimensions was in the process of being built. As far as I could see–ahead, behind, right and left–there were incredible numbers of people building on gigantic pillars. I, too, was building on a pillar. The whole building process was in its very first beginnings, but the foundation was already there, the rest of the building was starting to go up, and I and many others were working on it.
Jung said, “Ja, you know, that is the temple we all build on. We don’t know the people because, believe me, they build in India and China and in Russia and all over the world. That is the new religion. You know how long it will take until it is built?”
I said, “How should I know? Do you know?” He said, “I know.” I asked how long it will take. He said, “About six hundred years.”
“Where do you know this from?” I asked. He said, “From dreams. From other people’s dreams and from my own. This new religion will come together as far as we can see.”
And then I could say goodbye. There was the answer to my question what we, as analysts, are doing.
There is not an analyst who doesn’t experience it. We work with a person, and there is a critical family situation, or difficulties here and there, and as this individual works, what he or she does spreads. It has a much greater effect than we think. It is not as it looks from the outside, that we sit in a narrow cubbyhole; because the material we work with transforms. It transforms us and we, being touched, touch other people without even talking about it. (p. 3)

I guess we counselors are psychic masons, working on the temple in the Astral.  Thanks to Meredith Sabini, Director of the Northern California Dream Institute in Berkeley, California for reminding me of Zeller’s dream, so that I could share it with the world.

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