When I lived in
I once saw an intelligent man, whom
I considered something of a mentor, inadvertently pick up one of Jung’s
collected works from the desk in front of him in the Sri Aurobindo Library, and
immediately slam it down, as if he had picked up a vermin. Several years later I paid him a visit to
express my gratitude for his having helped me understand the teachings of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother. On his desk I noticed a book entitled Jung and Eastern Thought, and I
exclaimed that I know the man who wrote the book and that he lives in my
hometown,
In response, I mentioned Jung
having posited a unus mundus, which I
said involves unity in multiplicity. The man brusquely picked up a calculator
from his desk and retorted “there’s unity in multiplicity in this calculator,”
presumably referring to the fact that the numbers are all contained in a unity
in the calculator. In point of fact, Jung’s hypothesis of a unus mundus is a key unifying idea in
his psychology, which I develop somewhat below and later in these essays. Other
than the aborted discussion on Jung, we had an agreeable time and, when I left,
he gave me a copy of an article he had once written on Jung, whom he had
actually met, which was published in an Ashram magazine. I later read it and,
as can be expected, Jung was considerably shortchanged and devalued.
I was aware, too, of Sri
Aurobindo’s letter to Dilip Kumar Roy in 1932, where he classified Jung
together with other Western psychologists, seeing them as children,
scrutinizing spiritual experiences with “the flicker of their torch-lights”. [1]
I was also cogniscent of the fact that Jung glanced through a manuscript of Sri
Aurobindo’s Life Divine that was
handed to him by a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and that he
returned it, saying, if I remember correctly, that this was the same old Indian
metaphysics of which he was already aware, and nothing new. The only way I can
explain both reactions is that Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar, and Jung, the Great Man,
were both pre-occupied with their own unique journeys and had no time to
seriously devote to study the works of the other. They each had to find their
own way through their different cultural backgrounds and predispositions in
order to fulfill their missions appropriately. Jung actually had a dream while
he was in
My general impression is that the
above dynamics, nonetheless, have cast a dark cloud over Jung, which is at the
origin of the negative impression held towards him by several disciples of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother. I may be wrong and, if so, I am open to being
corrected. There is, in any event, no longer any need for distrust and a closed
mind, but an open attitude and willingness to seek a reconciling truth could
benefit everybody concerned. Now is the time for it and, some forty years after
my initial exposure to Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Jung and as a contribution
to the discourse I feel prepared to give an answer to those whom I believe
don’t give Jung his appropriate due. In my essays I often quote Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother, generally, in order to show the compatibility of their thinking
with Jung or make comparisons, but occasionally, also, to contrast their view
from his.
There are people who believe that
each path of yoga or knowledge is unique and different from other paths and
therefore should be compartmentalized and studied entirely separately. I am not
one of them. I believe that making comparisons and contrasts is a valuable
enterprise that helps overall understanding. This, in my estimation, is doubly
so in the case of comparing and contrasting Jung with Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother. The fundamental assumption to their basically unique paths is
identical. All life is yoga according to Sri Aurobindo, and Integral Yoga is a
“scientific” method that hastens a natural evolutionary dynamic towards
consciousness, while all life individuates according to CG Jung, and conscious
“scientific” involvement in the individuation process brings differentiation of
being that otherwise remains undifferentiated and unconscious. In addition,
Jung’s understanding of the science of psychology is in perfect harmony with
that of Sri Aurobindo, as I discuss below.
My methodology in this four part
series is, generally, to present what Jung wrote and said, along with some of
his important dreams, visions and fantasy material, which I amplify in order to
get a sense of their meaning. I also indicate similar or, in a few cases,
contrasting ideas written by Sri Aurobindo and spoken by the Mother. In Part
III I record Jung’s inner experiences along with what he wrote and said and, in
addition to amplification proper, I use the words of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother for what I consider to be relevant explicatory material to mediate the
meaning and significance of Jung’s experiences and understanding. My purpose is
not to classify Jung in any way, but to open up understanding of the meaning and
relevance of his life and psychological work.
Most arguments I have seen
denigrating Jung are, at best, based on what Aristotle called doxa, opinion
based on illusion or belief, but not scientific-type reasoning let alone a
higher order kind of reasoning that leads to knowledge of higher
principles. Often I noticed the
arguments came from individuals who, otherwise, show good sense and even, in
some cases, have excellent intuitive minds. When it comes to Jung, however, it
seems that their thinking fell under the spell of the Evil Persona driven by a
dark shadow complex.
By way of example, I take the case
of V Madhusudan Reddy, whose monumental three volume work on the Vedas I find
to be exceptionally illuminating. I appreciate the thought behind some of his
other writings as well. So I was disheartened to read what he had to say about
Jung in a book published in 1990, called Integral
Yoga Psychology well after Jung’s demise and the publication of his
autobiography. The autobiography included his experience of the mysterium coniunctionis, which was a
feeling experience of the unus mundus
(one world with underlying unity and multiplicity), and which could possibly be
described as the realization of Satchitananda on the Overmind plane as I
discuss in Part III. I bring this up here because Reddy saw the need to
criticize Jung for not having such an ideal.
He also noted, for instance, that “in
the context of Vedantic integral self-realization, Jung’s concept of the self
is too narrow, too contingent and has no ultimate validity.” [2] In fact I
would argue that it is not a question of contingency at all, nor narrow, but that the Self for Jung fully
embraces nature as well as, in the unus
mundus, the potential world outside of time. Reddy, moreover, classified
Jung as being “a typical representative of general thinking and, totally rooted
in Reason...” which is an incredibly thick–headed statement given Jung’s
recorded experiences and that, for years, he argued that reason no longer
sufficed, while his thinking is sometimes difficult to follow precisely because
it does go beyond reason. [3]
As far as Jung’s empiricism is
concerned, it is often a point of criticism by both Jung’s spiritual
antagonists and mainline cognitive behavioural therapists from completely
opposite points of view. The Cognitive Behavioral Therapists accuse Jung and
his school of psychology of not having any science at all, by which they mean
experimental Newtonian cause and effect science. Jung’s spiritual antagonists,
on the other hand, accuse Jung and Jungians of not having any inner experiences
of value and of basing their hypotheses only on external empiricism. In fact
Jung’s scientific approach to psychology is fully in harmony with Sri
Aurobindo’s appeal for a complete psychological science, which he defined as
being a “compound of science with a metaphysical knowledge”. [4] He also
defined psychology as “the science of consciousness and its states and
operations in nature... ” [5] If Jung’s psychology of individuation is anything
at all, it is a psychology of consciousness of nature without repression but,
rather, integration that is supported by metaphysical assumptions and goals. It
is a psychology based on the fact that, for him, the Self is not only the most
complete expression of being, but one’s life’s goal. Its empiricism is based on
acausal laws with secondary causality similar to those of quantum and
relativity theories, and the empirical evidence is both inner and external
synchronicities.
Sri Aurobindo added to the above
definitions, when he wrote that “a complete psychology must be a complex of the
science of mind, its operations and its relations to life and body, with
intuitive and experiential knowledge of the nature of mind and its relations to
Supermind and spirit.” [6] Sri Aurobindo defined the Supermind as “a principle
of active Will and Knowledge superior to mind and creatrix of the worlds...a
state of power and being between the self-possession of the One and the flux of
the many. It is the “Truth-Consciousness.”
[7] I take this to mean that, according to him, practical psychology needs to
be concerned with consciousness in all aspects of life from the body through
life itself to the intellect while being grounded on a principle of unity and
truth of being and becoming.
The psychology of CG Jung fulfills
all the requirements put forth by Sri Aurobindo, as well as having the merit of
widening the scientific effort not only to Jung himself and his disciples, but
to include their clients. Following some important alchemists, Jung posited the
existence of the unus mundus as “the
potential world of the first day of creation” and “the eternal ground of all
empirical being.” [8] Moreover, he went on to write that “the unus mundus is founded on the assumption
that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on underlying unity, and
that not two or more fundamentally different worlds exist side by side or are
intermingled with one another.” [9] Intrinsic to the nature of the unus mundus are the archetypes, which, on
the one hand, are grounded in the unknowable and, on the other, organize the
psyche and its transformations as images, ideas and evaluative processes as
well as the structures and transformations of matter and energy.
Jung understood experiences of synchronicity,
or meaningful coincidences, as specific instances of “general acausal
orderedness” characterized by “absolute knowledge” and as acausal “acts of
creation in time”. [10] Empirical experiences of synchronicity, as understood
by Jung, are therefore based on a principle of active Will and Knowledge, with
a creative unity superior to the mind involved in the phenomenal evolutionary
flux of life. Thus, in a practical way, Jung’s psychology fully fits the
definitional requirements determined by Sri Aurobindo. I believe his psychology
is particularly relevant for people from the West, as it takes into
consideration the difficulties and merits of the contemporary Western mind.
Contemporary Indians can also benefit from a sincere study of Jung, without losing
their cultural standpoint. In fact it can enhance it inasmuch as it is grounded
on natural symbols that emerge from within.
As far as the psychic being is concerned it is front and centre in Jung’s work from the beginning. The Mother is recorded to have said that “the secret truth of your being … what you really are and what you are meant to be,” at first contact happens something like this: “you are, as it were, in the woods, dark and still, hardly visible—a bit of a pond imbedded in the obscurity, and slowly upon it a moonbeam is cast and in the cool dim light emerges the calm liquid surface.” [11] As a young man, Jung had a similar, if not more differentiated, dream experience when he was trying to decide what field of study to pursue as follows:
I was in a wood; it was threaded
with watercourses, and in the darkest place I saw a circular pool, surrounded
by dense undergrowth half immersed in the water lay the strangest and most
wonderful creature: a round animal, shimmering in opalescent hues, and consisting
of innumerable little cells, or organs shaped like tentacles. It was a giant
radiolarian, measuring about three feet across. It seemed to me indescribably
wonderful that this magnificent creature should be lying there undisturbed, in
that hidden place, in the clear, deep water. It aroused in me an intense desire
for knowledge, so that I awoke with a beating heart. [12]
With the powerful influence of this
dream and another one, which he had about the same time, and where he was also
in a dark wood, Jung chose science and the field of psychiatry and the rest is
history. He understood who he was and what he was meant to be thanks to
becoming conscious of experiences of the psychic being.
As far as his system of psychology
is concerned the psychic being is, in point of fact, a principal factor in
Jung’s system of psychology, even if not so clearly identified as in Integral
Yoga. Indra Sen, in fact, quoted Jung
regarding the centre of personality that has a dynamic influence, equating it
with the psychic being as follows: “The centre of personality acts like a
magnet upon the disparate materials and processes of the conscious and like a
crystal grating, catches them one by one.” [13] Unfortunately he went on to say
that, “for Jung it is a hypotheses” with the implication that it is not a fact
of experience and that Jung did not develop a method to gain access to it. [14]
Only a hypothesis he observed! It is as if some sadhaks of Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother are able to resonate to what Jung wrote, but they cannot admit that
he worked primarily from inner experiences and synchronicities and that, for
him, the outer experience is secondary although, in truth, the inner and outer
are two arms of a single reality. Jung’s hypotheses are based on his own personal
experiences as well as those of his clients, and he did, in point of fact,
develop an effective psychological method involving the study of dreams and
active imagination to assist his disciples in their process of individuation.
The ego is another stumbling block
for many spiritual seekers who don’t go into Jung very deeply. As far as the
ego is concerned, in Jung’s definition, the ego refers to the point of
awareness and its field of consciousness, a definition that opens to mystery
and the unknown, going well beyond most understandings of its nature. Here Jung
captured something of the mystery behind this complex phenomenon.
All the worlds that have ever
existed before man were physically there. But they were a nameless happening, not a definite actuality, for there
did not exist that minimal concentration of that psychic factor, which was also
present, to speak the word that outweighed the whole of Creation: That is the
world and this is I! That was the first morning of the world, the first morning
after the primal darkness, when that inchoately conscious complex, the ego, the
son of the darkness, knowingly sundered subject and object, and thus
precipitated itself into definite existence giving it and itself a voice and a
name. The refulgent body of the sun is the ego and its field of consciousness-Sol et eius umbra: light without and
darkness within. [15]
Jung went on to write that it is
nature itself (through the alchemists) that produced the sun symbol, thereby
expressing “an identity of God and ego”. [16] The lines quoted above from
Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis always
remind me of the following lines from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri in Book One, The Book of Beginnings: Canto One: The Symbol Dawn, which seem to confirm
this identity: [17]
Insensibly somewhere a breach
began:
A long line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a
desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life’s
obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of
boundlessness
An eye of deity pierced through the
dumb deeps;
A scout in a reconnaissance from
the sun,
It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
...
Too fallen to recollect forgotten
bliss.
Intervening in a mindless universe,
It crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of
consciousness and joy.
Jung actually noted that, in the
West, God and the ego are separated by an abyss whereas in
There is much more I could say
about Jung in relation to the criticism of him that this brief preface does not
permit. What follows is a four-part series on Jung as a spiritual figure that
has given the world a psychological system that can potentially take one on a
far reaching psychic and spiritual journey of individual transformation that
has direct implications for the community and its transformation. Part I is
mainly about Philemon, a winged-messenger from the Transcendent and the Self as
a fourfold quaternity, which includes both shadow and light and the spiritual
and chthonic aspects of the psyche. Part
II is about Jung’s Gnostic Cosmic Creation Myth that he attributed to Philemon,
whom he eventually integrated. It is about the mystery of the creative shadow
creation and the way of individuation that involves detachment from it. The
third part is about Jung’s later visions and their significance, including
evidence that he had attained to individualized global consciousness and
completed individuation. Part IV [in two sections] brings the discussion down
to the individual and the community. It is about the shadow and Evil Persona
and shows how important it is to come to terms with these psychological
realities, not only for the sake of individuation of the individual but also
for the sake of the community and its transformation.
A fuller discussion of Jung’s
psychology would involve the important requirement of integrating the
anima/animus, which I only occasionally allude to in passing in my four-part
series. A more systematic presentation of Jung’s psychology would involve a
discussion on first the need to integrate the personal shadow, then the
anima/animus, which connects to the archetypal psyche of the collective
unconscious, and finally the need for integration of the Self as Anthropos, the
central archetype of the Original Person or Purusha/Prakriti that relates the
individual fully to the community.
At the archetypal level there is
light and darkness, good and evil, truth and falsehood, joy and suffering, and
consciousness and ignorance that all ultimately belong to the full range of the
God-image. In Part IV I deal mainly with the Evil Persona and shadow side of
the individual and archetypal psyche as it is the most problematic, and yet so
important for integral individuation and the transformation of community.
Despite the concentration on shedding light on the darkness of being, the
reader can also always relate to the fact that, according to the Mother’s
original vision, the symbols of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Avatars of
our time and the new creation, reside fully embodied in unity in the Inner
Chamber of the Matrimandir.
My methodology in all the papers in
the four-part series on Jung was to refer, first and foremost, to Jung’s
visions and dreams and what he himself said and wrote. In this way I was always
being faithful to his inner life and myth and his own declarations. In order to
bring some measure of understanding to them, I applied the method of
amplification and brought disciplined imagination and thought to bear. I also
referred to the thought of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother mainly to show
similarities, but also to show contrasts. In Part III, I used Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother’s words to compare and contrast, but mainly for purposes of
explication and mediation of three of Jung’s late visions and dreams and what
he, himself, wrote and said about them and related subjects. I always stuck
closely to Jung’s inner life and its outer manifestation.
I have been driven to relentlessly
study Jung, and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother together for some forty years as a
vocation stimulated by my own inner life. I am not classifying Jung,
categorizing him or judging his level of consciousness from an external vantage
point, which I would consider to be totally inappropriate. I am only trying to
open up understanding of the wholeness of his life and the place of his
psychology in the world by bringing explications to bear on Jung’s inner life,
mainly from the thought of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who, surely, have the
largest vision and understanding of anybody on spiritual and psychological
matters. I believe that I logically applied explanatory material from the
former’s writings and what the latter is reported to have said. If this means
that I come to some tentative conclusions about Jung’s spiritual attainment, it
is based on my heart-felt engagement in the process.
I realized in the process of
writing these papers, especially Part III of the series, that I may be crossing
the line of what some people might consider to be taboo or out of limits.
Nonetheless, I took the freedom to proceed and present here my four-part series
on Jung, as I believe it is most important to follow one’s inner truth even if
it eventually proves to involve error or miscalculation. It goes without saying
that I am very grateful to RY Deshpande for putting it on the Mirror of Tomorrow.
References
[1] Mirror
of Tomorrow, Sri Aurobindo in a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy in 1932, in Re:
Apropos of Jung—Some Assorted Comments. Saturday November 2009. Permanent
Link.
[2] V Madhusudhan Reddy (1990). Integral Yoga Psychology: The Psychic Way to
Human Growth and Human Potential, pp. 97-101 passim, 99 (
[3] Ibid.
[4] Sri Aurobindo (1978). Glossary of Terms in Sri Aurobindo’s Writings,
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department,
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., p. 156
[7] Ibid., p. 124
[8] CG Jung (1974a), Collected Works, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Vol. 14, translated by RFC Hull, Bollingen Series XX.
[9] Ibid., p. 538
[10] CG Jung (1975a), Collected Works, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,
Bollingen Series XX, Vol. 8, translated by RFC Hull, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp.
419-531 passim, 506, 516, 517.
[11] The Mother (1972), Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta: The Steps of the Soul in the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. Three,
p. 241
[12] CG Jung (1965), Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded
and edited by Aniela Jaffé, translated from the German by Richard and Clara
Winston, Revised Edition,
[13] Indra Sen Integral Psychology: The Psychological System of Sri Aurobindo,
First Edition, Pondicherry, Sri
Aurobindo International Centre of Education,
p. 183
[14] Ibid., pp. 183, 184
[15] CG Jung (1974), Mysterium
Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites
in Alchemy, Second Edition, translated by RFC Hull, Bollingen Series XX, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, p.
108
[16] Ibid., p. 109
[17] Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: A legend and a symbol,
[18] CG Jung (1974), Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the
Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, Second Edition,
translated by RFC Hull, Bollingen Series XX,
Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 109