CHURNING THE MILKY OCEAN: POISON AND NECTAR IN CARL JUNG'S INDIA

CHURNING THE MILKY OCEAN:POISON AND NECTAR IN CARL JUNG’S INDIA

AL COLLINS AND ELAINE MOLCHANOV

The spirit of the East is penetrating through all pores and reachingthe most vulnerable parts of Europe. It could be a dangerousinfection, but perhaps also a remedy.

—C. G. Jung, “In Memory of Richard Wilhelm”

I’m afraid this supreme consciousness is at least not one we couldpossess. Inasmuch as it exists, we do not exist.

—C. G. Jung, in a letter to V. Subrahmanya Iyer, 1938

Al Collins, Ph.D., is on the adjunct faculty of Pacifica Graduate Institute and aformer associate professor of East/West psychology at the California Institute of IntegralStudies. He is a clinical and cultural psychologist with particular interest in Indianpsychological theories and Western depth psychologies (Jungian and Freudian). He isauthor of Fatherson: A Self Psychology of the Archetypal Masculine (1994) and manypresentations, book chapters, and articles, most recently “The Three Selves of IndianPsychology and Psychoanalysis,” in G. Misra, editor, Psychology and Psychoanalysis, vol.13, part 3 of History of Indian Science, Philosophy, and Culture (2013).

Elaine Molchanov, LCSW, is a Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice inAnchorage, Alaska, and Chicago and a member of the Chicago Institute of Jungian Analysts.Formerly adjunct faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, she has practiced SiddhaYoga for more than thirty-five years and analytical psychology for even longer. She is aboard member of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS). She is theauthor of “Kundalini the Serpent Energy” in Journal of Sandplay Therapy (2002) andmany presentations. She is writing a book on her two life paths. Her latest presentation(with Al Collins) was “Soul in a Hyperactive World: ADHD as a Myth of Our Times.”

2 AL COLLINS AND ELAINE MOLCHANOV

I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought, “Aha,so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I amit.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.

—C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

INTRODUCTION

n her 2003 biography of Carl Jung, Deirdre Bair writes that Jung“believed passionately” that the two “most important experiencesof his life” both involved India.1 While Jungian practitioners and

scholars would generally agree that India was significant to him, “mostimportant” would seem to be going too far. Recovering the deepsignificance of India for Jung, and why it is not more generallyacknowledged in the Jungian world—or even, at times, by Junghimself—will be the aim of this paper. Our approach will be similarto Murray Stein’s retelling of Jung’s encounter with Chinese culture,intertwining biographical and theoretical perspectives.2 In fact, Jung’smore fraught relationship with India developed in parallel with theChinese—and was often entangled with it, as the Orientalist cultureof his times lumped them together under the rubric of “the East.”3

While Jung already had a degree of interest in China prior to 1928when Richard Wilhelm sent him an alchemical work called The Secretof the Golden Flower, it was the serendipity of receiving this textjust after he had painted a Chinese “castle” seen from above thatsparked his intense involvement with Chinese thought. Jung realizedthat his painting expressed a circulation of life energies similar todescriptions in The Secret of the Golden Flower. It was what he wouldlater call a “mandala,” adopting a Sanskrit term for a symbol ofpsychic wholeness or transformation. It was characteristic of Jungthat significant events in his life (the receipt of the text from Wilhelmand the near-simultaneous mandala painting) led to developmentsin his thought. A similar pattern is present with India, as this paperwill attempt to demonstrate.

The nexus of person and theory in Jung’s encounter with Indianculture, however, is much more convoluted than with China andmarked by an intense ambivalence, ranging from idealization toantipathy, toward what Jung took to be India’s denial of the significanceof human individuality and the value of the ego. Even so, we believe

I

CHURNING THE MILKY OCEAN 3

that Indian ideas penetrated at least as deeply into Jung’s thinking,and ultimately into his sense of his own nature, as did the Chinese.Ironically, it was precisely where Jung felt the greatest threat from Indiathat his ideas and life were most deeply stimulated by it: at the veryheart of his theory, in the symbol and experience of an ego-transcendingself. The relationship between limited and inclusive selves lies at thecenter of Jung’s theory. It is also an essential issue for Indian thought,where it has stimulated creative controversy for twenty-five hundredyears. In the end, while Jung’s self and India’s are very different, theirencounter has thrown off sparks of creativity that still offer the potentialfor future insights into selfhood and consciousness.

Before Jung’s mature interest in India, which we will explore inthis paper, as a child of perhaps four or five he became fascinated withpicture book images of the Indian gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva.4

Jung’s mother “later told me that I always returned to these pictures.Whenever I did so, I had an obscure feeling of their affinity with my‘original revelation.’”5 Jung is here referring to his famous first dream,at the age of almost four, of entering a subterranean chamber with agolden throne on which stood a “ritual phallus” twelve to fifteen feettall. Jung’s mother’s voice entered the dream, saying, “Yes just lookat him. That is the man-eater!”6 The fear and awe that Jung as achild felt before the numinous power of this image are repeated insome of his responses later in life to Indian images from his reading,in his dreams, and face to face. Noteworthy is the similarity of thecentral image in Jung’s dream to the Indian symbol of the Sivalingam (a stylized erect phallus of the god set in the vagina of thegoddess, sometimes, but often not, obviously phallic). Would perusalof late nineteenth-century picture books reveal images of an “aniconic”Siva lingam, not recognized as a sexual organ by the authors of exoticworks for European children, amid photographs and drawings of thecolorful divinities of Hinduism?7

We will identify three basic strands or stages in Jung’s adultrelationship to India, with the aim of finding a model forconceptualizing the whole of it. First, as a young man Jung was exposedto Asian thought through his general and university cultures. Hepossessed the fifty volumes of English translations of Asian classics editedby Max Muller in the 1880s and 1890s and published as The SacredBooks of the East. At least four of his Red Book paintings were inspired


by texts from early India that he may have read in volumes of The SacredBooks of the East, and on the margins of another he quotes from theBhagavad Gita.8 As a late participant in German Romanticism and thevolkisch thought that grew from it, Jung also shared the fascination Indiaheld for the Schlegel brothers, Goethe, Hegel, and especiallySchopenhauer. As Jung says, “[Indian] ideas found a powerfulspokesman through the genius of Schopenhauer and became intimatelywedded to the Germanic mind, never again to depart from it.”9 Biblicaland classical philology, pillars of the German university, had expandedin the nineteenth century to include other Indo-European languagesand literatures, and Sanskrit trumped even Greek and Latin as the oldestand (in the Vedic hymns and Upanishads) noblest member of the Indo-European family tree. The science of culture that developed into culturalanthropology and history of religions around this time inevitablyfocused on India, and theorists as diverse as Durkheim, Weber, Frazer,Bachofen, Marx, and the Grimm brothers had studied Indiancivilization, culture, and ideas. The European attraction to Indiablossomed in the occult and Theosophical movements from the late1800s on, and the fascination with Indian figures such as RabindranathTagore and Ramakrishna was strong a little later.10 India was culturallyvery much in the air during Jung’s intellectually formative years andthrough the 1920s, though it was primarily the early period of Indianthought that was of interest to him because this was the phase closestto German linguistic and cultural roots.11 In Jung’s young adulthood,then, it is the Vedas, early Buddhism, and Schopenhauer’s belovedUpanishads that appear most often, not the yoga and Tantra that hebecame interested in later and which are associated with his dialogueswith Heinrich Zimmer and J. W. Hauer.12

The second phase of Jung’s interest in India is most evident duringthe years leading up to and immediately after his visit to India in 1937–1938, for example, in the seminars on Kundalini Yoga he gave with J.W. Hauer in 1932 (preceded by lectures in 1930–1931) and followingS. N. Dasgupta on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra in 1939.13 Carl Jung’s mostcharacteristic response to Indian religion during this middle period(his usual term is yoga even when the focus is on what is usually termedTantra) was to use its psychophysiological imagery as a parallel to andstimulus for developing his own thinking, while warning Westerners


against practicing it literally, especially its later and higher stages. Yoga,he tells us, “aims at controlling [the] forces that fetter human beingsto the world,” and in the end leads to “evaporating on a gazelle skinunder a dusty banyan tree and ending [one’s] days in nameless non-being.”14 Approached wrongly, Indian thought is “poison” forEuropeans.15 While dangerous for Westerners to enact, however, Jungstill found the Indian tradition to be a royal road for thinking aboutdepth psychology and continued to use the insights he had gained fromIndian texts in the years during which he prepared for and enduredthe psychospiritual adventures recalled in the Red Book. Perhaps hismost groundbreaking early work, Psychological Types (1921), would beunthinkable without the Indian materials and ideas it contains. Yogaand the Indian religious culture from which—and into which—it grewwere fundamental for Jung’s discovery and development around thistime of some of his most basic concepts: the purposive flow of psychicenergy (libido) that matured into the idea of individuation, thetranscendent function, the symbol, and ultimately the Self and itsrepresentation in mandalas.

In Jung’s later life, intermixed with continued warnings againstyoga, he had crucial dreams and insights that point toward a thirdapproach to India, a development in his thinking that Jung himselfwas never quite able to articulate clearly or hold but which remains asa potential source of vitality for future depth psychology. It also parallelsand even underlies his final burst of creative work, speculations aboutthe alchemical Self and reinterpretation of Christianity as the“phenomenology of the Self.”16 We will simply state the idea here,promising to provide a context and argument for it later: recalling hisreading of the Upanishads, and inspired by dreams and memories ofearly experiences of his so-called “personality number two,” Jung beganto realize that there can be consciousness outside the ego and that egoconsciousness merely reflects the higher awareness intrinsic to the Self.Connecting this third aspect of Jung’s India involvement with thesecond or “yogic” phase is the image and experience of the holy man ofIndia, and the related symbol of the guru, exemplified for Jung by thefigure of Philemon, and in the psyches of Jung’s followers by the imageof the sage of Bollingen himself.


INDIA AND THE SHADOW, INDIA AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Given the importance to Jung’s thinking of Indian religiouspsychology, why did he warn his readers and patients so frequentlyand in such strong terms against practicing yoga, and why did he refuseto expose himself to it on a personal level during his visit to India? Thedominant conscious rationale, repeated in a number of places over theyears, was perhaps most clearly put in his essay “The Psychology ofEastern Meditation,” published in 1948.

Only the man who goes through this darkness [the personalunconscious and shadow] can hope to make any further progress.I am therefore in principle against the uncritical appropriationof yoga practices by Europeans, because I know only too wellthat they hope to avoid their own dark corners.17

By 1921 Jung had come to the conclusion that yoga’s aim in itsoriginal context was a radical introversion of consciousness that ledto an awareness of the deeper (or, in India’s case, putatively higher)layers of the psyche. This aim, Jung thought, might be appropriatefor (at least some) Indians but not for Westerners because in Indiathe opposition between consciousness and the personal unconsciousis not as sharp as it is among Europeans. In Indians, yoga maylegitimately be used to reach the deep (or higher) psyche; practicedby Westerners, it would lead to denial of the personal unconsciousand shadow and would likely produce “an artificial stultification ofour . . . intelligence” or “inhibit the natural growth and developmentof our own psychology.”18

In the West, nothing ought to be forced on the unconscious.Usually, consciousness is characterized by an intensity andnarrowness that have a cramping effect, and this ought not to beemphasized still further.19

A second argument against yoga was that it represents a foreignway of life and that we Westerners belong to the culture and society inwhich we are organically and historically situated. To practice yogaseriously would amount to leading an artificial life that could neverbecome native to us. Individuation, as Jung saw it, always involvedbecoming an individual within the vessel of one’s own tradition.Paradoxically, one cannot individuate outside a strong cultural context.


We maintain, however, that need to confront and integrate theshadow and the requirement of loyalty to one’s culture of origin werenot Jung’s only or even main reasons for warning Westerners away fromyoga. Jung protested so strongly against yoga because he believed itposed a danger to the ego and individuality itself. Jung’s previousinvestigations had found in yoga and in speculations about theUpanishads a potential for profound transformation of consciousness,and his later visions and dreams confirmed this. While in the end Jungbegan to recognize the value of this shift in perspective, he remainedambivalent, emphasizing the dangers of yoga and other forms of Indianmeditation to the European psyche throughout his life.

Indians, Jung believed, did not split their ego consciousness fromthe personal shadow as much as Westerners do; indeed, they have lessof both ego (and its attendant individuality) and shadow and so donot feel the same intense conflict between them as Westerners. Hencein doing yoga they can pass more directly to the collective unconsciousand uncover the mandala of archetypes that underlies the consciousego. Westerners must first integrate the split-off shadow and socreate a mature ego capable of relating to the deep unconscious;Indians have the potential to transcend the ego directly and reachthe deep self beyond. The implication is that only Westerners canhave a personal relationship to the archetypal psyche; only they canindividuate. Indians (and to a large extent all non-Westerners) canonly become the unconscious, they cannot relate to it.20 The mark ofthe “primitive” for Jung was always the tendency to succumb toparticipation mystique, the idea, appropriated from Lévy-Bruhl, thatprecivilized men identify with their unconscious powers rather thaninteract or dialogue with them as independent agents. In this sense,Jung considered Indians primitive.

Increasingly, Jung found a monotony in India and Indian thoughtthat repelled him, and in one of his darkest meditations on this theme,“The Holy Men of India,” written a few years after his 1938 trip tothe subcontinent, he searched for metaphors for the atmosphere of egodissolution he believed to be the single secret of holy men like RamanaMaharshi, the sage celebrated by Jung’s friend Heinrich Zimmer whomJung had been encouraged to visit in India.21 Jung compares the psycheof these sages to a “pleasant fragrance . . . everywhere the same,” an“effortless drone of argumentation so suited to the heat of southern


India,” to the “gentle murmur of the coconut palms fanning themselvesin the light sea wind,” and to the “shrilling of crickets on a summer’snight.”22 He finds a single theme endlessly repeated in the holy man’steaching: “the drama of ahaMkara, the ‘I-maker’ or ego consciousness,in opposition and indissoluble bondage to the atman, the self or non-ego.”23 This dialogue is tilted too one-sidedly toward the atman to suitJung, who insisted that the self, for Westerners, should be understoodas “the essence of psychic wholeness, . . . the totality of conscious andunconscious.”24 The self is the “goal” and “subject matter” of “a processthat . . . makes its presence felt only by a kind of long-range effect,” inother words, through individuation across the life span.25 Indianthought, Jung concludes, leads to “a depreciation and abolition of thephysical and psychic man (i.e., the living body and ahaMkara) in favorof the pneumatic [i.e., spiritual] man.”26 India wants to annihilate theego and put in its place a one-sided and inflated “self ” that may be nomore than the product of a temporary mystical enthusiasm. Jung, tothe contrary, seeks reflection and dialogue with the self as archetype ofwholeness, a lifelong process of individuation rather than a momentaryenlightenment. The holy men in India are not individuals, Jungthought, but merely examples of a single type.27 To know one of themis to know them all, and separately or in mass Jung concluded thatthey had nothing more to teach him or his Western culture.

Put so starkly as an opposition between European persons andIndians, Jung’s position appears hopelessly outdated and colonialist.He implies that Indians (and elsewhere other non-Westerners) are naïveand childish, lacking the maturity and good sense of Europeans. Theycannot engage in the psychological dialectic between ego (ahaMkara)and self that Jung thinks appropriate to normal adult life. Because oftheir psychological primitivity, Indians are prey to their holy men andeasily fall into the role of “dumb fish” who bow their heads in submissionto the guru.28 The opposition of passive “oriental” and active sahib isalmost overt. Even so, the essential issue is not colonialism but ratherhow one should understand the self, regressively (as Jung sees what hetakes to be the Indian position) or progressively, looking toward thefulfillment of one’s individual potential.

One of the central figures of Jung’s trip to India, and the only onehe remembers by name in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is SubramanyaIyer, whom Jung identifies as the guru of the maharaja of Mysore. In


letters exchanged after his return home, Jung debated Iyer on thesubject of a putative consciousness beyond the ego. Counter toIyer’s arguments, Jung concludes that this is impossible to conceive,because “if you eradicate the ego completely, there is nobody leftthat would consciously experience.”29 The ego must always bepreserved for without it there is no possibility of relatedness and wefloat off, untethered to the earth.30

Close to the end of his life Jung was approached by Arwind Vasavada,a middle-aged Indian psychologist who adopted the old man as hisguru and indeed “perfect Master.” Vasavada remained true to his Indianroots and convictions despite becoming a Jungian analyst and practicingfor many years in India, Chicago, and Los Angeles. On meeting Jungat his home in Küsnacht, Vasavada lit camphor and performed theceremony of arati, the offering of the devotee’s body and mind to thedeity, in this case to his guru, Dr. Jung. Naturally Jung rejected thegift (one can only imagine his chagrin at such a presentation), andVasavada reports that Jung sent him a blistering letter informing himthat he did not understand his psychology.31 Only when Vasavada latervisited Jung at Bollingen and told him a dream in which he was totake a baby Jung back to India did Jung write Vasavada a note, whichhe subsequently kept proudly framed on the wall beside his analyticchair, giving him the imprimatur of Jungian analyst. Before this, in1954, Jung had written Vasavada another letter in which he makes evenclearer the relationship, as he saw it, between ego and self. In reply toVasavada’s paean to the transcendent atman self, Jung replied:

Your standpoint seems to coincide with that of our medievalmystics, who tried to dissolve themselves in God. You seem to beinterested in how to get back to the self, instead of looking forwhat the self wants you to do in the world, where—for thetime being at least—we are located, presumably for a certainpurpose. The universe does not seem to exist for the purposeof man denying or escaping it. Nobody can be more convincedof the importance of the self than me. But as a young mandoes not stay in his father’s house but goes out into the world,so I don’t look back to the self but collect it out of manifoldexperiences and put it together again. What I have left behind,seemingly lost, I meet in everything that comes my way andI collect it, reassembling it as it were. In order to get rid of


opposites, I needs must accept them first, but this leads awayfrom the self . . . . Although the self is my origin, it is also thegoal of my quest. When it was my origin, I did not knowmyself, and when I did learn about myself, I did not knowthe self. I have to discover it in my actions, where first itreappears under strange masks. That is one of the reasons Imust study symbolism, otherwise I risk not recognizing myown father and mother when I meet them again after manyyears of my absence.32

The yogic attempt to regress into the self is essentially infantileand avoids life. Only when Vasavada’s dream convinced Jung thathe intended to put his vision of Jungian-cum-Indian psychologyinto practice did he accept that his young devotee was up to thetask of living a genuine life, with psychological work as its focus.Vasavada amply demonstrated this capability by interpreting Jung’spsychology in his own terms, for instance, in adopting a novel formof practice in which he received money from analysands as a sort ofgift rather than a defined fee, following the Indian tradition inwhich gurus accept a dakshina from disciples but do not charge fortheir services.33

HOLY MEN OF INDIA IN JUNG’S DREAMS AND VISIONS

During a coma-like state following his heart attack in 1944 Junghad visions that are somewhat differently recounted in Memories,Dreams, Reflections and in the “Protocols” to which Deirdre Bair hadaccess in writing her 2003 biography of Jung. Comparison of the twoversions will shed light on Jung’s developing relationship to India andthe self. Bair writes:

[Jung] experienced himself as floating in space high above theearth directly above Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Below he saw oceans,deep and blue, and the outlines of the Indian subcontinent.

He described his visions in detail in Memories, Dreams,Reflections, but he did not include “the other big caesura . . .and an enormously significant one” that he made much of inthe Protocol manuscripts: his trip to India in 1938–1939 [sic].He believed passionately that the two were the most importantexperiences of his life . . . . The 1944 infarct affected him in


ways resembling the amoebic dysentery, when he was engulfedwith similar, but shorter, episodes of delirium.. . . .Still, impressions from his Indian illness continued to interrupt,permeating these visions as if with an underlying imagery thatdetermined their content. In one, he saw a dark block of stone asbig as his Küsnacht house floating next to him in space. Heremembered seeing such rocks off the coast of the Bay of Bengal,into which temples had been carved. Inside the visionary rockwas a “completely black Indian in a white robe in lotus position,”seated in such silent repose that Jung knew the man was waitingfor him. To get to this figure he had to climb a series of stepscarved into the stone, similar to some he had seen at the templesin Kandy. They were framed by small oil lamps resembling aflaming wreath, a purifying essence through which he had towalk. He recognized the significance of what was happening:

I had a feeling as if I were shedding everything, or rather as ifeverything was being shed from me; everything that I believedor wished or thought was taken from me. . . it was an extremelypainful process. I was aware of everything that I had experiencedand done, everything that had happened around me. All that Ihad, it was with me now. I consisted of it, so to speak: I consistedof my story; I am this bunch of facts. It was a feeling of extremepoverty and at the same time of great contentment. . . . I wasobjective. I was what I had been.34

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as recorded by Aniela Jaffé, we find:

It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw theglobe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw thedeep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon,and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India.. . . .Something new entered my field of vision. A short distance awayI saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite.It was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was floatingin space, and I myself was floating in space.

I had seen similar stones on the coast of the Gulf of Bengal. Theywere blocks of tawny granite, and some of them had beenhollowed out into temples. My stone was one such gigantic darkblock. An entrance led into a small antechamber. To the right of


the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon astone bench. He wore a white gown, and I knew that he expectedme. Two steps led up to this antechamber, and inside, on theleft, was the gate to the temple. Innumerable tiny niches, eachwith a saucer-like concavity filled with coconut oil and smallburning wicks, surrounded the door with a wreath of brightflames. I had once actually seen this when I visited the Temple ofthe Holy Tooth at Kandy in Ceylon; the gate had been framedby several rows of burning oil lamps of this sort.

As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into therock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everythingwas being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished foror thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence,fell away or was stripped from me—an extremely painfulprocess. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I nowcarried along with me everything I had ever experienced ordone, everything that had happened around me. I might alsosay: it was with me, and I was it. I consisted of all that, so tospeak. I consisted of my own history, and I felt with great certainty:this is what I am. “I am this bundle of what has been, and whathas been accomplished.”

This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at thesame time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wantedor desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had beenand lived. At first the sense of annihilation predominated, ofhaving been stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became ofno consequence. Everything seemed to be past; what remainedwas a fait accompli, without any reference back to what had been.There was no longer any regret that something had droppedaway or been taken away. On the contrary: I had everything thatI was, and that was everything.35

The autobiographical account continues with a passage left outby Bair in which Jung was “to enter an illuminated room and wouldmeet there all those people to whom I belong in reality” and“understand . . . what historical nexus I or my life fitted into.”

Bair’s claim, based on the “Protocols,” that Jung associated thisheart attack vision (taking place in Europe but set in India) with hisIndian dysentery dream (conversely set in Europe) is highlysignificant.36 Jung encounters here what is evidently a holy man of India


who was “waiting for” or “expected” him. We are immediately remindedof Ramana Maharshi, whom Jung was invited by Heinrich Zimmer tomeet in 1938, and Jung’s refusal to see him. Evidently the invitation,and expectation that Jung would eventually come, had remained openin Jung’s psyche.

Another experience of a yogi occurred around the same time, “aftermy illness in 1944”:

I was on a hiking trip. I was walking along a little road througha hilly landscape; the sun was shining and I had a wide view inall directions. Then I came to a small wayside chapel. The doorwas ajar, and I went in. To my surprise there was no image ofthe Virgin on the altar, and no crucifix either, but only awonderful flower arrangement. But then I saw that on thefloor in front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi—in lotusposture, in deep meditation. When I looked at him moreclosely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright,and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who ismeditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that whenhe awakened, I would no longer be.37

Here again is the holy man of India. As Jung had long ago realized,the wise old man is often a symbol of the self, the wholeness of thepersonality. But this is no Philemon or Elijah. What is unique in theimage of the Indian wise man that brought it so forcefully to hisattention at the time of his 1944 heart attack?

Jung suggests the answer in reflecting on this dream, and anothersimilar one near the end of his life where he discovered that UFOs werenot “projections of ours” as he had thought. Now it turns out that “weare their projections. I am projected by the magic lantern as C.G. Jung.”As also in his childhood experience of sitting on a stone and wonderingwhether “I” am sitting on the stone or rather “I” am the stone beingsat upon (and in the similar Chuang Tse story of the butterfly), Jungin these dreams and in the heart attack vision finds not just that theself is greater by far than the ego which it creates “for a specific purpose”but also that the self is a higher locus of consciousness than the ego.38 Itturns out that the holy men of India were right all along. There isconsciousness outside the ego, and this consciousness does not dependon the ego. In fact, when this higher awareness fully manifests, theego may no longer be there.


Closer examination of the 1944 vision shows that Jung’s holy manis a Buddhist. This is suggested first by the fact that the rock templefloating in space reminded him of the Buddhist temple he had visitedin Kandy, Sri Lanka. But the specifically Buddhist character of theexperience lies deeper than that. A central aspect of Jung’s basicunderstanding of the psyche is that of psychological objectivity, theintrinsic “just-so-ness” of our life that is inseparable from ourindividuality and potential for individuation. This objectivity (inSanskrit, tathata) in Buddhism is the human personality viewed withoutgrasping or selfish craving, as a bare fact not dependent on our wishesor projections. But this recognition of our fundamental limitation isintimately related to the realization of freedom and limitlessness thatis nirvana. Jung discovered the same paradox.

Near the end of his life, Jung found that “the decisive question forman is: Is he related to something infinite or not?”39 But for Jung thisquestion comes with its opposite:

the feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if weare bounded to the utmost . . . . Our knowledge of our narrowconfinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of theunconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselvesconcurrently as limited and eternal . . . . In knowing ourselves tobe unique in our personal combination—that is, ultimatelylimited—we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious ofthe infinite. But only then!40

In Bair’s version of the 1944 vision Jung realizes his limited natureas nothing but a “bunch of facts,” rendered in Memories, Dreams,Reflections as a “bundle of what has been.” He no longer possesses himselfor projects himself into the future, but simply is what he is, in anexperience characterized by a sense of “annihilation” or “extremepoverty.” The terminology recalls the Theravada Buddhist analysis ofhuman nature into five “bundles” (skandhas), none of them possessinga permanent self (atta). This is the limitation Jung speaks of later asnecessary to the sense of the infinite. The infinite itself is suggested inthe mandala of oil lamps surrounding the entrance to the temple andespecially in the sense of “contentment” he feels on realizing his radicalfinitude, a sense of peace quite near to nirvana. Jung here reprises acentral tenet of Buddhism: nirvana, or release into freedom, depends


on realization of one’s bondage in the world of conditioned ordetermined karmic inevitability (pratitya-samutpada, generallytranslated “conditioned origination”).

The overall tenor of the two accounts of Jung’s 1944 vision issubtly different. While both Jaffé and Bair portray a sense ofemptiness that nevertheless reveals a residual “suchness” ofpersonality, the Jaffé version of Jung’s experience emphasizes fullnessor individuation, with more ego remaining. “This is what I am.” “Ihad everything that I was” (our italics). Bair tells a more egoless, Buddhiststory, with the accent on Jung realizing what he is not now: “I wasobjective. I was what I had been.” In Jaffé, the annihilation in theinitial portion of the vision is followed by a fullness. In Bair, theego is emptier, closer to the holy man.

INDIA IN SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION, LIBER NOVUS (THE RED BOOK)AND PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES

Already in Symbols of Transformation (1912) Jung had madesubstantial use of early Indian materials; in Psychological Types (1921)his scholarship goes much further, revealing (in the years before HeinrichZimmer and J. W. Hauer) many hours in the library and apparentlyin consultation with the Zürich Sanskrit scholar Emil Abegg.41 Thetime seems to have been well spent, as Jung’s reading of early Indianreligious thought on the self (atman, purusa), “life energy” (prana),and cosmic law (pta) is put to use in the formulation of the essentialconclusions of the book. In Psychological Types as well as the Red Book(though not overtly in the latter), we will find strong anticipation ofJung’s later interest in yoga and the holy men of India. To appraise theimportance of Jung’s Indian sources—to show how they wereconstitutive of his ideas on the psyche and not just instances of his“trawling,” as Deirdre Bair puts it, for “similarities to his own [ideas]and for examples to support [them]”—will require a close look at howJung interprets a few texts from the Upanishads and Vedas.42 Indianmaterials in Psychological Types are primarily found in the sections onSchiller (chapter 2) and especially “The Type Problem in Poetry”(chapter 5).43 Even closer scrutiny is needed for the Red Book, andonly the beginning of an adequate interpretation of this protean projectcan be undertaken here.


THE RED BOOK

Liber Novus (the proper name of the leather-bound volume Jungand others generally referred to adjectivally as “the Red Book”) was thepersonal, esoteric source for ideas formulated a little later in more public,exoteric form in Psychological Types, and while explicit references to Indiaare almost absent from Liber Novus’s written text, many of its earlypaintings directly or indirectly refer to Indian themes. That India wason his mind during this time is explicitly noted in Jung’s unpublisheddream book where he references “my intensive unconscious relation toIndia in the Red Book.”44 Jung’s relationship to India in PsychologicalTypes and the Red Book therefore are best understood together.

A series of four paintings in the Red Book refer to Vedic Indianthemes: they are on pages 45, 54, 59, and 64. These paintings weredone around 1917. In addition, Vedic references are found in Jung’smarginalia to pages 73 and 74 and a quotation from the Bhagavad Gitais appended in calligraphic style to the Philemon painting (page 154),which was done later, around 1925. Between pages 36 and 64 thetheme of the written text is the transformation of the god image in thefigure of Izdubar, a divinity of the ancient Middle East (Babylonia)related to Gilgamesh, who also has Indian and Egyptian associations.Izdubar dies from the poison of modernity but is transformed throughbecoming a creative fantasy, a fate he initially resists.45 “Jung” (analogousto C. G. Jung’s “dream ego”) within the vision transforms Izdubar intoan egg that he puts in his pocket after persuading or coercing the godto accept the status of a fantasy. The egg develops and a new godemerges, represented in Jung’s paintings by an eruption of fire,referred to in the caption as the Vedic fire god Agni (page 64). Whilethe egg containing Izdubar is being incubated in “Jung’s” pocket,readying the embryo for rebirth, “Jung” is effectively his god’s mother.46

Jung finds this period analogous to the “night sea journey,” in Egyptianmythology, when the sun passes across the ocean from the west into theeast (pages 55 and 64). When Izdubar emerges reborn, the new godimage is celebrated in a series of ecstatic “Incantations” that Jay Sherryfinds to be the psychological center of the Red Book.47 The Vedicpaintings are located in the context of the Izdubar material, and tounderstand the crucial psychological development in Jung’sexperience and thought between 1913 and 1921 it will help to look


carefully at these images and their Indian references. The Izdubar themedevelops into the figure of the divine child Phanes (page 113), a relativeof Jung’s “guru” Philemon, who is himself, as Jung’s marginal commentfrom the Bhagavad Gita shows, a descent or emergent form of god.The god image reaches its final shape in the Red Book in the figure ofAbraxas within the pseudo-gnostic text, “Seven Sermons to the Dead.”In its uniting of opposites (for instance, full and empty), Abraxas bearsa close relationship to the Atman-Brahman of the Upanishads that Jungwas absorbed in at the same time. Finally, it is clear in this section ofthe Red Book (“Scrutinies”) that Jung’s ambivalence toward the animaand the Judeo-Christian God was intense and is later mirrored in hismixed response to India.

Prior to his discovery of the circular mandala pattern as an imageof the all-inclusive self, Jung wrestled with the theme of the binaryopposites and their reconciliation. Even around the time of the firstmandalas (1916 and after), Jung continued to struggle with the polaropposites. The paintings and text in the Izdubar section of the RedBook conflate Egyptian, Indian, and ancient Mesopotamian themes,all seemingly referred to by the generic “the East.” The central imageis that of the egg incubating, developing toward rebirth, emerging anewand then dying again.48 The Egyptian night sea journey by barge ofthe sun, from its grave in the west to its place of rebirth in the east,shows the sun as a golden sphere on the boat’s deck (page 55). Onpage 45 the egg is placed in an Indian context as the original formof the cosmos before the sky and the earth were propped apart bythe birth of the god Skambha (the “Prop”).49 Page 64 shows aneruption of fire from the cracked egg as a worshipper prostrateshimself with his head to the floor. On the wall behind is paintedthe scene of the night sea journey, again with the solar egg lying onthe barge. The text from the Satapatha Brahmana cited at the bottomof Jung’s painting refers to the Agnihotra sacrifice performed at dawnand dusk. The parallel between Egypt and India is made again on page59, titled “hiranyagarbha,” which is Sanskrit for “Golden Embryo” or“Golden Egg” (or, as Jung sometimes translates it, “Golden Child”).Jung ties the story of Izdubar’s rebirth to the Egyptian and Indianmaterials by associating the fire sacrifice of the Agnihotra with thenight sea journey and the rebirth of the god Izdubar after hisincubation in “Jung’s” pocket.


PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES AND THE SYMBOL OF THE SELF

Jung first uses the term self (selbst) in something like his maturesense (source, totality, and goal of individuation) in Psychological Types,though it was prefigured in “The Structure of the Unconscious”(originally published in 1916), which developed into one of the twoessays in the appendix to volume 7 of the Collected Works.50 The imageand concept of the self appeared also in his mandala drawings of 1916–1918 and the mandala-like structure of his developing eightfoldtypology of attitude and function.51 In the 1916 essay, Jung writes:“The unconscious personal contents constitute the self, the unconsciousor subconscious ego.”52 Clearly the self at this point is not a center ofthe whole psyche, though it does go beyond the conscious ego. Avaluable footnote by the editors in Psychological Types clarifies thedevelopment of Jung’s early ideas on the self.53 Paragraph 183 ofPsychological Types, where the footnote occurs, is the first time that Jungclearly distinguished the ego and the self. However, in the surroundingtext he uses other terms taken from Schiller and Schopenhauer to getat some of what self was later to mean. As the editors point out, the selfof paragraph 183 constitutes something akin to the referent of the termindividual nucleus,” as Schiller names a central faculty in the personbeyond the pull of the opposites. Jung uses this phrase interchangeablywith the word individuality. He unites self and individuality in saying“the self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fatefulcombination we call individuality.”54

The self, individuation (individual nucleus, individuality), andlibido come together at this point in Jung’s thinking. The goal is tofind a symbol to mediate between libidinal (or, later, archetypal) forcespulling in contrary directions (for example, between extraversion andintroversion, persona and shadow, or matter and spirit). Jung concludesthat the ego is powerless to resolve this struggle for it is always drawnto whichever force is strongest at the moment. The individual (or“indivisible”) center capable of mediating and integrating the oppositescan only constellate when libido introverts into the unconscious, “thatmaternal womb of creative fantasy, which is able at any time to fashionsymbols . . . that can serve to determine the mediating will.”55 We arereminded of Izdubar in “Jung’s” maternal pocket. Introversion of thelibido is brought about by the deadlock between more or less evenly


matched opposites. It is also furthered by a detachment of libido fromboth opposites: “The will then has the self as a possible aim” and“disposable energy is drawn into the self—in other words, it isintroverted.”56 This is a key insight: the libido, guided by the will,focuses on a center, which is (or becomes) the unconscious butultimately individual locus of symbolization and psychologicaldevelopment: the self. In this process the libido is rendered “whollyobjectless” and so able to devote its energy to creating symbols out ofthe fantasy material in the unconscious.57 The process of symbolization,insofar as it reconciles the opposites, expresses the “transcendentfunction.” Jung has now recognized that the self is essential to thatmediating function, which he also named the “uniting” symbol (or“reconciling symbol” in Baynes’s translation). When constellated, theself—formerly sought by the introverting will—guides the will (ego)and lays out a blueprint for future life.

In the Red Book (and again in Memories, Dreams, Reflections), Jungreports that a female figure, in some way associated with his patientand friend Maria Moltzer, told him that his active imaginations were“art.”58 It is well known that Jung took violent exception to this, andyet his Red Book project itself is described in Memories, Dreams,Reflections as an “estheticizing” approach to his fantasies that he foundlater must be supplanted by rational understanding.59 He paintedsymbolic images in his great book for over ten years. The same issueappears in Psychological Types in Jung’s discussion of Schiller. The poethad found that the way beyond psychological conflict (the opposites)was aesthetic play. Interpreting Schiller according to his libido theory,Jung finds that Schiller’s “play instinct” is the “source of symbols.”60

When the opposites cancel one another out, a void and free conditionensues where the psyche can play. Schiller calls this the “aestheticcondition,” and it appears to be equivalent to Jung’s “symbol-formingactivity (creative fantasy).” But even though it is the product of creativeplay, Jung cannot accept that the symbol is primarily aesthetic, and itis here that he brings in India (and China), specifically the Upanishadictheme of the atman and the brahman.

Had [Schiller] been acquainted with Indian literature, hewould have seen that the primordial image which floatedbefore his mind’s eye had a very different character from an“aesthetic” one . . . . He interpreted it as “aesthetic,” although he


himself had previously emphasized its symbolic character. Theprimordial image I am thinking of is that particularconfiguration of Eastern ideas which is condensed in thebrahman-atman teaching of India and whose philosophicalspokesman in China is Lao-tzu.61

Jung now repeats his earlier assertion that symbols are created in astate of introverted libido. But it is not just any symbol that is beingcreated, but rather the symbol of the self, which as Murray Stein saysis the “prime archetype . . . from which all the other archetypes andarchetypal images ultimately derive.”62 Jung borrows from India thefundamental idea that the introverting libido takes the self as an objectof “meditation without content, in which the libido is supplied to one’sown self somewhat in the manner of incubating heat [tapas].”63 Heequates this incubating, activating meditation with yoga. Jungcontrasts the spiritual work required in tapas with the possibly unserious“aesthetic” attitude of “play,” though he allows that play can be seriousand that aesthetics can be a religious passion. The potential flaw in artand play (presumably including Jung’s own work with water and stonesas well as the illustrations in the Red Book) appears to be that it maynot be centered enough, that it might let the unconscious express itselftoo freely without conscious ego control or reference to the self. ButJung was ambivalent on this point and at other times more fullyrecognized the spiritual value of play. On the one hand, “what is neededis a supreme moral effort, the greatest self-denial and sacrifice, the mostintense religious austerity and true saintliness.”64 This asceticdescription of tapas is rather severe: there seems no room here for playor art. On the other hand, “beauty, for [Schiller] was a religious ideal.Beauty was his religion.”65

The process of symbolization begins with an introversion of libido,an objectless meditation on the self after letting go both internal andexternal objects. This process has two outcomes. First, it liberates theperson from the pain of struggling with the opposites. Second, it createsnew outer and inner realities and a life path arising from the symbolicvisions of the self. All symbols have a quality of “selfness” or relatednessto the self which is itself the central symbol or symbol of the center.Jung is speaking of symbols in general, but most particularly of thebrooded-upon self when he writes:


Devotion, as Schiller correctly conceived it, is a regressivemovement of libido towards the primordial, a diving down intothe source of the first beginnings. Out of this there rises, as animage of the incipient progressive movement, the symbol, whichis a condensation of all the operative unconscious factors—“livingform,” as Schiller says, and a God-image, as history proves . . . .the vision of the symbol is a pointer to the onward course of life,beckoning the libido towards a still distant goal.66

The self is the sought-for source, reached anew by transcendingall other opportunities for libidinal investment. After it is attained,or constellated, the self provides the blueprint and motivation forbuilding the structure of a new life centered on actualizing thepotentialities of that same self. In the image of the self Jung foundthe fulfillment of the quest, pursued in the first half of hisprofessional life, to discover the nature of the mediating and guidingsymbol. He also found in the Indian self the possibility of “apsychological doctrine of salvation which brings the way ofdeliverance within man’s ken and capacity.”67 His strong criticisms ofChristianity around this time contrast with a very positive view ofBuddhism and Hinduism.68 Beginning before 1938, but acceleratingas a result of experiences during his trip to India at this time, the balanceshifted, and Jung began working toward a reinterpretation ofChristianity (guided by the symbolism of alchemy) and his interestin India became intermittent and less intense.69 Nevertheless, theinsights of 1921 were not entirely abandoned and returned in thevisions that followed his heart attack in 1945 and even in his latework on alchemy and Christian self symbolism.

The theme of redemption from the opposites, which therecognition of the self promises to achieve, is the topic of a longsection in Psychological Types.70 Here Jung approaches the topic ofthe self in various ways but finds his deepest understanding in Indianideas. At one point he speaks of “harmony with natural laws that guidethe libido in the direction of life’s optimum.”71 This “optimum,” withits suggestion of a middle way between a maximum and a minimum,Jung imagines to swing according to the “tidal law” of transitionbetween systole (contraction, introversion) and disastole (expansion,extraversion) (terms taken from Goethe that he uses often in this period).The “attainment of the middle path” involves a balance between


bondage and freedom and reminds us of one of Jung’s final conclusions,almost forty years in the future, when he would say, “the feeling forthe infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to theutmost.”72 This razor’s edge path between constraint and freedom, “notexactly the simplest of tasks,” as Jung gently reminds us is bestrecognized in “the profoundest philosophical speculation that thehuman mind has ever known,” namely the ancient thought of India.73

Jung notes that “our Western superciliousness in the face of theseIndian insights is a mark of our barbarian nature which has not theremotest inkling of their extraordinary depth and psychologicalaccuracy.”74 The essence of the insights he is referring to seems tobe the recognition of an inner law within the personality, a rootcause for the alternation or balance between extraversion andintroversion. Jung contrasts this [pta or dharma (and Chinese tao)to the Judeo-Christian law imposed from outside by a father Godwho “puts an end to the division [between the opposites] as andwhen it suits him and for reasons we are not fitted to understand.The childishness of this conception needs no stressing.”75 Insteadof this arbitrary fiat from above, Jung tells us that there is a “selfmanifesting” and constantly “self renewing” source of libido in theunconscious.76 This source (which he is beginning to call the “self,”after the Indian atman) is also the agent of compensation, the powerthat dictates when systole and diastole will succeed one another.Befitting its importance to his developing ideas, Jung’s depth ofengagement in Indian thought at this time is quite extensive, withreferences to most of the major German scholars as well as to writersin the French and English languages.77

Jung’s idea of the inner law governing individuation and thecircumambulation (or rotundum) of the self are implicitly, thoughnever directly (during this period), related to the type theory, as itexpanded in the process of creating Psychological Types, where aneightfold pattern replaces a single binary opposition (of thinking/extraversion versus feeling/introversion). The three orthogonaldimensions of Jung’s mature typology create a sort of solid mandala,a representation of wholeness that mirrors that of the archetypes inthe more usual two dimensional mandalic image that Jung wasdeveloping at the same time.78


JUNG, YOGA, AND TANTRA

By 1932 Jung seemed to have made all the use of India requiredto develop his theory of the self as the unconscious center of the processof psychological development (individuation) that he had earlierglimpsed in the symbolic transformations of libido. Psychologicaldevelopment was now understood to be guided by the self throughthe transcendent function that balances between ego and unconsciousforces via symbols. In 1931–1932 and after his trip to India in 1937–1938 he elaborated on the process of self development in tantric andyogic Hinduism, collaborating with Indologists J. W. Hauer, S. N.Dasgupta, and Heinrich Zimmer.

Lectures on Kundalini Yoga by J. W. Hauer at the PsychologicalClub in 1932 were followed by a series of four lectures by Jung (threein English, one in German).79 The lectures, like many lecture series atthe club, were transcribed by Mary Foote’s secretary and later publishedin a volume edited by Sonu Shamdasani. Shamdasani shows that inhis commentaries on Kundalini Yoga Jung views the system of subtlepsychic ganglia called chakras, “discs” (or padmas, “lotuses”) as an Indianrepresentation of archetypal structures underlying and enablingindividuation of the personality. The chakras are energy centersconnected by channels called nadis that convey psychospiritual energy,shakti, that Jung saw as essentially identical to the libido.80 Themovement of shakti up the spine from one chakra to another isaccompanied by psychospiritual development analogous toindividuation. Further, Jung interpreted the chakras, like archetypalimages, as intrinsically symbolic. Each was not just represented but inpart constituted by its particular symbolic form; thus, the chakrastransform energy by virtue of their metaphoric resemblances to theelements of earth, water, fire, and air, each of which symbolizespsychological qualities (ordinary consciousness, the unconscious,passions, and the objective psyche).81

Joseph Henderson, in his introduction to Coward’s Jung and EasternThought, makes the point that Jung tried to balance between twocomplementary views of psychospiritual development, one imaginingour relationship to the self as like a “ladder,” which must be climbedfrom level to level (i.e., from chakra to chakra) and the other havingthe form of a circumambulation around the self at the center of each


chakra, “an eternal process of self centering.”82 Jung himself speaks ofthe individual chakras as having the form of mandalas, each constitutingits own world.83 This would represent Henderson’s second aspect. Atthe same time he says that the movement of the Kundalini, its initialshift from dormancy in the lowest chakra, the muladhara, constitutespsychic objectivity and allows a transition from participation mystiquetoward consciousness. Moving upward means to see the ego and otherpsychic contents more objectively and to increase the scope ofconsciousness; moving around (circumambulating) is to see the self asone’s center, origin, and aim.

The existence of a psychological reality beyond the ego is somethingthat can only be recognized by entering the unconscious or, using Jung’sterminology, by going into the “objective psyche.” The second chakra,the svadhisthana (a world of water), symbolizes the unconscious realmfor Jung, and to enter it is to undergo the night sea journey of the sunas it sinks into the western horizon and moves toward dawn in the east.Jung understands Kundalini here as the anima, the female initiator intothe unconscious. Of course the possibility of being swallowedpermanently by the unconscious is ever present, and Jung emphasizesthat we must “fly” with our own wings and not get swept up passivelyin the afflatus of the anima.84

The rest of Jung’s 1932 Kundalini discourse follows the same road,in part repeating with a new language the established story ofindividuation as Jung had come to understand it. In Shamdasani’swords, however, “Jung’s aim was to develop a cross-culturalcomparative psychology of inner experience.”85 He was concernedto differentiate his view from Indian (and also other Westerners’)views of the same process, emphasizing its psychological nature asopposed to what he called the “metaphysical.” This shift is clear inJung’s interpretation of Kundalini as anima, and her movementupward through the chakras as a process of increasing psychologicalobjectivity. Another of Jung’s main concepts, the self, requires lessinterpretation since it was drawn from the same field of thought inwhich the tantric purusa grew. The fourth or heart chakra, anahata(indestructible), Jung finds to symbolize the self, purusa. Here, andin the chakras above the heart (visuddha at the throat, ajña at the thirdeye in the center of the forehead, and sahasrara above the top of thehead), there is an increase in the psychic or subtle body nature of


experience. “But in the ajña center the psyche gets wings—here youknow you are nothing but psyche.”86 Jung projects the realization ofthis state into the distant future—at least for Westerners:

[We] are reaching . . . into the remote future of mankind, or ofourselves. For any man has at least the potential faculty toexperience that which will be the collective experience in twothousand years, perhaps in ten thousand years.87

There is another psyche, a counterpart to your psychical reality,the non-ego reality, the thing that is not even to be called self,and you know that you are going to disappear into it. The egodisappears completely; the psychical is no longer a content in us,but we become contents of it.88

Here already in 1932 Jung foresees the essence of his dreams manyyears later in which the meditating holy man and the UFO representa center of awareness projecting—and so able to dissolve—his ego.This is the beginning of the third stage of Jung’s response to India,the recognition that consciousness itself may not, after all, beintrinsic to the ego but could be its transcendent source. This insightlies close enough to the horizon of the ego’s vision and occasionallyerupts into ego consciousness as it did in Jung’s dream. But the highestchakra, sahasrara, which Jung identifies with nirvana, is completelybeyond any possible relationship to the ego and therefore “is withoutpractical value for us.”89

Jung’s ambivalence about Kundalini Yoga, and especially its higherchakras, was felt keenly by his audience at the Psychological Club.Barbara Hannah writes:

As always happens when a perfected Indian philosophy isplaced before a European audience, we all got terribly out ofourselves and confused . . . . The East is too far above everydayreality for us, aiming at Nirvana instead of at our present, three-dimensional life.90

What Jung began to perceive in this vision of non-ego consciousnessin Kundalini Yoga he could not forget; he wrestled with in dreams andvisions and worked for the remainder of his life with some success tounderstand it. Already in the Red Book Jung had seen the oppositionbetween ego consciousness and the reborn god and the difficulty of


reconciling them. The progression there leads from the primitive,unconscious divinity Izdubar in concrete form to a psychological(fantasy) representation and development of him, a move towardindividuation. The ego at this point feels fear of the new god, inflatesdefensively, and even considers killing Izdubar: “Should I slay him,the defenseless one whom I loved? Should I shatter the delicate shellof his grave, and expose him to the weightlessness andunboundedness of the winds of the world?”91 Having decided tonurture the god within the egg, the ego personality (which hasadopted the maternal role) pours its strength into the divine child,the renewed form of god. The result?

When I conquered the God, his force streamed into me. Butwhen the god rested in the egg and awaited his beginning, myforce went into him. And when he rose up radiantly, I lay on myface. He took my life with him. All my force was now in him.My soul swam like a fish in his sea of fire. . . . My God had tornme apart terribly, he had drunk the juice of my life. . . . He leftme powerless and groaning.92

One is reminded here of Sabina Spielrein’s essay on death as thecause of coming to be.93 As Jung puts it, “I lay there like a child-bearercruelly mauled and bleeding her life into the child, uniting life anddeath in a dying glance, the day’s mother, the night’s prey.”94 As thegod surges upward, regaining heaven, the ego descends down to hell.Nigredo follows coniunctio. The remainder of the Red Book, especiallythe “Seven Sermons,” explores the ramifications of this ego-selfopposition, as does Answer to Job many years later.

JUNG’S PASSAGE TO INDIA: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE “MAN EATER”?

Alice Boner, the Swiss interpreter of Indian art, met Jung duringhis India trip in December 1937 at her home in Banaras; she spenta day with him before taking him the next morning to the trainstation for his journey onward to Calcutta. They visited a templeof the goddess Durga in the morning; then, after he received anhonorary doctorate (wearing red academic robes), Jung was takento a Siva temple.95 In her diary Boner writes that “the VishvanathaTemple and the narrow lanes filled Jung’s soul with horror [grausen]and made him turn back.”96 The Vishvanatha Temple to Siva as Lord


of the World contains one of the twelve jyotir lingas (phalluses oflight) sacred in Hinduism. Boner later describes the “egg-shaped,black lingam of ovoid form.”97

It suggested the idea of the supreme or central entity, unformed—or rather, formless, a form of purest concentration, the blackcolor suggesting inwardness, the innermost cavity, the dark,small place in the heart of the universe, and of the individualbeing where Brahma dwells, the unique being, unmanifest, inits own purest essence.98

This is precisely the poisonous (to Westerners), ego-annihilatingsort of Indian absolute that Jung most feared and—as embodied inthe holy men of India—avoided. We speculate that the phallic “maneater” God of Jung’s childhood dream vision reemerged in hisimagination of the Siva lingam. The theme of the devouring god, andthe necessity for the ego to resist and “treat” (Murray Stein’s term) thebrutal divine Self, preoccupies the majority of Jung’s late work,appearing in the important dream of the Emperor Akbar and in Answerto Job.99 Jung insists that we must not bow down all the way before thedivine, lest the ego’s spark of individuality be extinguished.

YOGA AND ACTIVE IMAGINATION

In 1938–1939 Jung delivered a series of lectures at theEidgenossiche Technische Hochschule (ETH) on Hindu andBuddhist yoga, which he used to develop his ideas on activeimagination. During the same period Professor S. N. Dasguptalectured on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra at the Psychological Club.100 Junghad met Dasgupta, a preeminent authority on Indian philosophy,in Calcutta during his visit the preceding year.101 In addition to a closereading of Patanjali, Jung discussed two Buddhist texts, AmitayurDhyana Sutra and Shri Chakra Sambhara Tantra, as well as a numberof texts from Meister Eckhart.

The overall subject of the 1938–1939 lectures was activeimagination, and Jung took yoga and Buddhist spiritual practices astechniques parallel to his own, though quite different in the status theyassigned to personal individuality. He also treated Ignatius Loyola’sspiritual exercises as a kind of active imagination and compared themand yoga to Western mysticism as exemplified in Meister Eckhart. Jung


writes: “A knowledge of [yoga] is a necessary preparation tounderstanding the spirit of European active imagination and is a greathelp in obtaining a right attitude towards it.”102

The essential point of comparison between yogic practices andJung’s active imagination is the intense focus in both on contents ofthe unconscious, which are treated as objectively real. The basicdifference is that Jung’s practice emphasizes the separateness of,distinction between, the ego observer and the unconscious content.Active imagination is a conversation between or dialogue with figuresof the unconscious. For yoga, on the contrary, in Jung’s view, thepractitioner identifies with the unconscious content, for example, withan image of the Buddha, by projecting it onto the outer world and inthis way makes it conscious and objective. Yoga is an emanation orintentional creation of figures that express the qualities of the projectingpersonality.103 Its goal is not dialogue but an emptying oruniversalization of the personality that identifies a human’s parts withthose of a god or Buddha. Yoga handles negative or shadow elementssimilarly, by projecting them onto demons or other negative figuresand so eliminates them from the ego.

One of us (Elaine Molchanov) recalls that in her personal practiceof Siddha Yoga her teacher Swami Muktananda taught studentssomething similar. He told them that in his sadhana (spiritual work)he had imaginatively placed his guru’s body parts (arms, shoulders,heart, mind, etc.) into corresponding locations within himself, thusexperiencing or recognizing his own parts as (really) those of theguru. Similar in a way to Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christdiscussed by Jung in the 1938–1939 seminars, this process ofidentification with the teacher was recommended by Muktanandafor his own disciples. Described in detail in Muktananda’s book,the practice has roots in vedic texts where the dying father placeshis vital energies (pranas) into his son at the time of death.104 Theson lies on the body of the father and literally takes into his ownbody the father’s vital energies as the father passes away. Atransmission of selfhood takes place that is analogous to the guru-disciple relationship reported by Molchanov.

Jung’s central insight about such practices is that they recognize,far more than does ordinary Western consciousness, the objectivityof the psyche.


I wish very much that psychic objectivity were recognized in theWest. . . . Our text is full of this recognition. The subjective imagehas its objective existence, one can stand outside and worship it.The reason of this whole procedure is to give its separate objectiveexistence to everything subjective. . . . for recognizing theobjectivity of the psyche is typical for the eastern point of view,whereas we regard it as subjective.105

Jung is clear that this “eastern” practice is magical and a work ofartifice, though it can be successful only if the unconscious consentsto place its contents into the projective structures of a culture, possibleonly if the cultural structures (e.g., religious dogmas) are adequate tocontain them. He gives the example of

the “Platonic idea of the round world soul. The microcosm is asmall edition of the macrocosm, the anima mundi. . . . Plato’sidea is identical with the eastern idea of the ́ tman or Puruc-a.The person (puruc-a) not larger than a thumb who dwells inthe heart of man and who encompasses the earth on every side,extending beyond it by ten fingers breadth.. . . .this person is not present from the beginning. He has to becreated by the Yogin, induced by the practice of Yoga. . . .This is a magic procedure, undertaken in order to producethe spiritual personality.106

The dangers of ego inflation in this projective form of activeimagination are obvious to Jung, as they are in many Indian stories ofevil yogis or demons who practice yoga in order to gain power over theworld. Heinrich Zimmer, for instance, retells the famous story of theking and the vampire (vetala) to make this point. An evil sorcerer andaccomplished yogi attempts to bring a king under his power in orderto kill him and usurp his royal status for himself. To do this the yogimust use his magical powers to control a spirit (the vetala) who cananimate the corpse of an executed felon. The sorcerer creates a scenarioin which the king will be forced, through the yogi’s manipulation ofthe vetala’s powers, to enter a magic circle and submit to his ownexecution. The sorcerer’s design, however, is thwarted by the vetala,who tricks the magician by divulging his plan to the king who is ableto decapitate the yogi instead.107 This is ultimately a story where the


unconscious does not allow itself to be forced into the structures thatyoga tries to impose on it.

The proper and improper uses of yoga can be glimpsed throughJung’s ideas on symbol formation discussed above. Symbols arespontaneous creations of the unconscious: at once sensory,ideational, and affective images that work as containers ofarchetypal libido. Symbols are not manufactured by the ego,and when power-hungry yogis try to construct a worldrepresented as under their (egotistic, ahamkaric) control theyhave not genuinely contained archetypal contents but rather haveimprisoned them. In other words, the yogi creates complexesrather than archetypally valid symbols.

In the final sections of the seminar Jung turns to a deeper studyof the Patanjali Yoga Sutras as an example of “eastern” activeimagination. The goal of yoga is the discrimination between egoconsciousness and the Self (purusa) which Jung identifies with theunconscious. Harold Coward studied the 1938–1939 seminar andfound that “Jung saw that the yoga viewpoint led to a completedissolution of ego and individuality.”108 In recognizing that the ego(here the Indian term ahaMkara is preferable) is just anotherprojection of a more fundamental psychological faculty (inSaMkhya-Yoga called buddhi) yoga leaves Jung behind, and as wehave seen he repeatedly refuses to follow, always for the same reason.As he put it in a letter to Evans-Wentz in the same year

No matter how far . . . consciousness can be extended, there isstill the continuity of the apperceiving ego which is essential toall forms of consciousness.109

Thus it is absolutely impossible to know what I would experiencewhen that “I” which could experience didn’t exist any more.110

In the last lecture (lecture 7) of the summer semester 1939, Jungdraws a close parallel between the teachings of Meister Eckhart andPatanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Edffrn thought which made it possible forEuropeans to begin to understand Eckhart. In spite of his ultimaterejection of yoga as a possible path for Westerners, it is clear that Jungdid finally accept the reality of the Indian (yogic) path as an alternativeto his own work.


The Indian idea is that we leave the ego with the rest of the worldand go over into Puruc-a, the Self, and that then we can cut offthe Gunas and the Prak[-ti. The world disappears and we cometo what has ever existed, the eternal Puruc-a. But such aconception is only possible to an eastern psychology and weshould not imagine that we can understand it with our westernconsciousness. There is an essential difference in the qualityof consciousness between East and West. Ours is anexceedingly definite ego consciousness, it is much moreintense. The eastern consciousness is far less distinct, it isnot difficult for Easterners to move from their consciousness intothe unconscious, the Void.111

A quality of nostalgia or yearning for the Eastern way, characteristicof Romanticism, finally attaches to Jung’s rejection of yogic practices:“it would be wiser to meditate and seek the Void when we need rest,than to run after outer distraction. That Void is the Purusa, which wecan reach by emptying the ego.”112

THE GURU

The function of the psychotherapist as spiritual and psychologicalteacher (in Sanskrit, guru) is another idea Jung developed at least inpart from Indian sources. As usual, it is impossible to tell whether thethought first came from his own experience prior to confirmation (andnaming) by India or the reverse. At any rate, Jung’s individuationjourney was aided by spiritual teachers in his dreams and fantasies,most of all by the figure of Philemon, whom Jung explicitly called hisguru. In a letter to a young American student Jung reiterated the needfor a personal initiation into psychology as an essential requisite forbecoming a psychologist oneself.113 It is clear that he based hisunderstanding of the analyst-analysand relationship on the guru-disciple bond as much as on that of physician and patient, though thelatter was emphasized in his public personality. Still today, one’s locus(and even status) in the Jungian world is partly determined by whoone’s analyst is or was and who one’s analyst trained with. Like theIndian notion of parampara (succession of teachers), the generationalcontinuity of analysts to a degree defines the perceived validity in theworld of analytical psychology of one’s understanding of Jungianthought. The reason for this perspective (on its face somewhat irrational)


is that true knowledge is understood to come from encounter with theunconscious; it is not something manufactured by the ego. Only theperspective of the unconscious can teach truth to ego, and that objectiveviewpoint belongs to the guru as archetype and is actualized inrelationships with those carrying his image. This Jungian perspectiveis almost exactly that of India.

For Jung as well as India, the necessity for a guru comes inpart from the ego’s bondage within its own limited perspectiveand need for an outside point of reference to see beyond itslimitations. Although Jung continued to view the ego as thecenter of consciousness, it was for him emphatically not the centerof understanding, much less wisdom. The ego is like a youngstudent needing education (the German Bildung captures the ideabetter) and even in advanced old age Jung saw himself as the eternalson of the Great Mother. The guru function is essentially symbolic,and it could even be said that symbols are the guru, as the guru isitself a symbol. From the perspective of Indian SaMkhya-Yoga,consciousness communicates with the ego (specifically with thefaculty of insight, buddhi) through Siva as the Lord of Yoga. Inaddition to the god of yoga, the sacred texts themselves functionas carriers of the guru function, and this has been true to someextent in the Jungian (and post-Jungian) tradition also. In itsdescriptions of gradually ascending levels of “absorption” (samadhi)of ego in higher consciousness, the Yoga Sutras functionsymbolically, imagining states with and without a sense of “I am-ness” (asmita) that lead the ego to and even over its horizon. Thetext also alludes symbolically to the ego’s relationship to the higherconsciousness through the image of the siddhis, powers that dependon enhancing the ego’s faculties by overcoming them (for instance,becoming invisible through withdrawing the ego’s faculty ofprojecting objects of sight).114

The guru symbolizes the self coming down to the ego’s level toinstruct him or her, as Philemon flies down on kingfisher’s wings toteach the imagining Jung. The willingness to be taught by the self, totake the images the unconscious sends as higher knowledge, is essentialto the practice of Jungian active imagination.


THE CHRISTIAN MANDALA

Murray Stein has convincingly shown that Jung’s interests turneddecisively toward Christianity around the time of his illness in Indiain 1938 and argues that Jung’s dream of swimming to retrieve the HolyGrail was a specific point of articulation in his psychological trajectory,a moment when the path of his individuation turned sharply towardthe West.115 We agree with this assessment but believe that Jung’s“treatment” of Christianity retained an element of Indian healing,specifically the continuing presence of the self-regulating atman fromthe Upanishads that formed the heart of his mandalas of transformationand the essence of the transcendent function. Jung never lost his uneasetoward what he thought was a one-sided Christian (and even more,Old Testament) God and repeats innumerable times that Christianityis unbalanced because it leaves out the feminine and evil.116 His interestin alchemy was due in large part to the fact that phenomena omittedfrom the dominant Western paradigms are integrated there in a moreinclusive Weltanschauung (and Selbst-anschauung). He had alreadyfound this to be true in India.

What Jung rejected in Christianity is easier to see than hisreformulation of it, but focusing on the Indian influences will help inunderstanding how he thought the Church must change. As we foundin Psychological Types, Jung realized that the libido, detached frominternal and external objects, could take the self as an object. Two thingsare expressed in this insight. First, there is the possibility of what Jungrepeatedly calls by the Sanskrit word nirdvandva, the nonduality orovercoming of opposites.117 Second, there is a process of increasing focuson the center of the personality, the self, a concept which Jung alwaysacknowledged to have been drawn from the Indian atman. InTransformation Symbolism in the Mass, Jung writes:

The self is brought into actuality through the concentration ofthe many upon the centre, and the self wants this concentration.. . . the self is a “mirror”: on the one hand it reflects the subjectiveconsciousness of the disciple, making it visible to him, and onthe other hand it “knows” Christ, that is to say it does not merelyreflect the empirical man, it also shows him as a (transcendental)whole. . . . Only subjective consciousness is isolated; when it relates


to its centre it is integrated into wholeness. Whoever joins in thedance sees himself in the reflecting centre.118

This amounts to a recipe for creating a mandala. The circlessurrounding the center focus light and attention upon the latter,concentrating their energies there, but also are reflected back out intotheir own positions and natures by that center. This mutual recognitionand interpenetration of center and periphery, the movement of energyback and forth between them, was later developed by Michael Fordhamin his theory of deintegration and reintegration of the self.119

The two aspects of psychic development distinguished byHenderson can be seen in the two sides of the center-peripheryrelationship. From the viewpoint of the periphery, the pattern ofcirculation is foregrounded. From the perspective of the center, theemphasis is on transcendence, the ladder-like development contrastedby Henderson to the alternative pattern of circulation. In Aion, theascending and rotational aspects of individuation are integrated into a“step by step development of the self from an unconscious state to aconscious one.”120 By combining them, Jung finds a way to show theindividuation process as one that first turns downward into the shadowand matter and then goes up, returning to the original position butnow in a consciously embodied form.121

Although some of the details differ, there is a striking parallelbetween the progression of Kundalini through the chakras in Jung’s1932 discussion and the movement of the psyche through thesymbolism of the self in Aion almost twenty years later.122 In both casesa series of mandalas, one on top of the next, represent stages in psychicdevelopment or individuation. Jung’s thinking in 1950 goes fartherthan he had been able to go in 1932 when he found an oppositionbetween Western depth psychology (which descends into the waterworld of the unconscious) and Indian Kundalini psychology (whichascends into the same watery territory). In Aion, Jung finds a way tocombine going down (into the unconscious) with going up (towardhigher levels of psychological development).

Although he continues to consider the outright adoption of Indianideas “delusory,” Jung begins the final, and decisive, chapter of Aionby adverting once again to Upanishadic insights on the atman andbrahman.123 Jung begins the final, and decisive, chapter of Aion by


adverting once again to Upanishadic insights on the atman andbrahman. Jung quotes Yajñavalkya that “there is no other seer but he,no other hearer but he [the atman].”124 Even though this clearly tellsus that, for the Upanishadic sage, the self is the only conscious principle,Jung continues to assert that the self abides in the unconscious whereit is the center upon which the ego “concentrates” and with which it is“preoccupied.”125 Leaving aside his failure to formulate an explicittheory of higher consciousness, Jung in Aion does find a means ofreconciling the ascending and descending aspects of the individuationprocess that had perplexed him in 1932. Essentially, the ego (andegotism, Sanskrit ahaMkara or asmita ) must go or be taken down sothat a different sort of consciousness can rise beyond it. These two thingshappen together. Indian SaMkhya and Yoga thought tells the spiritualaspirant to discriminate between the ego and consciousness (purusaor cit) and to keep the mind focused on this difference. To do this is toestablish oneself at the level of buddhi, “insight,” which is the onlypsychic faculty in SaMkhya-Yoga capable of seeing the ego and itsdistortions from outside, that is, from above.126 In a word, the buddhiis Yoga’s transcendent function, the means of connecting purusa andprakpti. For Jung, the parallel idea would be to attain psychic objectivitytoward the ego, to view one’s ego as a content, as he did in his 1944heart attack vision of the meteorite above the Indian subcontinent. Theego must become objective in order to be shifted from the center ofthe mandala to the periphery.

INDIVIDUATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT

The diachronic growth of ego consciousness under the tutelage ofthe self, which Jung called individuation, can be viewed synchronicallyand in this way appears as a single form, a mandala symbolizing life asa whole. We again reflect on Henderson’s complementarity betweenthe ladder and circumambulation. Jung divided the human life spaninto early and late phases, which he viewed through the Goetheanrubrics of diastole and systole (expansion and contraction), technicallycalled extraversion and introversion in analytical psychology. In thisimage the two sorts of relation to the self are combined. India doessomething quite similar. Beginning with childhood, life is analyzedinto four stages (asramas) of which the first two (school years, parenting


and work) correspond to Jung’s extraversion while the latter pair (retreatto the forest and renunciation of ego concerns) together constituteintroversion. The linear course of life becomes a cycle. Jung’s conceptsof extraversion and introversion are closely paralleled in Sanskrit (amongother terms, by pravptti, outer expression, and nivptti, turning inward).Whether the Indian ideal structure of life influenced Jung’s is notknown, but it would seem likely that it was at least one factor. Despitethe clear parallelism, however, the aims of life appear quite differentin Indian thought and in Jung. To capture the difference, we suggestthat the Indian view can be characterized as a “way of essence” andthe Jungian as a “way of totality.” By way of essence we intend toconvey that the true flavor or quality of a transcendent reality was all-important, even if it flashed into a life only at moments. For Yoga, thegoal of life, in all its psychic and corporeal movements, is the pureconsciousness of the self (purusartha). By way of totality, we mean tosuggest that individuation embodies a vision of life emphasizingbalance and harmony, a middle way between competing interests, aspiritual or psychic homeostasis. Essence can be epitomized in theexperience of enlightenment or release (moksa, nirvana, nirvikalpasamadhi) or of ecstatic unity with god; it is a vertical cut against thehorizontal flow of life, in contrast to gathering life together in themandalic wholeness of individuation.127

This sort of opposition is close to what Jung himself saw as thedifference between his ideas and those of India, and in Sanskrit itparallels the fundamental distinction between saMsara and nirvana.128

Jung never recommended the pursuit of nirvana to his Western studentsand patients, though he did allow that it might be legitimate for Indians,given their primitive natures (in both positive and negative ways). Onthe other hand, Jung danced back and forth across the ego’s horizon,playing on the razor’s edge that separates the ego from itsambiguously unconscious source in the self. If the yogi meditatinghim in his 1944 dream had awakened, with the predicted consequencethat “I would not be,” Jung would presumably have experiencednirvana. Fear held him back, and the dream turned into a nightmarefrom which he woke.129 Nevertheless, Jung clearly did have intimationsof enlightenment, and this dream is one of them. In fact, each of Jung’smajor transition points in life expresses the quality of a breakthroughinto essence: confrontation with the shadow (the sudden recognition


of darkness or evil within oneself ), the encounter with the anima oranimus (seeing one’s black-and-white life suddenly rendered inTechnicolor with the awakening of soul), and especially engaging withthe self (the moments of transition between the four quaternios in Aion,when spiritual wholeness is revealed to be bodily, then reptilian, andfinally chemical/geological/energetic).

For Jung, the self is an unconscious center, aim, and source ofwholeness but requires interaction with the conscious ego in orderto come to light and develop its potential (for instance, Jahwehneeds Job).130 In India, the self is an original consciousness that isthen borrowed by the ego, mostly in an act of illegitimatepresumption, distortion, or theft.131 Put so sharply, the distinctionis between an unconscious self and conscious ego (Jung) versus aself that is consciousness and an ego that pretends to a consciousnessit does not actually possess (India). No wonder Jung thought theIndian position poison.

But Jung could not leave India alone, and many of his fundamentalideas are nourished on its nectar. Even in his most Christian work, Aion,Jung begins the crucial last chapter by invoking atman and brahmanto explain “the archetype that underlies ego consciousness.”132 A fewpages previously he had associated the unconsciousness of the Godarchetype (the self ) with its numinosity, again citing “the atman/purusaphilosophy of the East” along with Meister Eckhart.133 The numinousby nature implies the power to evoke and kindle consciousness.(Rudolph Otto used the term to refer to the “tremendous” and“fascinating” nature of the divine.)134 Jung says:

The idea of God’s £gnos…a. . . is of the utmost importance,because it identifies the Deity with the numinosity of theunconscious. The atman/purusa philosophy of the East and, aswe have seen, Meister Eckhart in the West [whom Jung had justdiscussed at length] both bear witness to this.135

Jung’s unconscious is close to the undifferentiated level of psycho-material reality (prakpti) called pradhana in yoga, corresponding to thegoddess aspect in other forms of Hinduism, particularly tantrism.In Jung’s later thought, the term psychoid captures this psycho-material level. By locating God in the psychoid region where matterand mind merge, and making God unconscious, Jung effectively makes


god into the goddess. If he had followed his 1932 explorations of thetantric side of Indian thought, he would have found much morecorrespondence with his efforts to put together the most spiritualand most material sides of reality, which is epitomized in the tantricimage (found ubiquitously, both in Hinduism and Buddhism) ofthe god and goddess (consciousness and the psychoid) in sexualembrace, essentially expressing the same idea as the alchemicalconjunction of King and Queen. Instead, Jung’s India was mostlylimited to the one-sidedly spiritual neo-Vedanta that he identifiedmistakenly with the holy man of India.

CONCLUSION

Schematically, we have found the following Indian themes tohave influenced, or at least to have resonated with, Jung’s mostfundamental ideas. Jung returned regularly to these parallels in hiswork until the end.

Jung’s life, which he understood to be “a story of the self realizationof the unconscious,” centered on his dreams, visions, and fantasies,which parallel the serious play of consciousness recounted in the Indian

Indiarakti, prana, etc.atman, purusaahaMkara, jivabuddhi, purusarthamandala

quarters of life falling into two parts,expressing pravptti and nivpttiyoga, sadhanayoga

lila, god as dancer and musician,Krishnaguruin Hinduism: purusartha, dharma,sadhana, yoga; in Buddhism: nirvana,noble eightfold path

Jungpsychic energy (libido)

self (Self )ego (in opposition to self/Self )

transcendent functionwholeness, mandala

halves of life expressing extraversion-introversion

psychospiritual developmentactive imagination

the artful playfulness of the psycheand self

analyst, psychopompindividuation


tales, philosophies, art, and rituals retold by his friend HeinrichZimmer.136 Of his most significant imaginative experiences, manyconnect directly or indirectly with Indian themes. From the Siva-likephallic god and picture books of early childhood, to the magnolia treeof “unearthly beauty” in the Liverpool mandala in 1928, to the Buddhisttemple during his heart attack, and the meditating yogi dreaming himin 1944, India was in Jung’s soul and unconscious psyche as much ason his waking mind. Like Siva in the old story of the churning of theocean of milk, Jung drank the “poison” of India to attain the nectar. Ifhe failed ultimately to express the full savor of the rasa (flavor) his psycheextracted from the maelstrom, Jung did live it to a degree matched byfew Westerners.

CODA: AN ARCHETYPAL PERSPECTIVE ON JUNG’SAND INDIA’S VIEWS ON EGO AND SELF

To conclude this paper, it may be helpful to point out that Jung’sambivalence toward the project of transcending the ego is actuallyreflected in Indian thought on the subject. Some of the same fear anddistaste toward the yogic project of “quelling the fluctuations of themind” (citta-vptti-nirodha, Yoga Sutra 1) is found in Indian storiesabout yogis. David White’s recent book on “sinister yogis” documentsthe ambivalence with which India has always viewed yogictranscendence of ordinary human life.137 Even within spiritualcommunities the dark side of going beyond the ego is recognized andcommented upon (though frequently with the intention of showingthat enlightenment ultimately transcends the darkness of ego loss). Aparticularly striking example of this is remembered by one of us (ElaineMolchanov) from her practice of Siddha Yoga. One day, while livingin Baba Muktananda’s ashram, Elaine went into Bombay for a visit. Intown she picked up an issue of Newsweek containing a photo of anotorious killer. (Time, Newsweek, and similar literature were frownedupon by fellow disciples, who approved only “spiritual” readingmaterial.) Returning on the bus, quite near the ashram, Elaine glancedat her magazine and suddenly had the thought, “the guru is amurderer!” She was shocked and puzzled that she could think such athing of her beloved teacher. Getting off the bus at the ashram (themagazine carefully out of sight in her bag), Elaine passed through the


courtyard where she found Baba Muktananda receiving disciples. Theprotocol was that if one were free, and the guru was present in thecourtyard, disciples were invited to sit with him. Elaine therefore satdown among a number of other disciples, still thinking about herwayward idea on the bus, and at that moment

Baba looked at me, then almost immediately turned and wentinto his little house. When he returned after a few moments itseemed he was holding something behind his back. He lookedme in the eye and asked, “Do you know what the guru is like?”I was startled and more than a little uneasy, remembering mythought from a few minutes before. Then Baba whipped outthe object he was holding, revealing the same issue of Newsweekthat I had been reading on the bus. “The guru is like this,” heannounced, almost shouting and waving the photo in the air.“The guru is a murderer.” I froze. Then Baba smiled and, lookingat me again, said sweetly, “Ah. The guru kills your limitedunderstanding, your negativity, your ego.”

Muktananda’s point was that from the viewpoint of the ego, theself can be felt to be a tyrannical and destructive force. Jung certainlyrecognized this, for instance, standing with Job who experienced thewind of the Jewish Sky God as a death-dealing blight. He went evenfurther in Mysterium Coniunctionis, writing that “the experience of theself is always a defeat for the ego.”138

Jung was not enough of a student of India to know it, but workingwith the ego-destructive side of the self, finding ways to reconcile theego to its self and gods, has been at the heart of Hinduism andBuddhism for their whole existence. Far from lying satisfied in a blankworld of ego absence (as if immersed in the swishing of palm leaves, orthe susurrus of cicadas, to recall Jung’s metaphors), Indian thoughtseeks ways to bring back ordinary life in extraordinary raiment. Manyof these are reflected in the image of the great goddess Devi, just asmany of Jung’s images of the individuated person are mediated by thefeminine. One has only to think of the paths (margas) of devotion(bhakti) and spiritual energy (tantra) to recognize that most ofHinduism over the past thousand years has not aimed at the obliterationor final leaving behind of the ego. Like Jung, India seeks wholeness,though often a wholeness arising after the ego’s “murder.” Jung’sstruggle with India in a way continued India’s struggle with the self


(atman) in relation to the ego (ahaMkara), and his whole psychologycan be even seen from this perspective as part of the internal dynamicsof Hinduism, indeed following the same impetus that created Tantraa thousand years ago. If, as Murray Stein has argued, Jung treatedChristianity, he did so with the consultation of an Indian physicianwho also stands to benefit from the therapy.

NOTES

1. Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003),p. 497. Both experiences involved altered states of consciousness, inone case a dream and the other a vision while in a semi-coma. The 1938dream, during Jung’s trip to India, of the Holy Grail (seen from aperspective above India) and the 1944 vision of a yogi meditating in ameteorite above India will both be discussed below.

2. Murray Stein, “Some Reflections on the Influence of ChineseThought on Jung and His Psychological Theory,” Journal of AnalyticalPsychology 50 (2005): 209–222.

3. Previous attempts to address the relationship between Jung’sideas and Indian thought have been made by a number of others,especially Harold Coward, Jung and Eastern Thought (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1985); Luis O. Gomez, “Jung and theIndian East,” in Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha: TheStudy of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1995), pp. 197–250; Christine Maillard, L’Inde vue d’Europe:Histoire d’une rencontre, 1750–1950 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008); andSonu Shamdasani, introduction to C. G. Jung, The Psychology ofKundalini Yoga: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1932 by C. G. Jung, S.Shamdasani, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).Borelli’s excellent bibliography in Coward, Jung and Eastern Thought,is fairly complete up to the date of its publication, though it does notcover Jung’s references to India thoroughly.

4. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: PantheonBooks, 1961), p. 17.

5. Ibid.6. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 12.7. Diana Eck applies the term aniconic (not iconic) to the Siva

lingam, thus understanding it as a “sign” (the literal meaning of


linga)—suggesting an arbitrary relationship between image andreferent—rather than an “icon,” which resembles the thing that itdenotes (following C. S. Peirce). The linga is often represented as asimple rounded stone or pillar without obvious resemblance to a phallus.Hence it might have been pictured in the Orbis Pictus books of Jung’schildhood without recognition by the authors of any sexualimplications. Diana Eck, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India,3rd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

8. C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus (New York: W. W. Norton,2009), pp. 45, 54, 59, 64, and 154.

9. C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1923), vol. 6, The Collected Worksof C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), § 193.

10. The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875, the year ofJung’s birth.

11. See Maillard, L’Inde vue d’Europe.12. The uncapitalized term yoga will be used when a general

reference is intended to the practices of psychophysiological andspiritual training; Yoga refers to a specific philosophical/meditationalschool (e.g., the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali). In addition to Zimmer andHauer, Jung also interacted with S. N. Dasgupta, who lectured onPatanjali’s Yoga Sutras at the Psychological Club in May 1939. Thiswas followed by Jung’s own lectures on Patanjali and other texts atEidgenossiche Technische Hochschule (Shamdasani in Jung, ThePsychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. xxii-xxiii, note 17).

13. C. G. Jung, “Notes on Lectures given at the EidgenossicheTechnische Hochschule, Zurich, by Prof. Dr. C. G. Jung,” October1938–June 1939 (unpublished ms.). Jung met S. N. Dasgupta, wholectured on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in Zürich in 1939, during his visitto Calcutta in 1937–1938.

14. C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of Eastern Meditation” (1948),in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11, ed. and trans. GerhardAdler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1969), §§ 912, 933.

15. C. G. Jung, Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, ed. Sonu Shamdasani(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 12, 20; andJung’s letter to James Kirsch, March, 12, 1932, in Ann C. Lammers,ed., The Jung-Kirsch Letters (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 25. Theview that India was “poisonous” to Europeans was sometimes taken


literally by Jung and his followers. James Kirsch had written to Jungabout a patient, a son of the artist Kathe Kollwitz, who had apparentlyalso been treated by Kirsch’s analyst Toni Sussmann. Sussmann hadstrong ties to Indian thought and practices. Kollwitz contractedsepticemia, Kirsch speculates, due to practicing yoga at Sussmann’sbehest; Jung, in reply to an earlier letter from Kirsch (not extant), alludesto a similar case involving her. Lammers indicates that Jung distancedhimself from Sussmann, one of his earliest students and a trainer ofanalysts, due to her involvement with “Indian theosophy” (p. 6). In1933 Jung wrote Kirsch: “For us the Indian way never leads to theunconscious but to an Indian substitute system” (p. 33). Later, Jungeven attributed an auto accident in which Sussmann was injured toher Indian proclivities: “India cannot have been completely without arole in this incident” (p. 39). It is ironic that Sussmann, whose Indianloyalties caused Jung to be suspicious of her, was important inintroducing Bede Griffiths both to Jungian and Indian thought.Griffiths was one of the most important modern synthesizers ofChristianity and Hinduism, and his writings show him clearly to havebeen influenced by Jung. Griffiths visited the Jungian community ofApple Farm and was eulogized by its founder, Helen Luke, just beforehis death; see Bede Griffiths, The Other Half of My Life: Bede Griffithsand the Hindu-Christian Dialogue, compiled by Beatrice Butreau(Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1996), pp. 36–42. Luke reports thatGriffiths frequently carried Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections withhim on his travels and that Sussmann at one point “tried to steer himinto Jungian work” (p. 39). Luke reports that she herself came toJungian and Indian thought through Sussmann.

16. See C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), vol. 12, TheCollected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F.C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953); and C. G.Jung, Aion (1951), vol. 9ii, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. andtrans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1959).

17. Jung, CW 11, § 939.18. Ibid., § 933, and Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. 14.19. C. G. Jung, “Yoga and the West” (1936), in The Collected Works

of C. G. Jung, vol. 11, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), § 875. Jung used


the word cramp frequently in reference to Western consciousnessand contrasts this with what he thought was the Eastern attitude.For instance, “when you watch a Yogin doing his religiousgymnastics in the ‘mandapam,’ there is no apparent cramp or strain,he simply stretches himself out like a cat.” (Jung, “Notes onLectures,” 1938–1939, p. 165).

20. An excruciating example of Jung’s view of “primitives” asdeficient in ego consciousness occurs in his discussion of anapocryphal story of an African “bushman.” The man comes homeenraged by a failed fishing expedition and impulsively strangles hisson as a result of his anger. Jung tells us that the man has “monkeylove” for his boy and cannot distinguish the actual child from hisfeelings toward him. As we have seen before (and as is typical in acolonialist world) Jung does not think non-Europeans have much orany ego (CW 6, § 403).

21. Jung actually rejects the term monotony, but refers to a“simplicity” that “pervades the spiritual l i fe of India l ike apleasant fragrance or melody. It is everywhere the same” (“TheHoly Men of India” [1944], in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung,vol. 11, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969], § 952). Inhis autobiography he refers to a “certain stasis” that results fromthe efforts of yoga to go “beyond the opposites” (nirdvandva) andreach “imagelessness and emptiness”(Memories, Dreams, Reflections,p. 276). Later, James Hillman, in a dialogue with Deepak Chopra,called Indian ideas on pure consciousness “bloody boring” (DickRussell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman [New York: HeliosPress, 2013], p. 359). Hillman said he had “Jung to thank” forhis not ‘going East’” (ibid., p. 346).

22. Jung, CW 11, §§ 952–955.23. Ibid., § 955.24. Ibid., § 959.25. Ibid § 953.26. Ibid.27. Ibid., § 952.28. Jung prided himself on a dream where his father had bowed

all the way to the floor but Jung the son stopped with “perhaps amillimeter to spare” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 219). His refusal


to be a “fish” is significant because he refers to fish as “mute andunconscious” (ibid.).

29. C. G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, 1906–1950, ed. Gerhard Adler withAniela Jaffé, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1992), p. 247.

30. The propensity for Westerners to get “ out of ourselves” in thepresence of Indian ideas was expressed by Barbara Hannah during theKundalini seminars with Hauer and Jung in 1932 (Hannah is quotedin Shamdasani’s introduction to Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga,p. xxxiii). Heinz Kohut has noted that the symbolism of flying off intospace is characteristic of narcissistic pathology. He identifies an orbitingspace station or satellite, when such images appear in dreams, aspointing to a dangerous distance between the dreamer’s self and his orher selfobjects (the parent and other figures who mirror the self or allowit to merge with them). Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York:International Universities Press, 1975), p. 5.

31. James Hillman, who was in Zürich at the same time, describedVasavada as “a good Vedanta man” and liked him (Russell, The Lifeand Ideas of James Hillman, p. 432). He reports, however, that the samesuspicion of Indian mysticism that had fallen on Toni Sussmann earliernow was applied to Vasavada. There was controversy over graduatinghim from the Jung Institute, and his analyst, Meyer, had to intervene(ibid., p. 432).

32. Jung quoted in Frederick Spiegelman and Arwind Vasavada,Hinduism and Jungian Psychology (Las Vegas: New Falcon Publications,1987), p. 193.

33. Contemporary gurus in America (including those from India)seem to have no problems with fixed, and stiff, fees for spiritual service.

34. Bair, Jung: A Biography, pp. 497–498.35. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 289–291.36. Even before the Grail dream of 1938 Jung had been reading

tantric texts translated by Sir John Woodroffe, who wrote under thepen name of Arthur Avalon. Jung, in his 1938 lectures, noted that “boththese names are taken from the Grail Legend” (Jung, “Notes onLectures,” 1938–1939, p. 43).

37. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 323.38. Ibid., p. 324.39. Ibid., p. 325.


40. Ibid.41. C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (1952), vol. 5, The

Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), § 349,note 85.

42. Bair, Jung: A Biography, p. 284.43. See Sonu Shamdasani, “Reading Jung Backwards? The

Correspondence of Michael Fordham and Richard Hull Concerning‘The Type Problem in Poetry’ in Jung’s Psychological Types,” Spring:Journal of Archetype and Culture 55 (1994): 100–127), for a discussionbetween Richard Hull and Michael Fordham, two of the threetranslators of Psychological Types, of this section of the text.

44. Sonu Shamdasani, in C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus,ed. Sonu Shamdasani (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), p. 239,note 93.

45. Jung’s ambivalence about symbolic versus literal reality can beseen in the opposite treatment of Elijah and Salome, who correct Jungby telling him that they are not just symbols but rather are real.Izdubar, on the contrary, must become symbolic in order to survive.

46. Jung, The Red Book, p. 287.47. Jay Sherry, “A Pictorial Guide to The Red Book,” ARAS

Connections, 2010. Accessed August 12, 2013, at http://aras.org/docs/00033sherry.pdf.

48. The following pages of the Red Book contain painted eggimages: 45, 50, 51, 53 (by text), 55, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 91, 92, 93,115, 125, 154 (Philemon holds a glowing egg in his hands). Otherimages also contain egg-like shapes.

49. Jung labels page 45 “atharva veda 4.1.4,” which would seemto refer to the fourth verse of the first hymn in book 4 from theAtharvaveda. Shamdasani; however, he quotes a translation of a versefrom another hymn, Atharvaveda 4.4 verse 1 (i.e., 4.4.1), which is amagic formula for virility. While this might seem to fit the Izdubarcontext, it is not compatible with the painting, which is part of the“egg” series of images showing how Izdubar is reborn. Hymn 4.1 isactually a poem to the god Skambha, the anthropomorphized “Pillar”that props apart heaven and earth. This very common theme in Vedicliterature is associated by Jung with the mythologem of the GoldenEgg (Hiranyagarbha, the title of page 59). On page 45 an egg is in the


center of the painting, at the mid-point of the vertical pillar that restson the head of a human figure (Skambha as god?) standing below acircle that may represent the heaven, midspace, and earth (dyaus,prthivi, rajas in the hymn). Shamdasani was likely misled by the factthat Jung owned the Sacred Books of the East volume of Bloomfield’stranslations from the Atharvaveda (vol. 32), which includes hymn 4.4but not 4.1. One place Jung might have read 4.1 is in the 1895–1896English translation by Griffith: “For he, true to the law of Earth andHeaven, established both the mighty worlds securely. Mighty whenborn, he propped apart the mighty, the sky, our earthly home, andair’s mid-region” (Ralph Griffith, Hymns of the Atharva Veda. AccessedJune 24, 2013, at http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/av/av04001.htm.

Translations of Atharva Veda 4.1 in German by Deussen andothers were also available (personal communication, Indology listserve, April 2012).

50. Jung, CW 6, § 183.51. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote: “Only when I

began to paint the mandalas did I see that all the paths I took, all thesteps I made, led back to the one point, that is, to the center” (p. 221).This suggests that the mandalas expressed the idea of the self as thecenter and goal of the personality.

52. C. G. Jung, “The Structure of the Unconscious” (1916), inThe Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 7, ed. and trans. GerhardAdler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1966), § 512.

53. Jung, CW 6, § 183, note 85.54. Ibid., § 404.55. Ibid., §§ 177, 182.56. Ibid., § 183.57. Ibid.58. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 185.59. Ibid., p. 188.60. Ibid., p. 185.61. Jung, CW 6, § 188.62. Murray Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul (Chicago: Open Court

Press, 1998).63. The Sanskrit word tapas is cognate with English temperature

and tepid.


64. Jung, CW 6, § 194.65. Ibid., § 195. In 1928 Jung had his famous Liverpool dream of

the self appearing in the form of a reddish, flowering magnolia tree ofunearthly beauty.

66. Ibid., § 202.67. Ibid., § 326.68. Ibid.69. Murray Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy

of a Religious Tradition (Wilmette, IL: Chiron, 1985).70. Jung, CW 6, §§ 327–374.71. Ibid., § 356.72. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 325.73. Jung, CW 6, § 357.74. Ibid.75. Ibid., § 326.76. Ibid., § 355.77. Jung refers to Paul Deussen, Herman Oldenberg, Abel

Bergaigne, William DwightWhitney, Charles Rockwell Lanman,Albrecht Weber, Arthur B. Keith, Ralph Griffith, Richard Garbe, R.E. Hume, N. Dutt, S. Radhakrishnan, S. N. Dasgupta, and others.He quotes from the Rg and Atharva Vedas, several Brahmanas, and anumber of Upanishads, law books (Dharmasastras), the Yoga Sk´tra,Buddhist tantric texts, and the Bhagavad Gita. He consulted with EmilAbegg of the University of Zürich in this study.

78. Solid mandalas appear in the last chapter of Aion, where Jungalso refers to the functions as being arranged mandalically. In Tibet,most mandalas are implicitly three dimensional. Jung’s first mandalapaintings were done in 1916–1917.

79. Jung had already lectured on tantric yoga, based on books bySir John Woodruffe (Arthur Avalon) as early as 1930 (Shamdasani inJung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, pp. xxxiv and 71–78).

80. Shakti, like other Indian concepts, Jung thought to be“metaphysical” as distinguished from his own “psychological” libido,etc.

81. The interpenetration of symbolic association and power to affect“outer” events has frequently been noted in Indian culture.

82. Harold Coward, Jung and Eastern Thought (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press), 1985.


83. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. 13.84. The sea monster in the Red Book, pages 55 and 64, and the

figure of Atmavictu painted several times suggest this danger.85. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. xxix.86. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. 57.87. Ibid., p. 56.88. Ibid., p. 57. In his foreword to D. T. Suzuki’s Introduction to

Zen Buddhism, Jung later made the same point, concluding that in Zenenlightenment, “an empty consciousness stands open to anotherinfluence. This ‘other’ influence is no longer felt as one’s own activity,but as that of a non-ego which has the conscious mind as its object.It is as if the subject character of the ego has been overrun, or takenover, by another subject which appears in place of the ego” (C. G.Jung, “Foreword to Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism” (1939),in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11, ed. and trans. GerhardAdler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1969), § 890).

89. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. 57.90. Barbara Hannah, Jung, His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir

(New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 206.91. Jung, The Red Book, p. 286.92. Jung, The Red Book, p. 287.93. Sabina Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into

Being,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 39 (2, 1994): 155–186.94. Jung, The Red Book, p. 287.95. The color of his academic robes is possibly significant because

Fowler McCormick noted that Jung was preoccupied with the colorred (and blood) during his Calcutta illness a few weeks later (Bair, Jung:A Biography, p. 428).

96. “Vishvanatha-Tempel und die engen Gassen erfullen die SeeleJungs mit Grausen und zwingen ihn umzukehren.” Alice Boner inG. Boner, L. Soni, and J. Soni, eds., Alice Boner Diaries: India 1934–1967 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1993), p. 60. It isinteresting that the same word, horror, appears in Joseph Conrad’sHeart of Darkness as the last word of Kurtz, the European “gonenative.” Luis Gomez argues that the culturally “other” is a profoundthreat to the sense of self: “The other is always other, . . . not natural,not quite human. In the end, the other becomes the bizarre. In Jung,


a chasm separates . . . the world of the self and the world of the other.”Luis O. Gomez, “Jung and the Indian East,” in Curators of the Buddha:The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 211.

97. Boner, Soni, and Soni, Alice Boner Diaries, p. 253.98. Ibid., p. 60.99. See David Shulman, The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide

and Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Jung’sdream of the Emperor Akbar is found in Jung, Memories, Dreams,Reflections, p. 218.

100. The lecture took place in May 1939; see Shamdasani in Jung,The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. xxi, note 17. Dasgupta was theteacher of Mircea Eliade during Eliade’s residence in Calcutta and thefather of Eliade’s paramour.

101. Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy is a classic multivolumework on the subject. Jung apparently queried Dasgupta about Indianalchemy, as his copybook pages from 1938 contain a reference to acommunication from the Indian scholar about two alchemistsmentioned in the work of the grammarian Patanjali. SonuShamdasani, C. G. Jung: A Biography in Books (New York: W. W.Norton, 2012), p. 179.

102. Jung, “Notes on Lectures,” 1938–1939, lecture 6, December9, p. 42.

103. Evident here is the close relationship between yogic creation(emanation) of psychological realities and the widespread Indianphenomenon of possession (a-des, pra-des) of one person (or being) byanother, discussed at length by Frederick Smith, The Self Possessed: Deityand Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization (New York:Columbia University Press, 2006). The Hindu self is fluid andtransactional, lying between persons as much as within them. See alsoAlfred Collins and Prakash Desai, “Selfhood in the Indian Context: APsychoanalytic Perspective,” in Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader inPsychoanalysis and Hinduism, ed. T. G. Vaidyanathan and J. Kripal (NewDelhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 367–398.

104. Swami Muktananda, Play of Consciousness (South Fallsburg,NY: Siddha Yoga Publications), 2000. See Collins and Desai, “Selfhoodin the Indian Context,” for some of the vedic texts and discussion ofthis process in terms of self psychology; and Alfred Collins, Fatherson:


A Self Psychology of the Archetypal Masculine (Wilmette, IL: ChironPublications), 1994.

105. Jung, “Notes on Lectures,” 1938–1939, p. 73.106. Jung, “Notes on Lectures,” 1938–1939, p. 77.107. Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s

Conquest of Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945).108. Coward, Jung and Eastern Thought, p. 67.109. Of course it is exactly this continuity that much Indian

thought—particularly Buddhist—denies.110. Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, p. 264.111. Jung, “Notes on Lectures,” 1938–1939, p. 147.112. Ibid.113. Jung, Letters, Vol. I, pp. 236–237. Jung writes to Kendig B.

Cully that “in India since ancient times everybody . . . has a guru, aspiritual leader who teaches you, and you alone, what you ought toknow.” The letter is apparently addressed to a psychology studentaiming to be “a man entrusted with the care of souls.”

114. Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 87.

115. Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, p. 103.116. This imbalance was partly overcome in Jung’s eyes by

the “assumption of the Virgin” into the God image by Pope PiusXII in 1950.

117. Mistakenly written “nirdvanda” in C. G. Jung,“Transformation Symbolism in the Mass” (1954), in The Collected Worksof C. G. Jung, vol. 11, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), § 435.

118. Ibid., § 427.119. The same or similar ideas were also expressed by D. W.

Winnicott and J. Lacan. Later, they were developed in detail byHeinz Kohut.

120. Jung, CW 9ii, § 418.121. Ibid., § 410. The diagram remarkably reproduces the details

of Jung’s 1927 Liverpool dream where the central square of the citymandala was surrounded by “individual quarters,” “themselves arrangedradially around a central point. This point formed a small open square. . . and constituted a small replica of the island [in the center of thesquare, where a red-flowered magnolia grew].” (Jung, Memories, Dreams,


Reflections, p. 198). In Aion the square of individuation contains foursubsidiary squares within which the overall movement of individuationis reproduced in miniature.

122. For instance, the order of the four elements is somewhat atvariance. In the Kundalini sequence the progression is from earth towater to fire to air. In Aion, earth leads to water but then to air andfinally fire.

123. Jung, CW 9ii, § 271.124. Ibid., § 348.125. Ibid., § 352.126. Alfred Collins, “The Three Selves of Indian Psychology and

Psychoanalysis,” in Psychology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Girishwar Misra(Delhi: Center for Study of Civilizations, 2013).

127. Coward, in Jung and Eastern Thought, p. 165, distinguishesbetween a “rupture of planes” in yoga and Zen Buddhism and“integration” of levels in Jungian individuation.

128. In the 1938 lectures on Yoga and active imagination, Jungstates what he takes to be the Indian position that “one emerges fromthe personal atman into the universal atman through Yoga, the Yoginbecomes aware of himself as the universal essence.” But at the sametime he directs his audience of Westerners that “on no account shouldyou meditate on such a text” (Jung, “Notes on Lectures,” 1938–1939,lecture 6, December 9, p. 42, emphasis in original).

129. Jung refers to “the fear which the conscious mind has of theunconscious” in Aion (Jung, CW 9ii, § 355). We are reminded of Jung’sretreat in horror (grausen) from the Vishvanatha Temple in 1937, asrecorded by Alice Boner (Boner, Soni, and Soni, Alice Boner Diaries).

130. “The unconscious God-image can therefore alter the state ofconsciousness, just as the latter can modify the God-image once it hasbecome conscious” (Jung, CW 9ii, § 303).

131. Most Indian demons are usurpers who attempt to assertillegitimate authority or power.

132. Jung, CW 9ii, § 347.133. Ibid., § 303.134. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1958).135. Ibid.136. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 3.


137. David White, Sinister Yogis (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2011).

138. C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–1956), vol. 14,The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), § 778(italics in original).

CHURNING THE MILKY OCEAN: POISON AND NECTAR IN CARL JUNG'S INDIA

Documents

Transcript of CHURNING THE MILKY OCEAN: POISON AND NECTAR IN CARL JUNG'S INDIA