Abstract
In Part I I discuss the
significance of the number four (4) in both the Mother’s story of creation and
Sri Aurobindo’s account of a Vedic creation myth. I relate this to the fact
that Philemon, to whom Jung attributed superior insight, is clutching four (4) keys
in Jung’s dream, drawing the conclusion that Philemon’s message involves the
essential fourfold nature of the Self. Throughout the essay I amplify the
nature of Philemon by referring to Metatron, the chief angel of the
Judeo-Christian hierarchy of Angels, Merlin and the Fisher king of the Grail
legend, and Indra of the Vedic pantheon of gods. I also observe that Jung notes
that he eventually integrated Philemon along with a spirit of nature, who
insists on concrete reality. I discuss the difficulty of psychologically moving
from three (3) to four (4), that is from insight to wholeness involving
incarnation of the Self in life. This requires coming to terms with the shadow
as sol
Introduction
In his illuminating book on Vedic
symbolism, The Secret of the Veda, in
a chapter entitled The Guardians of Light,
Sri Aurobindo described and explicated a creation myth involving fourfold
Savitri Surya, the Supermind and creative source, founded on four luminous
Beings and Kings of the gods, Varuna,
Mitra, Bhaga and Aryaman. [1] These
luminous beings act in support of the human soul and spirit, pulling them
towards immortality, against the Darkness and Ignorance, the exact opposite of
their Truth and Light. He noted that
this quaternary was later replaced by the trinity of Satchitananda, Existence,
Consciousness-Force and Bliss, where Varuna became Sat, all-pervading
Existence, Mitra, Chit, the light of Consciousness, Aryaman, the discerning
force of Tapas, the sum of human aspiration, and Bhaga, Ananda, the joy of
Bliss.
According to the Mother’s account
of the story of creation, there were also four beings which, on the initial act
of creation, immediately separated from the Supreme, giving birth to their
opposites, so that Consciousness became the inconscience and Light became
darkness, Love turned to hate, Life became death, and Truth turned to falsehood.
[2] She then recounted that the Shakti was subsequently commanded to penetrate
the inconscience with Consciousness, suffering with Love, and falsehood with
Truth. What I find interesting psychologically is the fourfold nature of
creation as depicted in both stories related above, that there was a necessity
to come to terms with the opposites in the Vedic myth and that, in the Mother’s
story, the four beings turned into their precise opposites with creation, the
Divine solution being that the Mother’s Creative Force penetrate each of these
shadow states over time.
As the Mother noted, what she related
is a “story for children” and the “childlike consciousness” in each of us. [3]
She, however, warned her audience not to take it as gospel or make a dogma of
it, but rather receive it as a beautiful story of “something which is otherwise
too remote from us.” [4] I would observe that the same thing can be said of Sri
Aurobindo’s account of the Vedic creation myth. In both cases, however, there
strikes me as being considerable symbolic truth in their presentations that,
from a psychological perspective, appeals to one’s wholeness through feeling,
intuition, intellectual logic and sensate reality.
I always stand in awe with the
range and intrinsic truth of the Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness, in
this case, with the suggestion that it extends so far as to include the act of
creation itself. Jung gave little indication that he had that kind of
awareness, but his psychology does, nonetheless fit neatly into Sri Aurobindo’s
and the Mother’s metaphysical envelope. The relevant message from a psychological
point of view is that there were four Beings of Light involved in the creation,
which immediately, on the act of creation, had to either deal with their
opposite or became their own opposite. Although the act of creation is an
incomprehensible mystery to the human mind, one can, through the individuation
process as described by Jung, come to realize the essential fourfold nature of
the manifest world and individual wholeness [Exhibit 1]. Indeed, it is relevant
that the four psychological levels of being, the mental, the vital or life
mind, the physical, and the psychic being are directly linked to the Supermind,
Chit-Shakti (Consciousness-Force), Sat (Existence), and Ananda (Bliss)
successively. The subordinate term of Supermind is Mind, Chit-Shakti is
expressed through Life, Sat manifests through form of being, or matter, and
Bliss manifests through the soul and psychic being. [5]
Jung’s Relationship with Philemon
When Jung was 38 in 1913, he had a
remarkable dream of a figure he called Philemon, whom he described as exuding
an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere and a Gnostic suggestion [Exhibit 2]. [6] It
is an initiatory threshold dream that anticipated the development of his
psychological system, requiring a lifetime to complete. Here is the dream:
There was a blue sky, like the sea,
covered by flat brown clods of earth. It looked as if the clods were breaking
apart and the blue water of the sea was becoming visible between them. The
water was the blue sky. Suddenly there appeared from the right a winged being
sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull.
He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to
open a lock. He had the wings of a kingfisher with its characteristic colors.
[7]
Jung used to walk up and down his
garden with Philemon and dialogue with him, as he was quite real to him. He
eventually painted his picture on a wall in his house in Bollingen. Jung
related that he was like his guru, represented superior insight and taught him
about the objective psyche, aspects of the psyche that were not produced by
Jung. Etymologically, the name Philemon means "loving, affectionate,"
based on the Greek word philein "to love,” which suggests something about
his basic nature.
Jung was also very aware of the
Roman myth, where an old couple Philemon and Baucis, were the only ones to
welcome the gods, Jupiter and Mercury, and were rewarded by becoming temple
priests and, when they died together,—on their request, they were turned into
intertwining trees. In Goethe’s Faust,
in his hubris, Faust caused the murder of Philemon and Baucis, and, according
to Jung, anticipated the fate of the German people. Jung is so affected by
Goethe’s treatment of the old couple that he feels he has a responsibility to
personally atone for the crime. Thus, over the entrance of one of the Towers of
his house in Bollingen, he had the following words imprinted: “Philemonis
Sacrum—Fausti Poenitentia,” meaning Shrine of Philemon—Repentence of Faust. [8]
Although Philemon of Jung’s
fantasies is different from the Philemon of the Roman myth and Faust, he
clearly chose the name judiciously, and the choice of name suggests the
affectionate acceptance and love of the gods, a monumental choice given the
godless European rationalism and romanticism of the time, still a defining
factor for the West. An essential aspect of Jung’s psychological system, in
fact, is that the objective psyche contains the archetypes of the collective
unconscious, which includes the gods and goddesses and angelic beings. In their
incipient form, these are the points of intelligence, the scintillae or
soul-sparks, the lumen naturae, the
light of nature of the alchemists. They point to accessible knowledge in the
unconscious that come through dreams, and ocular and auditory visions. Since,
in Jung’s definition, the archetype is psychoid, meaning it includes not only
the spiritual but the instinctual and physical dimensions of being and beyond
them to the unknown, they can be potentially incarnated in life. Indeed, the
further reaches of the individuation process involves the incarnation of the
godhead in the human heart.
As far as Jung’s dream is
concerned, the waters of the blue sky remind one of the Vedic upper waters and
the spiritual dimension of being. The
clods of earth that are breaking apart suggest the breakup of a materialistic
viewpoint to allow for a spiritual view and openness to the wisdom of the
unconscious. As Jung said, Philemon is a mysterious figure who came from
Initial Amplifications on Philemon
Jung described Philemon as being an
old man with bull’s horns and kingfisher wings, who clutched a set of four (4)
keys. I note at the outset that the four (4) keys here are essential to the
symbolism and reflect the Mother’s story of creation involving the four (4) Beings
of light, who immediately became their opposite, as well as Sri Aurobindo’s
Vedic myth, where the Four Beings had to deal with the darkness that increased
with their deepening descent. In 1916, Jung also wrote a cosmological creation
myth, largely based on the Gnostic tradition, where there are four (4) principal
gods because four (4) is the measure of the world. [9] In it, the wise
spokesman for the path of Knowledge (Gnosis) is assigned to Philemon, and his
audience is the spiritually dead. Jung observed that he later realized this
archetypal blueprint and other fantasies resulting from his confrontation with
the unconscious during the period 1912-1930 in the development of his
psychological work and in the message he presented to the world.
Marie-Louise von Franz, arguably,
Jung’s most important disciple, noted that Philemon replaced the Jewish prophet
Elijah in Jung’s active fantasy as the embodiment of wisdom. [10] According to
legends of late antiquity and the Middle-Ages, Elijah has some roguish and
mischievous traits, while being a prophetic personality. He was also identified
with Metatron, the chief angel in the Judeo-Christian tradition, who in late
antiquity, was also considered to have incarnated in both Enoch and John the
Baptist. She went on to show how these
figures, especially Elijah and John, were depicted as unusually hairy, a
characteristic of Merlin of the Grail tradition. Merlin, it is also worthy of
note, is reputed to have a Christian mother, a pure virginal woman, and the
devil for a father. During the Middle-ages, he was believed to be closely
connected to the alchemical Mercurius, which, in alchemy, is the exalted
transformative substance, embodying extreme opposites, depicted as being both
the godhead and found in the gutter. In fact, totally unaware of the fact, Jung
did things and experienced life much according to the pattern of Merlin as
recorded in his saga, including building his stone tower at Bollingen as a
place of refuge and self-reflection. From the point of view of this essay, the
message here is that the embodiments of wisdom and spiritual and psychological
transformation, according to Jung’s early experience, involves containing the
opposites of virtue and devilishness, seriousness/prophetic and mischievous, of
good and evil, of instinct (being hairy) and spirit, in a kind of delegated
model of the four Beings of creation and their negation.
Philemon in Jung’s fantasy took him
beyond the wisdom embodied in the figure of Elijah. Indeed, Jung is reported to
have told Carey Banes that he “was the same who inspired Buddha, Mani, Christ,
Mahomet—all those who may be said to have communed with God.” [11] Jung
believed that the others had identified with him, which he refused to do, in
order to keep a psychological perspective and understand the process. With such
a statement, however, it is clear that Jung was aware that he had a divinely
appointed mission. In addition to the effect this had on his own spiritual
development, the individuation process, as he describes it in the Collected
Works and his various seminars, is the result and gift to the world. In fact,
Jung said he eventually integrated Philemon, who brought spiritual meaning,
along with a spirit of nature like the alchemical Anthroparion, who insists on
making things real in the physical world.
The Fourfold Self
As a matter of fact, the symbolism
of the fourfold nature of the psyche and the Self is the very ground of Jung’s
approach to psychological knowledge and wholeness of being. Jung’s initial
insight into this foundational reality, which he filled out over the rest of
his life, came from Philemon. At a personal and individual level, Jung
developed a fourfold personality typology that consists of four functions of
consciousness, thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation and two attitudes,
extraversion and introversion. As with Sri Aurobindo’s soul-force and the
fourfold personality, and the Mother’s four austerities and four liberations,
personality integration eventually involves integrating all four aspects of the
psyche, defined in Jung’s case by the four functions of consciousness and the
two attitudes. What Jung discovered that is unique, is the nature of what is
involved psychologically in integrating the inferior side of personality, with
all its shadow qualities, which is not only difficult but varies by individual,
depending on which function[s] of consciousness and attitude is inferior in the
individual’s psychic makeup.
The Symbolic Three (3) and the Four (4) and the Shadow Sun
Coming to terms with the inferior
function can be understood to relate to the alchemical axiom of Maria
Prophetessa, which states: “One becomes Two, Two becomes Three, and out of the
Third comes One as the Fourth.” [12] According to the alchemist’s experience,
the difficulty lay in going from three to four, which symbolically means going
from process and insight to incarnation of the Godhead. Alchemical literature indicates that there
was often a wavering between the three (3) and the four (4) by individual
alchemists. In contemporary Jungian
psychology there is a recognizable experiential difficulty of moving from
insight and individuation as a developing dynamic process to living directly
according to the Self. The symbol of
the four (4) and the square are similar, and refer to the incarnation of the
Self in life. The painting found in Exhibit
3 is a symbolic depiction of the movement from three (3) to four (4).
Interestingly, Sri Aurobindo indicates that the Supermind, or truth mind, by
nature fourfold, is symbolically a square.
Jung often referred to the
alchemical filius philosophorum, the
son of the philosophers, given birth to by the alchemical work. [13] [14] [15]. He is the son of the chthonic mother and the secret hidden in the darkest
matter, the sought after lapis, the philosopher’s stone or truth, the filius macrocosmi or son of the
macrocosm, who has the function of salvator
macrocosmi, savior of the macrocosm. According to Jung, there is a parallel
to the filius in the Gnostic Anthropos or original man, as well as the
Anthroparian, a kind of goblin familiar of the alchemical adept. The alchemical
process involves both an ascent and descent, and the filius both ascends and
descends, uniting Above and Below, while effecting a transformation in the
workings of everyday life.
The alchemists also spoke of the
need to enter the gate of dark ignorance to gain the field of light, the need
to experience the sol
Jung’s Dynamic Model of the Fourfold Quaternity and Completeness of
Being
I will end this paper with further
amplifications on the nature of Philemon that relate him to the Vedic tradition
as well. In the meantime, I wish to briefly describe the nature of the fourfold
Self according to Jung’s latest and most complete formulation in his book, Aion.
[17] To begin with, Jung initially found support for his understanding of the
Self in the Upanishads. Thus, according to the Mandukya Upanishad: “All this
Universe is the Eternal Brahman, this Self is the eternal, and the Self is
fourfold.” [18] This verse refers to
the
Jung’s later formulation of the
Self involves a fourfold psyche at four different levels of being. This is
reminiscent of the supramental Divine perfection and fourfold quaternity of being,
involving the fourfold perfection of each of the physical, vital, psychic and
mental beings, as described by Sri Aurobindo’s disciple, V Madhusudan Reddy, in
his monumental three volume study of the Vedas. Although there is some
similarity in intent, the emphasis in each model is quite different. Reddy
referred to both Sri Aurobindo’s definition of the physical, vital, psychic and
mental beings, and traditional Sanskrit classifications of what a purified
nature entails, without the integrating dynamic involved in Jung’s diagram.
Rather it is assumed in the conscious functioning of the psychic and mental
beings and, for that matter, explained elsewhere in his books on the Vedic
epiphany. In Jung’s very complex account, emphasis is put on the paradoxical nature
of the opposites, the symbolic nature of the Self and its integration that
assumes the need for discernment by the four orienting functions of
consciousness. The four levels of being described by Reddy can, in fact, be
discerned in Jung’s description of the Self’s fourfold quaternity.
Using Gnostic and alchemical
imagery Jung described how, in its completeness, the fourfold Self manifests on
each of four levels of being. [19] He began by describing a transcendent
unitary God-image beyond duality as the original creative source of the
unfolding manifestation composed of all manner of dualities and pairs of
opposites. He then discussed the
existence of what he called the unus
mundus, one world, which he defines as a Transcendent creative source
beyond space and time, yet, a potential world composed of multiplicity
contained in unity. He observed that synchronistic events (meaningful
coincidences) are experiences of unus
mundus in life and acts of creation in time. The acausal nature of
synchronicity means that such experiences are not primarily causally determined
but are orchestrated by the Self as unus
mundus—hence their essential non-dual truth and free status as a new
creation in time. He also noted that the goal of complete integration of being
involves interiorizing the alchemical vas (vessel), through a continuous
dialogue between the conscious and unconscious, to form a psychological square
formed by the discriminated elemental truths of life, resulting in the sought
after squaring of the circle. This strikes me as being similar to the
requirement to bring forward the psychic being or soul behind the heart and
then, to extend the process, to include different levels of the spiritual and
supramental beings in the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
Jung developed a dynamic model of
psychological completeness and purity of being consisting of four (4)
vertically connected quaternities, each in turn being differentiated into a
fourfold order. He called the top quaternity, the Anthropos Quaternity, where
the Anthropos refers to the Original and complete man, the Purusha in Hindu
terminology. In his model of the structure and dynamics of the psyche, the
original unity of the Anthropos, or higher Adam, is separated into four beings
of light and reunited in the lower Adam, or the ego of the ordinary person. In
Jung’s terms, the ego is the centre of one’s field of consciousness, both a
condition and content of consciousness. Inasmuch as it is the center of
awareness, in Hindu terms, it is the purusha.
Here, it is interesting to note
that there are four (4) beings of light that are differentiated and coagulated
to form the individual ego, a distinct mirror image of the four Beings of Light
of the original creation myth, according to Vedic imagery and the Mother’s
story of creation. This fourfold order of being can also be called the
Spiritual Quaternity, which is formed from a superconscient source and grounded
on the basis of the ego of the ordinary person. This quaternity roughly
represents the mental and vital beings, both which have links to the
Superconscient.
The second quaternity is called the
Shadow Quaternity, where the four beings of light find their opposites,
differentiated into a fourfold materialistic shadow figure grounded on the
instincts represented by the serpent. The serpent in Western symbolism is
sometimes taken to be Christ, sometimes the devil. Again this is a kind of
mirror image of the Mother’s story of creation, where the four Beings of Light
turn into their opposites. The Paradise Quaternity is, in turn, differentiated
into four rivers of living water to be reunited as one of the four elements of
the lapis or secret of matter, the other three being air, fire and earth, on
the one hand, and the arcane lapis
philosophorum, the philosopher’s stone, the incarnated truth, on the other.
The second quaternity roughly represents the shadow side of the mental and
vital beings, while the third refers to the vital’s grounding in the
physical.
The fourth quaternity is called the
Lapis Quaternity, representing both matter and the sought for arcanum, and is
depicted as emerging out of the Rotundum, through a union of the four elements,
air, earth, fire and water. According to some alchemists, these elements can be
reduced to fire or, in terms of modern physics, as matter they can be reduced
to energy. In the language of the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, this
quaternity can be understood as the physical being emerging from the
Inconscient.
The Rotundum, which means round in
Latin, is circular or round and is paradoxically the primary substance or
alchemical prima materia, the
unknowable state of chaos, and also the “heavy darkness of the earth”….with “a
secret relationship to the Anthropos.” [20] As a state of formless chaos, Jung
related the Rotundum to Genesis 1:2: “In the beginnings God created the heavens
and the earth. Now the [uncreated] earth was a formless void, there was
darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water.” [21] Here one
can discern pure Being [Ens] of Christian theology or Sat as pure Existence in
Hindu nomenclature, just prior to creation of the material world as its
opposite pole.
In greater fullness of expression,
Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri begins with a
symbolic description of the dawn of creation in Book One: The Book of
Beginnings: Canto One: The Symbol Dawn:
[22]
It was the hour before the Gods
awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night,
alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’
marge.
Almost one felt, opaque,
impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless
muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
...
Something that wished but knew not
how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake
Ignorance.
The alchemical Rotundum is related
to the chaos of the Inconscient and yet contains the fullness of the embodied
infinite. The circular shape and roundness of the Rotundum itself suggests the
world soul or wholeness and relatedness with the Original Man, the Anthropos,
as the lowest relates to the highest.
Thus, the four levels of being can
be characterized as mental and vital, with a relationship to the
Superconscient, the shadow side of the mental and vital, and physical, which
emerges from the original Inconscient. The common denominator can be depicted
as Agni, the Fire-God and energy or intelligent Force of Will. For psychic and
spiritual integration and transformation, each level of being needs to be
differentiated by the four orienting functions of consciousness, thinking,
feeling, intuition and feeling. This results in unity of the highest, the
Anthropos, and the lowest, the Rotundum, to produce the uroborous or the
serpent biting its tail. Jung abstracted a general formula of the Self from
this fourfold quaternity, observing that man needs to assume the role of Christ—or
another realized spiritual being fully engaged with the opposites of life—for
such a complete realization and integration of being.
Jung’s quaternity can be viewed as
both static and dynamic. The static quality is represented by the nature of the
Self as a fourfold Quaternity, with the number four (4) symbolizing wholeness.
The dynamic aspect, which refers to self-renewal, is indicated in that, in the
Gnostic formulation, each of the four levels of being is constructed by double
triads, where the number three (3) refers to a dynamic developmental process.
The dynamics of the Self and the individuation process is also indicated in the
alchemical circulatio, which refers
to a continuous circulatory ascending and descending development over time,
linking the heights and the depths of being.
Further Amplifications on Philemon
As far as Jung’s guru, Philemon,
who presented himself to Jung as coming from Alexandria, where the East meets
the West, is concerned, his four (4) keys clearly opened the door for Jung to
develop a psychology firmly grounded on the symbolic value four (4), or
complete integration of being. As I amplified above, there are parallels
between his nature and that of Metatron, the chief angel of the Judeo-Christian
tradition. For further amplification, it
is noteworthy that Philemon is depicted as having kingfisher wings with their
characteristic coloration and bull’s horns, and that he is lame in one leg, as Jung
recounts in his personal reflections.
The kingfisher reference related
him to the wounded Fisher King of the Grail tradition, whose wounds would be
healed with the discovery of the Holy Grail. He is wounded in the thigh or
groin, and his impotence affects the kingdom, reducing it to a Wasteland. Both the Fisher king and the kingfisher bird
are also fishers, who take fish from the water, in other words, important
contents of the psyche from the unconscious. Christ, too, was related to fish
and symbolized as Ichthys, Greek for fish, as if he came from the depths of
being, and his disciples were fishers of men. The kingfisher’s beautiful
turquoise/blue colors suggest royalty and spiritual transformation. Turquoise
is a sacred color in several traditions, for example, Egyptian, Tibetan and Native
American.
Overall, then, these amplifications
suggest that the nature of the spiritual task presented to Jung to be fulfilled
through the development of his system of psychology. In retrospect, there is no doubt about the
fact that Jung brought living water to the contemporary mind and its
spiritually arid existence. Philemon’s lameness also ties him to the Fisher
king and implies that Jung’s task was to bring the Grail to the West, at which
time, the implication is, Philemon could be healed of his lameness. In point of
fact, during the time that Jung was visiting
Regarding the bull’s horns,
amplification takes me to Indra, the king of the Vedic gods. The parallel to Philemon begins with the
fact that “Indra is the Bull of the radiant herd, the master of the
thought-energies….” [23] “It is he who brings forth the dawn and the sun, and
effectuates the release of the waters.” [24] This reminds one of the parting of
the upper waters in Jung’s dream. According to Madhusudan Reddy, Indra
creatively “manifests sat [existence] out of asat [non-existence]” and
“embodies the organizing and systematizing luminous intelligence beyond the
whole cosmos in its Truth-ward movement.”
He represents the Light of consciousness, impelled by force [25]. He is
the illumined mind that brings discrimination to bear in order to make order
out of chaos. He is, in other words, the
god of psychology, who brings luminous knowledge along with the power of
realization. Jung’s integration of the spirit of nature, and high appreciation
of Philemon’s status as an imparter of spiritual meaning, which he also
assimilated, and his belief that this being has inspired spiritual world
leaders in the past, lend credulity to these amplifications. It also
anticipates a life of struggle and battle. His discovery and championing of the
archetypal psyche organized around the central Self bears witness to this. His constant teaching about the need to unite
the heights with the depths integrates the side of force and strength to
illumination from above.
Jung had a direct relationship with
the living God and a highly differentiated fourfold psyche. He may or may not have
had an inkling of the primordial act of creation itself, which includes the
involvement of the four (4) Beings of
Light and their negation, but he understands the manifest world to be a shadow
creation and he lives fully according to the reality of the Self as fourfold.
Although he was critical of other’s identification with metaphysical statements
and specifically does not indulge in such speculation, he did, in fact, live
his life as a fulfillment of early fantasies, which includes a creation myth with
four (4) primary gods in a statically
organized fourfold world that unfolds dynamically. The final completeness and
oneness of Jung’s life based on the reality of the psyche and the realization
of the mystical coincidentia oppositorum,
the reconciliation of opposites, moreover, suggests that he must have some
insight into the nature of the act of creation. His reference to Genesis 1:2 in
his description of the Rotundum in his dynamic model of the Self confirm this
possibility, as does his conception of the Self as a fourfold quaternity that
includes both light and shadow values, where the heights and depths are united
in a circulatory process
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.
Exhibit 1
CG Jung
Exhibit 2
Philemon [From The Red Book]
Top left of picture: The
Bhagavadgita says: Whenever there is a decline of the law and an increase in
iniquity/ Then I put forth myself for the refuse of the pious and for the
destruction of the evildoers/ For the establishment of the law I am born in
every age.
Exhibit 3
Movement from Three (3) to Four (4)
References
[1] Sri Aurobindo (1971), The Secret of the Veda, Vol. 10, pp.
421-64, passim
[2] The Mother (1977, 2004), Collected Works of the Mother, Questions and Answers 1957-58, Vol. 9,
pp. 206, 207, 208
[3] Ibid., p. 206
[4] Ibid.
[5] Sri Aurobindo (1970a), The Life Divine, Vol. 18, pp. 219, 220
passim
[6] CG Jung (1965), Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded
and edited by Aniela Jaffé, Translated from the German by Richard and Clara
Winston,
[7] Ibid., pp. 182, 183
[8] Ibid., p. 235n
[9] CG Jung (2009), Philemon Series,
The Red Book: Liber Novus, Sonu
Shamsdasani, Editor, Preface by Ulrich Hoerni, Translated by Mark Kyburz, John
Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani, New York: WW Noprton & Co
[10] Marie-Louise von Franz (1975),
Jung: His Myth in our Times, Translated
from the German by William H Kennedy,
[11] CG Jung (2009), Philemon
Series, The Red Book: Liber Novus,
Sonu Shamsdasani, Editor, Preface by Ulrich Hoerni, Translated by Mark Kyburz,
John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani, New York: WW Noprton & Co, p. 213
[12] CG Jung (1970), Collected Works, Alchemical studies, Vol.
13, Bollingen Series XX, Translated by RFC Hull, Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press,
p.151, n. 81, passim
[13] Ibid.
[14] CG Jung (1974a), Collected Works, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Enquiry into the Separation and Synthesis
of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, Vol. 14, Bollingen Series XX, Translated
by RFC Hull, Second Edition, Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, passim
[15] CG Jung (1977), Collected Works, Vol. 12, Psychology and
Alchemy, Translated by RFC
[16] V Madhusudan Reddy (1996), The Vedic Epiphany, Volume Three: The Vedic
Fulfilment: An Exposition and Celebration of the Inaugural Dawn in the Light of
Sri Aurobindo,
[17] CG Jung (1974b), Collected Works, Aion: Researches into
the Phenomenology of the Self, Vol. 9, II, Bollingen Series XX, Translated by RFC
Hull, Second Edition, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 222-269, passim
[18] Sri Aurobindo (1972), Mandukya
Upanishad, Verse 2, in The Upanishads,
Vol. 12, pp. 289
[19] CG Jung (1974b), Collected Works, Aion: Researches into
the Phenomenology of the Self, Vol. 9, II, Bollingen Series XX, Translated by
RFC Hull, Second Edition, Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 222-269, passim
[20] Ibid., p. 246
[21] Genesis 1:2, (1966) The Jerusalem Bible, Doubleday & Co,
Inc Garden City,
[22] Sri Aurobindo (1970b), Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, pp.
1-2
[23] V Madhusudan Reddy (1996), The Vedic Epiphany, Volume Three: The
Vedic Fulfilment: An Exposition and Celebration of the Inaugural Dawn in the
Light of Sri Aurobindo,
[24] Ibid., p. 166
[25] Ibid., pp. 163,165