Carl Jung: Your spiritual situation in India
Dear Sir, August 1957
I have looked in your interesting little book Yoga-the Way of Self-Fulfilment.
I also have read your letter with attention.
Your spiritual situation in India, where I have been nearly 20 years ago, before she got home rule, is practically the same as it is with us, although our history is very different.
We are both at the cross-ways: in a time when the old-established meaningful ways have become obsolete, no matter whether it is welcome or unwelcome, right or wrong, true or false, it is so, as it is.
We are confronted with the onslaught of disrupting powers, either from this or from the other side.
The two poles, the pairs of opposites, are represented by
America and Russia.
They are not the true agents but the main victims of the
separation of opposites in the man of today.
He has gradually come down from the unity of being he had reached on the summit of his medieval culture, and fascinated by the ten thousand things he has fallen into the opposites.
He is no more nirdvandva but torn between the opposites by his desirousness.
Thus he is split into two halves, the one is conscious of the one thing, and the other of the other thing, and they do not see their other side any more.
The trend of the time is one-sidedness and disagreement, and thus the dissociation and separation of the two worlds will be accomplished.
Nothing will prevent this fact.
We have no answer yet that would appeal to the general mind, nothing that could function as a bridge.
You are naturally reaching back to Yoga in the proper understanding that it has once been the right way which should still be the right way for our time.
But the world has become wrong and nobody listens to the old ways any more, in spite of the fact that the underlying truth is still true.
The same is the case in the West, where one makes futile attempts to give life to our Christian tenets; but they have gone to sleep.
Yet in Buddhism as well as in Christianity there is at the basis of both a valid truth, but its modern application has not been understood yet.
“By whatsoever consciousness, whatsoever compounds, whatsoever individuality he may be denoted-all that is finished, cut off at the root, made like a baseless palm tree, made non-becoming, of a nature to arise no more in the future. Freed from consciousness, from the compounds, from individuality is the Tathagata.”
“Tathagata” literally translated means the “thus going-one.”
This passage describes the effect we shall undergo in order to be Liberated from our illusions.
Over against our consciousness we must learn to live as it were unconsciously, only thus are able to fulfil the superior will, following the path of a Tathagata.
If you are consciously the one and unconsciously the other, you don’t know any more who you are. But you are nevertheless, and you are Tathagata.
Thus there is no question whether women have children or not,whether you have a car or not, whether you are this or that-you are the self, which is greater than yourself.
Circumstances will teach us this truth without fail.
My greeting to you!
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 385-386.
