If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.”

In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.

What’s my ego?

What you think you want, what you will believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to. It may be all much too small, in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you’re certainly going to be nailed down. Your neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from within yourself.

Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up beating its belly and bellowing, “Haw ha ha haww.” That’s a lovely kind of dragon, one that yields the bounty of the waters, a great, glorious gift. But the dragon of our Western tales tries to collect and keep everything to himself. In his secret cave he guards things: heaps of gold and perhaps a captured virgin. He doesn’t know what to do with either, so he just guards and keeps. There are people like that, and we call them creeps. There’s no life from them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and hang around and try to suck out of you their life.

Jung had a patient who came to him because she felt herself to be alone in the world, on the rocks, and when she drew a picture for him of how she felt, there she was on the shore of a dismal sea, caught in rocks from the waist down. The wind was blowing, and her hair was blowing, and all the gold, all the joy of life, was locked away from her in the rocks. The next picture that she drew, however, followed something that he had said to her. A flash of lightning strikes the rocks, and a golden disk is being lifted out. There is no more gold locked within the rocks. There are golden patches now on the surface. In the course of the conferences that followed, these patches of gold were identified. They were her friends. She wasn’t alone. She had locked herself in her own little room and life, yet she had friends. Her recognition of these followed only after the killing of her dragon.

Unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we are not going to save the world but to save ourselves.But in doing that, you save the world.