PARALLEL JOURNEYS:

ON THE WAY TO JUNG AND INDIA

Notes from a book in progress

Elaine Molchanov

In a letter to Miguel Serrano, Jung wrote:

The Unconscious is . . . the mother of all psychical life. .

. . Its experience—in whatever form it may be—is an

approach to wholeness, the one experience absent in our

modern civilization.1

I began to study and practice Jungian psychoanalysis and

Siddha Yoga, two approaches to wholeness, at about the same time

almost 40 years ago, and the two have struggled toward—and

against—one another in my psyche ever since. Like the two snakes

of the caduceus twisting around a central staff but never quite

meeting, it has been my work to bring Jung and yoga closer

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together in myself. Writing this, I realize that the metaphor

comes from a dream.

I go to an American Indian shaman for an initiation. He is

dressed in a business suit. My task is to sit in lotus

posture meditating while he places a coiled snake on each of

my shoulders; both are highly poisonous. One snake is black

with yellow bands, the other black with red bands. I sit in

terror all night, meditating very intensely (because it’s

the only way to overcome my fear). I know that if I move the

snakes will bite, so I am absolutely still in body and mind.

Overnight, the snakes’ poison is absorbed into my body, and

transforms into a strengthening force; instead of killing me

it gives me power. In the morning the shaman returns and I

see a pile of white clay in front of me and exclaim, “Oh,

the prima materia!” “No,” he replies, “you are the prima

materia.”

No longer prima, perhaps, thirty years later, but the healing

poisons of my two paths have worked on me long enough to make the

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changes at least somewhat clear. Discussing how that happened is

the theme of these notes.

“Don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen,” the Lutheran

minister said the day before my first Communion. It’s just a

wafer and wine.” I was appalled at this disclosure, but he was

right. Nothing happened. The emptiness of my church mirrored

the emptiness I felt in myself, my family, and the times we lived

in. It was this experience, though, that planted in my child’s

mind the seed of the transformation I would seek. My soul knew

that another life was possible, but not in the deadness of

church. My mother recited poetry to me and something about the

fact that I was born on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday activated her

long-stifled animus. Her recitation of Walt Whitman’s poem on

Lincoln, “O Captain, My Captain” haunted me. She would intone,

“…for on the deck my Captain lies, fallen cold and dead” and the

cry of her own soul touched mine. This was a sign.

In spite of pervasive bleakness there were other moments of

numinous feeling. People in my church reported that when I

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played the part of Mary in the Christmas pageant, cradling the

baby Jesus in my arms, I seemed to glow. When I was 10 yrs old,

I was on fire with tales of the Round Table and the Grail legend.

My favorite teacher in high school, whom I credited with teaching

me how to think, gave me Erik Erikson’s book on the life of

Mahatma Gandhi and a spark of interest in the East was kindled.

But disappointments continued. In college, I was in a

philosophy course on Kant where we were to read parts of the

Critique of Pure Reason. The professor had on the first day pointed

out to us how he went to great lengths to select an edited

version for us. He gave daily reading assignments and questions

on them when we came into class the next morning, testing whether

we had read the text. One day we were assigned a chapter on “The

Clue to the Understanding of Knowledge” so I figured his question

would be on that subject. I read and re-read that chapter but

could not find anything like a “clue.” Sure enough, the question

on the blackboard the next day was just what I had expected,

“What does Kant say is the clue to the understanding of

knowledge?” The other students looked as perplexed as I was.

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When we came back the next day, the professor was angry and

called us lazy as no one got the right answer. I raised my hand

and asked where the answer was; I had read and re-read that

chapter and could not find it. He read from his unedited version

of the Critique, and I realized that the section had been edited

out of our book! That’s how I felt about life at this point; I

had the question but the answer was being kept from me.

Still, from early childhood I had directed myself toward the

freedom of adulthood and still held out hope. I entered college

and graduate school early, and by the time I was twenty-five I

was Chief Social Worker at the University of Texas’ student

health center, field instructor for the School of Social Work,

adjunct professor in the health education department, and

coordinator of the problem pregnancy counseling service.

My spiritual life began to heat up in the seventies as

Austin, Texas was a happening place with a plethora of human

potential events, many of which I explored. Although helpful to

some degree, none of this satisfied me. It felt like I was

always touching just parts of the elephant. There were also

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personal events that pushed me towards spiritual life. The

dissolution of my marriage at 25 was a death blow that forced me

to go deeper. It wasn’t just the emotional pain from this event

but the backlog of emotions I had pushed aside from my childhood.

One event that came to seem more significant later was my

meeting around 1973 with an Indian teacher who gave a series of

talks on “Levels of Reality.”2 I remember going to his lectures

for a couple of hours a day for a week (the Health Center was

good about giving us time off for “training and professional

development”). At the end I was invited with other participants

to have dinner with the teacher and meet him for a private talk.

As I was waiting in the hallway to go into his room, I suddenly

became tearful. I didn’t understand: I wasn’t sad. When I came

into his presence, without conscious intent I suddenly blurted

out a request for his blessing to come to India. He said yes. At

that time, however, nothing came of it.

Then, in 1974, I had the following dream:

A young man was doing esoteric meditation practices on the

beach. An old man with a halo of light approached him (at

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this point I became the young man) and said, “You don’t need

to do all that,” and demonstrated what I should do by

walking into the ocean. When he was fully immersed, I saw a

rainbow-colored circle of light which began to swirl

gradually and expanded until there was no more man, no more

water, and no more me. All was white-golden light. A Voice

said, “Remember Elaine, it’s worth whatever suffering you

have to go through.

I recognized that I was trying too hard, forcing things

(intensity has always been characteristic of me). And I was

focusing too much on external, goal-directed practices. I needed

to go within, and not run from my suffering toward imaginary

solutions. There were other confirmatory experiences. Visions

came. I didn’t understand what was going on but I felt an intense

need to know what it meant. I read William James’ Varieties of

Religious Experience and yoga texts, and began to search for a

conscious path into this deeper country my visions and dreams had

revealed. The Humanistic Psychology Association’s national

conference was held in New Orleans in 1974, at the Jung (sic!)

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Hotel, and I signed up for a Jungian-oriented workshop on dreams,

entitled “Finding God in the Unconscious”. There I picked up

June Singer’s book, Boundaries of the Soul, and began to dive into the

ocean of Jungian thought. I soon began analysis with Dr. Harry

Wilmer. My first dream was this:

As I watch from the balcony of the school auditorium where

I’m sitting with a boyfriend, I see a girl among the group

of people on stage suddenly fall down. A teacher rushes to

pick her up in his arms and lays her not too far from the

stage itself on the left side, while explaining his actions

to the audience in a loud and clear voice, “in the event you

ever have a case like this of your own some day.” He

proceeds to rub the girl’s body to get her blood

circulating. Her body, however, is so cold that this isn’t

enough and he realizes he must put his entire body over the

girl so that his heat can revive her as if she were

suffering from hypothermic shock Then, as I am walking out

after the play, an unusual, beautiful dark-skinned woman

passes me in the hallway and gives me a sign. She

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recognizes me as belonging to a mystical sisterhood even

though I am not, like her, wearing the fiery golden scarf

that is its distinguishing mark.

I realized that the girl was me, and that the dream pointed

to what needed to happen in analysis on a personal and on a

deeper level. It was a message both to Harry and me. I needed to

be brought alive emotionally and helped to overcome my “stage

fright” about my role in life. I had a role to play (actually two

roles, since I must be the therapist also). In addition to

becoming an analyst I was shown that I was part of something

bigger, the “mystical sisterhood.” I wondered what that meant.

Later, I found a 1934 letter of Jung’s. When asked by a

correspondent if he had any secret knowledge beyond what he had

written in his books he answered that whatever secret knowledge

he may have derives from his own experiences, and then goes on to

say, “But one thing I will tell you: the exploration of the

unconscious has in fact and in truth discovered the age-old,

timeless way of initiation…”3 I didn’t know it at the time, but

the dream was a rite of passage into my real nature.

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Much of my first year of analysis consisted of births and

deaths—real deaths of several friends and mentors, and dream

births. Harry was able to give me a full measure of himself, and

with his help the submerged parts of myself began to surface.

Harry included me in the Jungian lectures and seminars he was

organizing at the medical school. When I started working with him

in 1974 I had told him I wanted to train as an analyst. He now

joined the Interregional Society so that I could do this, a big

decision for him as he identified with Zurich. I also went many

times to the Houston Jung Center for workshops with Ruth Thacker

Fry, Caroline Fay, and later James Hillman. At the end of the

year I attended my first Interregional meeting in Colorado where

I was interviewed by fifteen analysts, my chair in the middle

surrounded by members of the society. For once I was quite

relaxed going in, did well, and was accepted into training along

with two others.

Parallel with my analysis, I was consciously searching for a

spiritual teacher, a guru. Like most Jungian students, I read and

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reread Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I saw that Jung had found a guru

called Philemon. I was especially struck by his 1944 visions

following his heart infarct, which he called (as I later learned)

one of the two most profound experiences of his life. In one

vision he passed through an entrance into a huge black stone

floating in space, where a “black Hindu sitting silently in lotus

posture on a stone bench. . . . expected me. . . . Inside on

the left was the gate to the temple,” which was surrounded by oil

lamps. As Jung approached the steps leading to the entrance he

experienced the loss of “the whole phantasmagoria of earthly

existence.” Clearly this was the threshold of an initiation, the

thing that I sought. In my reading of yoga, I had happened upon

the book, Autobiography of a Yogi; I think it was there I found a

reference to a “siddha guru,” someone who has completed his/her

spiritual journey and attained the state of realization of the

Self, who has the authority of a lineage behind him, gives

initiation and guidance to the initiate on the spiritual path

afterwards. I began to do my spiritual practices in earnest. I

felt like a tiger at this time, spying about with vigilant eyes,

seeking such an enlightened teacher and initiation. I also was

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looking for a teacher who could relate to the West and our times.

My own initiation began in a dream one night after a period of

doing intense spiritual practices.4 There was much more to the

dream, but this much will suffice:

A little Indian man, clad in bright orange robes, came to

give me a blessing. He carried an old, beat-up film case in

his arms and proceeded to open it when he entered my house.

Suddenly, like lightning, an Egyptian scarab burst forth

transforming itself into a shining white cobra. It then bit

him and his whole body was immediately encased in a shining

white cocoon of cobra skin. I called the fire department to

take care of the Indian man. Then the cobra just as quickly

changed back into the scarab and I knew what I had to do.

It was just a matter of time before the scarab would turn

back into the cobra and I needed to get it to the right

place before this happened.5 I put the case into the

hatchback of my red Apollo Buick and rushed it to a marble

bank building. As I drove, I could see in the rear view

mirror that the lid on the film case was shaking wildly up

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and down. I heard the roar of thunder.6 Finally there, I

ran to put it at the bottom of a seven story staircase after

telling the guards to rope off the staircase so no one would

get hurt. When everything was in order the lid shot up and

the serpent rose up the whole seven stories. I woke in a

combination of terror and bliss, realizing that this was a

big dream having something to do with transformation.

The next morning, my reaction was that this was a deep

psychological experience, its initiatory quality clear. From Jung

I knew that everything can come from inside, and I took it as a

“subjective” dream not pointing outside itself. India was in my

psyche; there was no suggestion of going there literally. I had

read Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain, which could explain the

number of floors, and books on Gnosticism that offered comparable

intensity. But who was this little Indian man who came to my

house and gave me such a blessing? I realized that I didn’t

know his name and resolved to remember to ask it if I saw him

again in a dream. This was what Harry had asked me to do many

times, to be specific about figures who appeared in dreams, to

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personify them. The Indian did come in a second dream the next

night, and I did remember to ask his name. He said, “I am Baba

Muktananda; come to India.” The same thing happened a third

time. The dream no longer seemed solely interior, but seemed now

to demand action. I resolved to go to India, but had no idea

where in India or where “Baba Muktananda” might be. I had these

dreams in January, 1976. Harry was away in Zurich as he always

was in January. When he returned we began a process of trying to

understand.

The dream initiated 18 months of intense work on both the

Jungian and Indian fronts. Viraja, a Swiss woman who had taken

vows of “sannyas” (renunciation, monkhood) entered my life, and

encouraged my “spiritual destiny” (in her words). Harry,

however, focused me on the psychological meaning of my dreams,

and questioned my loyalties to Jungian psychology versus India.

His position was, “first things first; finish your Jungian

training and then think about these Indian matters.” I felt

confused and torn, but could not let go of either side. I felt as

if I were living in more than one movie at once. Al, my future

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husband (also in analysis with Harry) and I discussed my two

loyalties (which he shared in his own way) on our long drives

every Saturday to see Harry. I passed the written half of the

propaedeuticum exam one year and the oral the next, but Harry

finally put his foot down, “If you go to India I’m not going to

recommend you to the next stage of training.” I replied, “I’m

sorry, I have to go.” On July 31, 1977 I flew to India,

returning five weeks later on September 4.

Harry’s initial response was typical for Jungians at that

time. When I came back he had not changed his mind; he still

would not recommend me if I put Siddha Yoga above Jung, beyond

consciousness and individuation as he saw it. From India I had

written him a long letter reflecting on my Indian experiences,

our relationship, and my future in Jungian psychology; however,

at that point he had not received it. When it did come a few days

later Harry consulted about my case with Jo Wheelright, one of

his personal analysts. At our next session, Harry began with an

apology. He had been wrong, and would write the letter to advance

me to the next stage of training. He said that he could see the

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change in me, that I was able to be more psychologically and

physically present. It was quite plain. And my ability to reflect

objectively on myself and my two practices was also clear from my

letter to him. The physical change in me was also evident to Al,

who noted that my eyes were calm and steady now; they did not

dart around like a wary animal as they used to. Other friends

noticed it too. Many commented on my eyes, though one colleague

said he was frightened by them. He said they looked like “snake

eyes.”

This was only the first of three trips to India; in 1981 I

took a leave of absence from the training program, resigned my

job at the University, and followed Baba to India for what might

be the last time. The future was unknown, though I had two main

reasons for this major step. I was considering writing my Jungian

thesis on kundalini, and wanted to research it more, because I

clearly didn’t know enough about it; and I felt I had little time

left with Baba, as he had had a heart attack, was wearing a

pacemaker, and was diabetic. Living at the ashram I was able to

observe the kundalini process in others at the East/West clinic,

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and to do dreamwork and therapy with them. I also studied

kundalini literature directly under Baba, who recommended texts

to me, and summarized others that I could not read in the

original language. Most important, I needed to be there for my

own growth.

In 1982 I participated in a major event combining my two

paths, the 7th International Transpersonal Psychology meeting in

Bombay. Baba was the keynote speaker, and a number of prominent

Jungians attended. Stan Groff, the president of the organization,

has always honored Jung as a crucial pioneer in the field. I

attended the conference and served as a liaison for VIP visitors

to the ashram, which was located nearby. Grof is quoted as saying

The quantum relativistic image of the universe and the model

of the psyche emerging from Jungian psychology. . . appear

to be more and more compatible with different systems of

yoga, Kashmir Shaivism, Vajrayana, Zen Buddhism, Taoism,

Christian mysticism . . . .7

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In another article in this issue of Spring Al Collins and I

have discussed some of the reasons that Jung and many of his

followers have discouraged Westerners from yoga and other forms

of Asian religion and psychospiritual practice. Al and I have

also shown Jung’s equally powerful attraction to Indian ideas.

Even though this is now changing, I have found much organized

Jungian psychology to be a jealous master. Years after my first

visit to India Al and I were living in Alaska, and I was ready to

finish Jungian training (I had been in the control stage when I

left for India in 1981, prior to Baba’s death). I thought of

doing it in Zurich, as Anchorage was connected via a direct

Swissair flight. I flew with Susan Butcher, the champion dog

musher and 4-time winner of the Iditarod, who was bringing some

dogs to sell to an Italian. In Zurich I met Kate, a dear friend

who was celebrating graduation from the Institute, and

interviewed with several analysts. One, a woman anthropologist,

was devoted to a community of Tibetan Buddhist refugees in

Zollikon. She had integrated Buddhist ideas into her Jungian

worldview. When I met her something went off in my head, like

experiences I had had in Siddha Yoga. She felt it too, and

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remarked on it to me. A deeply spiritual person, she told me,

“it’s not often we have people like you here.” But the opposite

attitude was more prevalent. A male analyst with whom I talked

about my idea of writing on snake symbolism for my thesis grew

very cold when I told him my cobra dreams and their connection

with kundalini (I wasn’t thinking at the time about James Hillman

and his psychological study of Gopi Krishna). He said, “We’re

looking for people who fit in here. You are married to India, so

you don’t fit.” Others seemed to me materialistic and lacking

depth. My Zurich fantasies dissolved and I finished training with

the North Pacific group in Seattle.

I wrote, following after my first private darshan (meeting)

with Baba Muktananda:

I sat in Baba’s house and watched him speak first to an

older Indian man. Baba drew the man to him lovingly, threw

his shawl over the disciple’s shoulders, and said, “You’ve

been with me a long time. Know that you are the Self.” I

experienced waves of golden I was water when my turn came;

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it was hard even to get up. Baba drew me to him as he had

the man. He sat me on his lap, pated me on the back, and fed

me chocolates. He talked about my first dream of him and

quoted the poet-saint Tukaram, a Siddha in our tradition who

lived in the 16th century: to receive shaktipat initiation

in a dream is a very rare thing. Baba went on, “You have

received shaktipat in this way. Usually the guru takes the

disciple to God; in your case God took you to the guru.”

Then there was a moment between us as we looked into one

another’s eyes. I saw an ocean in his eyes and knew that

there was also an ocean in mine. I saw with my inner eye the

two oceans merge. Baba said, “It is complete.”

By now I had begun to understand how Siddha Yoga activates

the archetype of the Self, and how Jungian analysis helps to

deepen and to give a personal, intellectual, and cultural context

for that experience. Even the most compelling spiritual moments

come to nothing if not supported by a culture that recognizes and

remembers them, and if not integrated with the ego into a

personal life. It is not enough to have peak experiences. One

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must be established in this knowledge of the Self. Jungian

psychology is one of the few centers of culture in the West that

perform this task of holding and valuing spiritual experiences.

For me, the central reality of both Siddha Yoga and Jungian

psychology is the relationship between the two levels of the I:

the ego and the self. Besides Jung, I am drawn to Edward

Edinger’s8 understanding of how this works. In both traditions, a

repeated decentering of the ego makes way for the larger Self

that gradually transforms and supplants it. This process involves

suffering, but also brings a transformation of suffering when the

latter is understood from a higher level.

I have found it helpful to understand that the Self has two

sides, one from the viewpoint of the ego and its suffering, and

the other from the perspective of the Self whose experience

transcends pain. Here is a dream that taught me more about this.

I am at the ashram and know I am supposed to stand on the

speaker’s platform. (Baba’s successor) Gurumayi comes around

the corner a distance away and stops when she sees me. She

calls forth cobras from the earth, using a yogic practice she

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showed me before. One snake she throws at me; it lands near my

feet. I know this is a test I have been expecting and repeat

my mantra, sweating to hold my ground and not run. Gurumayi

tosses another cobra at me, then another. This time the snake

wraps around my neck and moves to the front of my face, biting

me five times on the lips. It rises above my head, erect, and

suddenly my crown cakra9 opens wide and the cobra dives into

the open passage and descends down my spine towards my feet.

Then the dream shifts and I’m at an airport on my way to

India. My eye catches a glimpse of a TV monitor. My image is

on TV, but my face is in absolute bliss. I realize that my

experience with the cobra is being played back for me on the

screen, but this time I see that when I had thought the cobra

was biting my lips five times in fact I was kissing it five

times. And what I had experienced as terror is now the

opposite, ecstasy.

This morning I saw a client who just experienced a cancer

scare. She brought a collage from an active imagination she had

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done over the weekend, visualizing her situation in a picture. A

figure was bent over as if in grief, an angel hovering by her ear

whispering to her. I suggested amplifications, that the ear has

to do with understanding, that a blowing in the ear suggests

initiation, that the angel might be giving nourishment. She was

tremendously comforted. Spiritual and psychological understanding

constantly interact in my work, as I see another process at play

even in dark circumstances, just as it has been in my own case.

Finding the symbol (Jung) in the situation I often can help the

client to recognize the transpersonal potential (Siddha Yoga) it

contains. Although Jung and India don’t always agree in theory,

they do seem to work together well in practice. Initiation (a

gift of grace from the transcendent) and the purposive striving

of the psyche (the work of individuation) go together.

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1 Miguel Serrano, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), p. 68-69.

2 At the time I had not met my husband, but later learned that this man was his guru. At the time my future husband was studying in India.The guru’s name was Sri Padmanabha Menon, and he was the eldest son of Sri Krishna Menon, Atmananda, a well-known teacher discussed by Arthur Koestler, The Lotus and the Robot (New York: HarperCollins, 1960), Joseph Campbell, Baksheesh and Brahman (New York: New World Library, 2002), pp. 275-278, and Jeffrey Masson, My Father’s Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion, (New York: Addison Wesley, 1993).

3 C.G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gerard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 140ff.

4 I had finished a 500 hour Arica course that summer.5 I had learned about the dangers of a “kundalini” awakening in a book by Gopi

Krishna where he wrote about what had gone wrong in his own kundalini experience. I didn’t want that to happen to me. His awakening came as a result of a physical shock to his body and he did not have a teacher who could help him. For him, the kundalini energy did not go up into his sushuma nadi (the central nerve channel in the subtle body) as it should and caused him great pain.

6 I learned later that thunder is one of the classical signs of a kundalini awakening (Arthur Avalon (Sir John Rodroffe), The Serpent Power: The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga (New York: Dover Publications, 1974).

7 The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn 1982), pp. 56-70 [Review of the 7th International Transpersonal Psychology meeting in Bombay].

8 Edward Edinger, Ego and Archetype (Boston: Shambala Publications), 1972.9 The energy center at the top of the head in kundalini yoga.