Carl Jung and Ramana Maharshi
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
To Gualthernus H. Mees
Dear Dr. Mees, 15 September 1947
I’m very sorry indeed that I had no chance to answer your three letters which I have received in the last years.
First I couldn’t because we were surrounded on all sides by the Nazis and later on I had two serious illnesses which have prevented me from coping with my enormous mail.
Thus I’m also late in answering your last letter which somehow got snowed under.
I often thought of you and I’m very sorry to hear that you had a bad time.
I hope that by now you have recovered completely from your ailments.
I was very much interested in your news about the Maharshi.
I’m well aware of the fact that my very Western criticism of such a phenomenon as the Maharshi was rather upsetting to you.
I consider a man’s life lived for 65 years in perfect balance as most unfortunate.
I’m glad that I haven’t chosen to live such a miracle.
It is so utterly inhuman that I can’t see for the life of me any fun in it.
It is surely very wonderful but think of being wonderful year in year out!
Moreover I think it is generally much more advisable not to identify with the self.
I quite appreciate the fact that such a model is of high pedagogical value to India .
Right now such a wonderful example of balance would be most needed in the Punjab or in Calcutta or in the respective governments of Hindustan and Pakistan.
Concerning Zimmer’s book I must say that I had no hand in its publication except that I took it in hand to be published by my Swiss publisher.
Thus I was fully unaware of how the text came into existence or what its defects are.
I had to leave the entire responsibility to my friend Zimmer who was a great admirer of the Maharishi.
I’m sorry that I was under the impression when we met in Trivandrum that you introduced your friend Raman Pillai as a remote pupil of Shri Ramana .
This however doesn’t matter very much, since the basic coincidence of most of the Indian teaching is so overwhelmingly great that it means little whether the author is called Ramakrishna or Vivekananda or Shri Auroobindo, etc.
I only hope that you didn’t endanger your health too much!
It must be awful to live in a continuous sweat-bath for months of the year.
I should much appreciate it if you could once enlighten me about the Maharishi’s daily activities.
I wonder wherein his self-realization consists and what he actually did do.
We know this running away business from parents etc. with our saints too !?
But some of them have done something tangible-if it was only a crusade or something like a book or the Canto di Sole.
I had a chance, when I was in Madras, to see the Maharishi, but by that time I was so imbued with the overwhelming Indian atmosphere of irrelevant wisdom and with the obvious Maya of this world that I didn’t care anymore if there had been twelve Maharishis on top of each other.
I was profoundly overawed and the black pagoda of Bhuvaneshvara took all the air out of me.
India is marvelous, unique, and I wish I could stand once more on Cape Comorin and know once more that this world is an incurable illusion.
This is a very helpful and salutary insight, when you must not live daily in this damn machinery and these undeniable realities which behave exactly as if they were real.
I’m sending this to the address you gave me in Holland, hoping that it will be forwarded to you if you have left.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol.1, Pages 477-479.