Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation – Quotations

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Psychology of Yoga and Meditation

We find similar ideas in the ancient Asclepius cult.  That is why medical clinics in antiquity had incubation chambers in which the ancients would have a dream that proffered the correct diagnosis, or often even indicated the right cure for healing. Similar practices are still used today by Indians and medicine men of primitive tribes. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 4

 We live through our eyes. However, that is not characteristic for all peoples, but simply a peculiarity of the West. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 4-5

In principle, this is nothing other than the usual technique of creating the dream’s context. I elicit the entire texture in which the dream is embedded. As it appears to the dreamer. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 5-6

Active imagination is a making conscious of fantasy perceptions that are manifesting at the threshold of consciousness.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 6

We must imagine that our perceptions possess a certain energy through which they can become conscious at all. It is a great achievement to be conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 6

Occidental man is not educated to use this technique, but rather to observe all external sense perceptions and one’s own thoughts, although not to play host to the perception of the background processes. The East is way ahead of us in this respect.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 7

 And the word meditatio actually means to consider or ponder. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 7

The old alchemists—by which you must by no means imagine just any old crazy gold makers but rather natural philosophers—defined the term meditation as a dialogue with another who is invisible. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 7

St. Victor had such a conversation with his own soul. The Middle Ages thus already had the inner counterpart in contrast to the external counterpart; and that inner counterpart possesses a meaning in its own right, so that one can, in a sense, have a conversation with this other. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 7-8

By concentrating on the chemical matter, the image that is within us is imprinted upon matter. This image within us is the soul, and it is round. Roundness is perfection, therefore gold has a round form because it is a perfect body. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 8

 In the Rigveda it says: tapas is seen among the things that carry the earth. The earth is carried through truth, size, strength, through rita, i.e., the law of right action, tapas, brahman, and sacrifice. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 9

 The classic text offering an overview of yoga teaching is a work from the second century BCE: the Yoga Sûtra by the grammarian Patañjali. It is an exceptionally deep book containing a plenitude of profound ideas, incredibly difficult to translate because it presents the secrets of yoga in an exceptionally concise language: four texts for a total of 195 tenets. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 11

 In the Yoga Sûtra 2.3 Patañjali lists the five kleshas: ignorance (ávidyâ), egoism (asmitâ), attachment (râga), aversion (dvesha), and the fear of death (abhinivesha). ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 11-12, fn 118

 kleshas: By this term one understands instinctive elements in the unconscious that actually should be repressed or at least diminished.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 11-12

 The Yoga Sûtra says: egoism, ignorance, attachment, aversion, and fear of death weaken you. Ignorance (ávidyâ) is the ground for all other vices or kleshas.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 12

A hymn from the Rigveda says:

What was hidden in the shell,

Was born through the power of fiery torments.

From this first arose love,

As the Germ of knowledge,

The wise found the roots of existence in non-existence,

By investigating the heart’s impulse.

Goethe said the same:

You follow a false trail;

Do not think that we are not serious;

Is not the kernel of nature

In the hearts of men?  9

These verses from the Rigveda propose that the existence of the world is in fact a psychic function. They would have us understand that these human qualities constantly generate heat, and that this glow begets the world. The world to our way of thinking is not begotten in this way, but to the Indian that’s what the world is: namely, consciousness.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 10

Another passage where the concept of the tapas plays a role occurs in the myth of the creator of the world, Prajâpati. In the beginning, he was alone. Apart from him there was nothing:

Pragâpati had the desire of creating beings and multiplying himself. He underwent (consequently) austerities. Having finished them, he created these worlds, viz., earth, air and heaven. He heated them (with the lustre of his mind, pursuing a course of austerities); three lights were produced: Agni from the earth, Vayu from the air, and Aditya from heaven. He heated them again, in consequence of which the three Vedas were produced. This means “he heated himself with his own heat,” in commutatio. “He brooded, he hatched.” He incubates himself. This is the word used for the technical concentration exercises out of which yoga developed. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 10

In the East, the guru, i.e., the leader, gives the tschela, i.e., the student, a particular instruction about the object he is to meditate upon. Guru and student are not outlandish peculiarities. Every moderately educated person in the East has his guru who instructs him in this technique. It has been this way since ancient times, a form of education practiced by one whose qualifications as a leader are not endorsed by any university. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 11

Patañjali, who wrote the Yoga Sûtra, is sometimes referred to as the author of Mahâbhâshya (Sanskrit for great commentary), a commentary on Panini’s grammar Astadhyayi. As this was written in the second century BCE Jung dates the Yoga Sûtra to around the same time. However, it is disputed that Patañjali was also the author of the Mahâbhâshya. Recent research dates the Yoga Sûtra between 325 and 425 CE. See Maas (2006), p. xix; also introduction p. l. 58, ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 11, fn 115

Klesha, Sanskrit, meaning “trouble” or “affliction.” “These factors, which can be compared to the drives of an earlier generation of psychologists, provide the cognitive and motivational framework for the ordinary individual enmeshed in conditional existence (samsâra) and ignorant of the transcendental Self.” (Feuerstein, 1997, p. 156). According to Patañjali, kriya-yoga aims at the attenuation of the kleshas. ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 11-12, fn 117

This is a technique used by the ancient Egyptian priests, for example, who stared into a bowl of water. There is nothing present in the water, but the intense gazing arouses the soul into seeing something. It has a hypnotic and fascinating effect. For this purpose, the ancient magicians used a glass button or jewel, or Egyptian priests a beautiful blue crystal, in order to impart unconscious perceptions to their clientele. It was not understood in this way back then but was employed for the purposes of prophecy, divination, and healing. The ancients were well aware that to heal the soul, or even the body, a certain assistance from psychic experiences was necessary. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 4

Lecture II

You may not know this, but yoga is principally a philosophy. When we speak about it in Europe we always imagine something half-acrobatic: a half-naked man sitting cross-legged on a pedestal; people who are capable of remarkable physical contortions… This is the lowest form of popular titillation and is never taken seriously by educated Indians. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 13

Yoga itself is India’s oldest practical philosophy; it is the mother of all philosophy, psychology, theology, etc. You cannot be a philosopher there without practicing Yoga. Yoga is the foundation of all spiritual development. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 14

It [Yoga] is the sacred practice of a nation of 380 million people. It is the foundation of all Eastern cultures, not only in India but also in China and Japan.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 14

For people in the East, this world is not as real as it is for us. They are not so attached to life as we are, they do not have anxiety as we do, it is much more natural for them. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 15

 In India, the Self is the ultimate meaning, the highest good. Here we consider things that lead us away from our Self to be the highest good, but not things that lead us to our Self.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 16

 Prana-yama also ranks among this restraint of body. It is the art of breathing. This involves the rhythm of the breath of which we are mainly unconscious. There are many people among us who cannot really breathe.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 22-23

 It is simply that people breathe so little from above, so a lack of oxygen occurs and one sighs. Then one has a spasm, which even leads to TB, because the apex of the lungs is not ventilated enough. This can lead to very far-reaching health consequences.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 23

 It is, of course, the same in India, and this is the reason for this exercise of making conscious the rhythm of the breath by greatly speeding it up or greatly slowing it down or stopping it. This training naturally takes years. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 23

 (5) Pratyâharaor the retracting of the senses, by which is meant that, through concentration, one sets aside every interest, every attachment to objects, curiosity, the compulsion to look.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 23

 [H.G.]Wells sent a copy of Anatomy of Frustration to Jung, who thanked Wells in a letter from 25 September 1937 (published in Wells, 1998, vol. 4, p. 170).  ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 19, fn 135

On the practice of yoga:

 (1.) Yama. This is moral self-control, ethical conduct. Not in the sense of a certain morality, but an ethos. We always confuse these.

(2.) Niyama This applies especially to the individual who is subject to egoism. Yoga is also practiced externally in the

(3.) Asanas (postures). ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 22

Kâlî, also Kâlikâ, Hindu goddess of time, change, and destruction. Kâlî is the violent and fierce aspect of Parvati, the gentle manifestation of Shakti, the consort of Shiva. She is said to have destroyed the demon Raktabija by sucking the blood from his body. Drunken from his blood, she danced over the bodies of the slain, thereby stepping on Shiva’s body. When she recognized her consort, her rage and blood thirst left her immediately. The moment of the blood-drunken Kâlî standing on Shiva’s body is a well-known iconographic representation of the goddess. For her worshippers Kâlî is the highest reality of Brahman. As Kâlî is associated with death and cremation, her devotees cover their bodies with the white ash of the cremation grounds. When Jung was in India in 1937/38 the temples of Kâlî had an enormous emotional impact on him. His travel companion Fowler McCormick (see n. 27) noted: “As we would go through temples of Kâlî, which were numerous at almost every Hindu city, we saw the evidences of animal sacrifice: the places were filthy dirty—dried blood on the floor and lots of remains of red betelnut all around, so that the colour red was associated with destructiveness. Concurrently in Calcutta Jung began to have a series of dreams in which the colour red was stressed. It wasn’t long before dysentry overcame Dr. Jung and I had to take him to the English hospital at Calcutta.… A more lasting effect of this impression of the destructiveness of Kâlî was the emotional foundation it gave him for the conviction that evil was not a negative thing but a positive thing …,The influence of that experience in India, to my mind, was very great on Jung in his later years.” ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 13, fn 121

In connection with the Yoga Sûtra, I told you last time that the practice consists of overcoming and subduing the kleshas. Klesha can be translated as compulsive urges—an instinctive type of impulse, or an inescapable mechanism, things that man is subject to, specifically understood as ignorance about the being of man and of the world. It is (1) ignorance (ávidyâ). It is not to be confused with the unconscious—it has nothing to do with that, rather it is a not-knowing about the causes and their identification.

The further kleshas are:

(2) egoism (asmitâ): egocentricity, a certain subjectivism, attachment to the I;

(3) attachment to sensory objects (râga);

(4) hate (devsha);

(5) compulsion to live (abhinivesha) in the sense of an attachment to life, not being able to separate, this life anxiety, something that we all know only too well. If a dark cloud appears somewhere, half the civilized world trembles. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 14

The kleshas are karma, a highly remarkable concept. It describes the disposition that we take with us into life, which causes us to live out a certain meaning, in a certain way. Our entire life destiny is dependent on this karma. It is the sum of the consequences of earlier existences, in particular the last existence before this one. What I lived there, I take over into my new existence with me. What we call “I” is an illusion and is ended by death. But karma remains, a complex of the consequences of life, which arises anew, being carried over into a new existence. This is how Buddhism explains it. It is its intention to bring karma to an end, namely by recognizing that I act in such and such a way for certain reasons and therefore that I might stop doing this in order to be free of this karma that compels me to take up a new existence over and over again. Through the kleshas a burdensome karma is created. But if it is possible for me to quell these kleshas through yoga so that they no longer have an effect, then I do not create karma for myself that compels me to live. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 16

By concentration (dhâranâ), Patañjali understands the captivation of the cittam (i.e., ordinary consciousness) in a specific place, in other words, concentration through meditation (dhyâna), i.e., through contemplation of what I observe in the state of captivation and then through meditative consciousness (samâdhi), i.e., introversion, i.e., the focusing of all my interests upon this point. Through this total restraint comes into being, i.e., in this way I can get hold of the kleshas by concentrating so that the kleshas no longer function automatically and can no longer cause me to lose myself in some sort of worldly interest. In brief, this is the purpose of the yoga method. Until recently every educated Indian experienced this. Every superior Indian has his guru who instructs him in this method. No one can be a priest, philosopher, or psychologist if they have not practiced this method. No one would ever just settle down in a quiet corner and read a few volumes of periodicals. This concerns one’s own body. It has different levels and practices, e.g., Râja Yoga or Hatha Yoga. I don’t want to comment on this—this is a matter for the Indians. I have never met a European who has really benefitted from this method. Read Brunton’s book or the author of Bengal Lancer. This latter has described with refreshing openness a white man’s experiences with yoga exercises.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 17

From perfect discipline of the strength of an animal such as an elephant, one gains that strength. [YS 3.24, p.66]

There is a whole further series of similarly amazing wonders. There are many such texts that have been circulated today by the Ramakrishna order. Sri Ramakrishna—Sri means “his eminence,” “the great,” even “the holy one”—you may know him from Romain Rolland and Annie Besant.138 In Bengal there is a large monastery where the order has its headquarters. The order is well-provided for with American money and distributes all sorts of texts about yoga in

Europe. Here in Europe there are countless missionaries, some of whom have quite substantial followings. In America these followers have three temples. Hinduistic syncretism with Hindu-Buddhist religious services. You can read these things there also. One of these prophets, Vivekananda, says, among other things, that the practitioner would look beautiful, would find the right words, etc. There is always this shameless advertising for the splendid power of yoga. I

don’t want to say the same about this ancient text. For all these things that are naively said of the effect of yoga are simply symbolic statements, and people who are really familiar with yoga are completely aware of that. But they say to themselves: Let’s make allowance for these ways of expressing things. It’s good for people. Through this they will be enticed and thus live out their karma. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 20-21

Ramakrishna (1836–1886), also Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Indian mystic, born Ramkrishno Pôromôhongśo into a poor orthodox Bengali Brahmin family, became a devotee and priest of the goddess Kâlî at the Dakshineswar Kâlî Temple. Ramakrishna had mystical experiences from his childhood days on and attracted many followers throughout his life, among them his wife Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda. His quest for God was not confined to Hinduism, but led him to contemplate other religions such as Christianity and Islam. He concluded that the realization of God was the ultimate goal for any spiritual path. His legacy has lived on through the brotherhood known as Ramakrishna Math. Though he himself did not write down his experiences and teachings, his disciple Mahendranâth Gupta noted down Ramakrishna’s conversations and published them under the pseudonym M. The Sri Râmakrishna Kathâmrita [The gospel of Ramakrishna] consists of five volumes transcribed between 1897 and 1932. The first complete English translation by Swami Nikhilânanda was published in 1942 (Gupta, 1942). In his introduction, the translator expressed his gratitude to Joseph Campbell and Margaret Woodrow Wilson, the daughter of the U.S. president, for their help. Jung’s library in Küsnacht contained the following books related to Ramakrishna: Life of Sri Ramakrishna. Compiled from various authentic sources (1925) by Swami Madhavananda, Teachings of Sri Ramakrishna (1934), Worte des Ramakrishna (Pelet, 1930), and Romain Rolland’s La vie de Ramakrishna [The life of Ramakrishna] (1929). ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 20, fn 136

Lecture III

We won’t meet next Friday. Being Swiss, I am part of a national commission, and I must attend their meeting and so sadly cannot be here next time. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 26

There is an authentic speech of the Buddha embellished in the style of that time:

Reverence to the Blessed One, the Holy One, the Fully-Enlightened One.

1. Thus have I heard. The Blessed One was once staying at Benares, at the hermitage called Migadâya. And there the Blessed One addressed the company of the five Bhikkhus, …
2. “There are two extremes, O Bhikkhus, which the man who has given up the world ought not to follow − the habitual practice, on the one hand of those things whose attraction depends upon the passions, and especially of sensuality − a low and pagan way (of seeking satisfaction) unworthy, unprofitable, and fit only for the worldly-minded —and the habitual practice, on the other hand, of asceticism (or self-mortification), which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable.”
3. “There is a middle path, O Bhikkhus, avoiding these two extremes, discovered by the Tathâgata

That is the habitual title of the Buddha, even today. Tathâgata, from Tathâ, “so” and gata “goes,” meaning “to conduct oneself in this way.” He is an examplar. It’s always translated as the perfect one, but that’s not what it means.

“…—a path which opens the eyes, and bestows understanding, which leads to peace of mind, to the higher wisdom, to full enlightenment, to Nirvâna!”

4. “What is that middle path, O Bhikkhus, avoiding these two extremes, discovered by the Tathâgata − that path which opens the eyes, and bestows understanding, which ‘leads to peace of mind, to the higher wisdom, to full enlightenment, to Nirvâna?’ Verily! it is this noble eightfold path that is to say:

Right views;

Right aspirations;

Right speech;

Right conduct;

Right livelihood;

Right effort;

Right mindfulness;

and Right contemplation.”

“This, O Bhikkhus, is that middle path, avoiding these two extremes, discovered by the Tathâgata − that path which opens the eyes, and bestows understanding, which leads to peace of mind, to the higher wisdom, to full enlightenment, to Nirvâna!” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 29

You see, the writer takes it for granted that the reader knows what a meditation is. The Western European has no such training, we are not raised with meditation, and what we do here in its name is usually so comically imitative as to be amazing. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 30-31

Of course, we don’t want to believe this—that one can generate a vision oneself—because we lack the training. However, through their education, people of the East acquire the ability to visualize, an ability we lack…The exercitia of the Catholic church can probably engender something similar. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 31

These are the four forms of the suffering of existence, namely: suffering, ignorance, nonbeing, impermanence (i.e., the deceitful mâyâ, the illusion of the world, which we accept instead of the Self). ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 33

A kalpa is an infinitely long series of world ages, each one being 2000 mahâyugas. A mahâyuga is 360 normal yugas. Every few hundred years at the beginning, and a few hundred years at the end of such a period, comes what we would call the twilight of the gods. At present, we are in the Kâli yuga. We have a bad prognosis. Now the majority of people lie, there remain only a few who can bear the truth. In the first yuga, everyone spoke the truth, in the second and the third ever fewer. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 35

A yuga consists of 4800, 3600, 2400, and 1200 years.178 These 12,000 years179 × 360 are 1 mahâyuga and that is already 4.3 million years.180 A kalpa however is 2000 × 4.32 million. That is 8.64 million years. And now one must work off his sinful deeds over the course of many million kalpas. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 35

It is therefore the purpose of yoga practice to create this land with this aspect; and by thinking it, it is created in actuality. India imagines the psychic much less hazily than we do; in fact, it somehow has substance. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 35

The expression used here is rather difficult to understand. Darmadhâtu-kâya, i.e., a subtle body corresponding to the principle of nature, is identical with it, and for this reason is able to penetrate into the consciousness of all beings, such that the Buddha’s full identity with the body is present, which accords with the principle of all beings and for this reason can penetrate into all beings. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 37

Jung quotes the German translation of Patañjali’s by Paul Deussen (1908), in the following abbreviated as YSD. On Jung and the German translations of the Yoga Sûtras, see introduction, pp. xlix–l. The English translation is by Barbara Stoler Miller (1996). Quotations from the Yoga Sûtras are subsequently referenced as YS followed by the number of the book, aphorism, and the page number from Miller’s translation.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 15, Fn 124

Ignorance is misperceiving permanence in transience, purity in impurity, pleasure in suffering, an essential self where there is no self. [YS 2.5, p. 45]

From perfect discipline of the heart, one has full consciousness of one’s thought. [YS 3.4, p. 67]

Knowledge of the past and future comes from perfect discipline of the three transformations of thought. [YS 3.16, p. 64]

… knowledge of the cries of all creatures comes through perfect discipline of the distinctions between them. [YS 3.17, p. 64]

… one has knowledge of former births. [YS 3.18, p. 64]

Through direct perception of the cognitive process, one has knowledge of the thoughts of others. [YS 3.19, p. 64]

From perfect discipline of the strength of an animal such as an elephant, one gains that strength. [YS 3.24, p.66]

“When each sense organ severs contact with its objects, withdrawal of the senses corresponds to the intrinsic form of thought. From this comes complete control of the senses” [YS 2.54–55, p. 59].

Ignorance is the field where the other forces of corruption develop, … [YS 2.4, p. 45]

Ignorance is misperceiving permanence in transience, purity in impurity, pleasure in suffering, an essential self where there is no self [YS 2.5, p. 45].

“Worldly experience is caused by a failure to differentiate between the lucid quality [sattva-guna] of nature [prakriti] and the spirit [purusha]. From perfect discipline of the distinction between spirit as the subject of itself and the lucid quality of nature as a dependent object, one gains knowledge of the spirit.” [YS 3.35, p. 68]

From perfect discipline of the receptive, intrinsic, egoistic, relational, and purposive functions of the sense organs, one attains mastery over them. [YS 3.47, p. 71]

From perfect discipline of moments and their sequence in time, one has the knowledge born of discrimination. [YS 3.52, p. 72]

From this one acquires quickness of mind, perception without the aid of the senses, and mastery over primordial matter. [YS 3.48, p. 71]

From perfect discipline of moments and their sequence in time, one has the knowledge born of discrimination. [YS 3.52, p. 72]

Through discrimination one comprehends differences of origin, characteristic, or position that distinguish two seemingly similar things. [YS 3.53, p. 73]

One who sees the distinction between the lucid quality of nature and the observer ceases to cultivate a personal reality. [YS 4.25, p. 80]

Then, deep in discrimination, thought gravitates toward freedom. [YS 4.26, p. 80]

This infinite knowledge means an end to the sequence of transformations in material things, their purpose now fulfilled. [YS 4.32, p. 82]

Sequence corresponds to a series of moments perceivable at the end of a process of transformation. [YS 4.33, p. 83]

Freedom is a reversal of the evolutionary course of material things, which are empty of meaning for the spirit; it is also the power of consciousness in a state of true identity. [YS 4.34, p. 83]

Lecture IV

The sûtras are a teaching document. They are part of the Tripitaka canon, being the three baskets in which the sûtras are gathered, i.e., speeches of the Buddha and so on.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 30

You will note here that meditation is in no way about spiritual truth or philosophy, but rather it is about the Buddha’s body. This is an absolute characteristic of the East, namely that truth of any kind, even ultimate spiritual truth (in which it is well known that Buddhism is poor) is developed as arising out of the body and not out of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 41

Everything, even the highest spirituality, grows out of the deep roots of the body. This is one of those differences between the Eastern and the Western spirit. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 41

Bodhi is complete enlightenment, Buddha is the enlightened one, the wise one, the clever, the intelligent. So here, enlightenment is personified by the feminine. It is plausible that it could also manifest in a female form. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 46

These are now the meditations anticipated by the practice of Bardo Thödol. This is a collection of those prayers read by the priest for the dead and also for the dying, but as a rule for the dead, as in Mahâyâna Buddhism it is the view that when someone has died, as a rule they are not aware that they are dead and must have it explained to them: “If you have a body, then pass through the walls.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 37

When Buddha had finished this speech, Vaidehî, together with her five hundred female attendants, could see, as guided by the Buddha’s words, the scene of the far-stretching World of the Highest Happiness, and could also see the body of Buddha and the bodies of the two Bodhisattvas. With her mind filled with joy she praised them, saying: “Never have I seen such a wonder!” Instantaneously she became wholly and fully enlightened, and attained a spirit of resignation, prepared to endure whatever consequences might yet arise. [p. 199] ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 37

So, you see that that ultimate good of India, the spirit of self-denial, proceeds from the body, not from the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 37

You see, the gods in no way take the highest position, they do not even have the level of the bodhisattvas, but function essentially as auxiliary powers. This is a characteristic of Buddhism.

The highest gods come to Buddha for instruction. They must become human in order to be able to be redeemed. They are humans who lead a god-like life for uncountable aeons. Then their karma is ended, and they must be born again like any other mortal. It is said that Buddhism is a religion without gods. In truth, however, that’s not the case. The highest god is the god reborn in man, Buddha himself. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 47

This circle of the Bodhis is the so-called round terrace of enlightenment. This circle is the ground upon which the Bodhi tree stands, that tree under which Buddha fought off the attack of Mâra, the devil. By not being present, he did not allow himself to get lost in existence, but was non-existing. For this reason, the seat of the Buddha is empty. And the devil also tries in vain to attack this seat. There are pictorial representations of this situation in Indian art. You see Mâra under the tree where the empty lotus seat of the Buddha stands. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 48

One day after his arrival in Bombay on 17 December 1937 Jung took the overnight train to Hyderabad, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Osmania University. He left on 20 December for Aurangabad (Sengupta, 2013, pp. 99– 102, 108–109). ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 29, Fn 192

The bodhi mandala is also known as the bodhi mandavara. Vara means circular flow, which alludes to the fact that this circle is not only something static, but is also in circulatory motion, turning clockwise. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 51

Stupas are hemispheric central structures, graves, with three parasols one above the other, representing the three worlds, namely: dharmakâya (i.e., the purely spiritual world, the world of absolute truth), sambhoga kâya (i.e., the intermediate world, the world of subtle bodies) and the nirvana kâya (i.e., the world of objects, the world of created things). One could also describe the three as Self, anima and body. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 52 Image

Mani means pearl or great treasure, padme is the lotus and hûm, like Om, has no single definition. The humming of the bees: humkana, snoring likewise. Both words, mani and padme, are framed with chanting. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 52

For the East, the psychic is not something inexpressible as it is with us, but something quite definite, something half physical. Through the imagination an existent image of the Buddha is created out of psychic material. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 54

Tantra means book, a leaf of paper or weaving loom. It is used for educational books or text books utilized for this special purpose. In its whole style Tantrism corresponds to the scholasticism of our Western culture. It plays a very great role in Tibetan Buddhism. They have a particular yoga, described as Kundalini Yoga or Serpent Fire Yoga. But this is Hindu, not Buddhist. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 56

Lamaistisches Vajramandala. This Yantra was used by Jung and Wilhelm as frontispiece to The Secret of the Golden Flower (Wilhelm & Jung, 1929); also in Jung, 1944, fig. 43; Jung, 1950, fig. 1 and §§ 630–638. Jung also presented it at the seminar on dream analysis on 19 February 1930 (Jung, 1928–1930, p. 479). The image was part of a greater number Jung collected, which he presented in his seminar series in Berlin in 1933.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 57 Image 94

This is an enormous difference between the East and us. Consciousness for us is simply an absolutely present conditio sine qua non. In the East, on the other hand, the phenomenon of consciousness is the absolute center of the world. It is the Buddha, the world-creating god. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 59

That which light is outwardly, consciousness is inwardly. There you have a fundamental concept of the East. Buddha is the inner sun, consciousness is the inner sun. Naturally you must not think that this philosophy means our everyday consciousness—including that of Eastern people—is Buddha.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 59

Not at all rather, the consciousness that is quickened through yoga, that enlightened consciousness (bodhi), that is for them the inner sun. Here we can make a bridge to the West where we have a similar concept in Christianity: the concept of the inner Christ as the inner sun, the inner light. This view is not exactly official; in fact theologians rather like to avoid it. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 59

The individual exists. What is community? It is a crowd. Only the individual gives it meaning and value. When all is said and done, it is absolutely exclusively the Christ in us. Otherwise we turn idols into gods and deliver ourselves up to idolatry. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 60

On the occasion of his visit of the Shakti temple in Trichur, Jung noted: “a so-called flagstaff (dhvâjastambha), a pillar divided into segments, standing on an altar and slightly curved at the top, bedecked with little bells at the upper end. These apparently depict the centers of the senses and the segmented pillars the spinal cord. But this is a great secret. All of this is related to the physiology of the body” (Jung’s copybook “Excerpta,” vol. 7, p. 18). See also Jung’s sketch of the flagstaff; reproduced in Shamdasani (2012), p. 180. ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 55, Fn 210

Jung’s remark can be seen as a critical statement regarding Nazi Germany and other fascist states at the time. At least the audience in the auditorium understood it that way. ES commented in his script: “Great applause.” In 1933, Jung also emphasized the importance of the self-development of the individual in order to fulfil its task within a collective movement: “The self-development of the individual is especially necessary in our time. When the individual is unconscious of himself, the collective movement too lacks a clear sense of purpose. Only the self-development of the individual, which I consider to be the supreme goal of all psychological endeavor, can produce consciously responsible spokesmen and leaders of the collective movement.” [Interview with Adolf Weizsäcker, 26 June 1933 in McGuire/Hull, 1977, p. 64] ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 60, fn 218

the âtman is the absolute origin of being. The particular: that he is not only the universal being like that of the highest Buddha, the essence of the world itself, but he is also a personal being. Everyone has a personal Self, this âtman within,

but this is only one aspect of the universal. Whoever immerses himself in the practice of yoga, flows in a way out of the personal âtman into the general, and then considers himself a universal being. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 62

The being of one’s own Self, as the text also shows, is at the same time a universal being. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 62

We know only a little about it [Tantric Yoga], and this comes from Sir John Woodroffe. He writes under the pseudonym of Arthur Avalon, Avalon being that town in southern England. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page  62

The Indians are very critical of Tantric yoga because it deals exclusively with the physiology of the body and especially with sex, although it is full of exceptionally interesting symbolism. Little is known about tantrism. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 62

In Calcutta I met a series of advocates, among them some very dubious characters. It has very much ousted Mahâyâna Buddhism from Indian scholasticism and is in fact very widespread in Tibet. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 63

The text is called Shrî-chakra-sambhâra Tantra.229 Shrî means holy; chakra is the wheel, also mandala; sambhâra

means bringing together, and also signifies the gathering; and tantra means weaving loom, leaf of paper, the woven, in other words, text. Thus, “the sacred wheel gathering text.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 63

Vajra means thunderbolt or diamond (vaj, hard; ra, wedge). The thunderbolt of the Indra is called vajra; yogini means female consort, a divine being that appears as a consort, the yoked one; shrî means holy and mahâ large; mâyâ is the Shakti, the feminine being that emanates from the masculine creator god and represents the world, a sort of mother of the world, a building material, a material—the word “materia” belongs here—of the visible god, but different from god inasmuch as it depicts his femininity. This femininity is called world. We speak of mother earth or even madam world; shrî mahâmâyâ is therefore the holy great illusion or also the great reality that is also an illusion; Târâ is a specific Mahâyâna goddess. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 63-64

Sattva, i.e., an entity, a being. This term belongs to the three so-called gunas but I will spare you all that. This Buddha has as an epithet the name vajra sattva which means diamond being or thunderbolt being. I prefer the first meaning. It is on the primitive level of the Bon that the thunderbolt is important as a magic missile, but later on a higher philosophical level the diamond meaning plays a much greater role: as the enduring, hardest being that is not subject to change. For example, in Chinese philosophical yoga it describes it as the subtle body, the spiritual body, which is no longer subjected to any changes. There this vajra takes on absolutely the meaning of the lapis philosophorum, the philosophers’ stone, that eternal being brought forth from man, that arises from the striving of his life, from the laboratorium, and then somehow outlives it. The body of the sleeping one is therefore the body of the Buddha vajra sattva—of the diamond being Buddha. Which is to say that this is a matter of a transformation of the body into the diamond being, this eternal, enduring thing.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 66

Feminine divinities were invoked at the beginning. Here is the place where it becomes clear that this is not the usual question of a god who is identical with the yogin, but also of his consort, so that the yogin transforms himself into a feminine being, into the consort of the god, even at the beginning of the experience. This god is described as yogini, i.e., the corresponding feminine. If he imagines his body as that of the devatâ,249 this is the blessedness that belongs to the body. If he says: Shrî Heruka aham, I am the holy Heruka, he should meditate on every syllable of the mantra, identifying himself with the god of the ritual so as to become a dyad, i.e., a form both feminine and masculine.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 69

In Mahâyâna Buddhism Târâ is a female bodhisattva. She plays an important role in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, where she is understood as the bodhisattva of compassion and action representing the female aspect of Avalokiteśvara. She has been venerated as a Tantric goddess since the seventh century. As Hindu goddess she is worshipped in Shaktism. On Târâ see Willson (1986). ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 64, Fn 230

The three gunas (“string,” “strand,” also “quality”) are sattva (i.e., the pure principle), rajas (i.e., the dynamic principle), and tamas (i.e., the principle of inertia), and are seen as the primary constituents of nature. See also introduction, p. li, and Jung’s lectures from 19 May 1939, pp. 216–18, and 26 May 1939, pp. 219–20.  ~ Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 66, Fn 235

The three gunas (“string,” “strand,” also “quality”) are sattva (i.e., the pure principle), rajas (i.e., the dynamic principle), and tamas (i.e., the principle of inertia), and are seen as the primary constituents of nature. ~ Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 66, Fn 235

He [Evans-Wentz] also translated the Bardo Thodol and generally acquired great benefits through this translation of this text. Nonetheless, due to the grueling climate of Calcutta, which he as a native Tibetan could not withstand, he died. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 67

Advaita means non-dual, therefore “two-less.” So, for example, it is said of Brahman, the world principle: apart from it there is no other. So already with the expression of the prefix syllable shrf, the yogin must realize that his “two-lessness” is being expressed, that there is nothing apart from him. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 70-71

“Ka” is not abiding anywhere. [SCST, p. 3] “Ka” abides nowhere and is everywhere. It is the essence of the world, concentrated nowhere but present everywhere. One being permeating everything, the so-called Buddha essence diffused through the whole world. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 71

Our Self seems to us the most defined, singular thing, since only an individual can say of itself that it is the Self. Yet is this Self supposed to be the original being that is uncompounded yet also dispersed through the entire world? ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 71

vishaya jnana. This is the world acquaintance with objects, a dubious knowledge. For this reason, it is connected with the moon. It is well-known that the moon has a particular relationship to the mind or manas. There is an Upanishad text: “The moon was engendered from his mind.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 73

When the yogin imagines the bright lunar disc, he is saying that all knowledge is doubt, deceptive, like moonlight. The word manas is linked to the Middle High German name for the moon: “mane.” Also, both the English word “mind” and the German “Mensch” are linked with this root. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 73

Four points depicting the horizon. The yogi in the center. Here he speaks the mystical syllable “hum.” It depicts a quality of consciousness, namely initial consciousness, the original consciousness, representing the world principle itself. The four colors disseminate from this consciousness in four different directions. These colors are qualities of consciousness; we would say: functions of consciousness-the four possible functions of consciousness that I have amply covered in this lecture. What is depicted here in a vivid form is simply psychology. These rays permeate the four heads of the devata. It is thought of as four divine beings that are permeated by this radiant light. From there, these rays gradually fill the universe, i.e., via this magic circle they go out into the whole world. An image arises like the one we already encountered earlier. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 75

In Indian and Tibetan ritual, these things are still in use. But from antiquity we have a very nice piece of evidence of this in the Mithras liturgy (second century AD): After you have repeated the second prayer, in which Silence is called for twice, whistle twice and snap your fingers  twice and you will at once see stars coming forward from the disc of the sun, many, many stars, five pointed, filling the whole air. Say again “Silence, silence” and when the disc of the sun has opened you will behold an infinite circle and fiery doors that are closed. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 76

“You can still find Swiss peasants who use the magic circle to prevent evil spirits from doing them harm” (p. 49). ~Barbara Hannah, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 77

When the native Americans say there were animals that were not normal animals, they are saying that sometimes animals have behavior attributed to them, which in fact could only have been attributed to humans. The coyote is a very shy animal. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 78

The animal forms are there because the animals imagine about us what we do not like to imagine about ourselves. This is why the gods also have giraffe and elephant heads, because these are psychological things that are not human. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 78

Rupa is the form, skandha is the element. Again, this is also a psychological term of the East: the form element. It is this element that initiates forms, thus: forms of imagination, ideas. The Rupa-skandha is Vairochana, so one of those beings who are called to once become a Buddha, thus one of the great bodhisattvas. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 80

Vedana-skandha is the element of the senses. Vajra-suryya is the diamond sun. This amounts to analysis of consciousness.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 80

Samjna-skandha is the feeling element. Whether samjna can be described as a feeling, I do not know, it has more the meaning of harmony and understanding. Padme is the lotus; nateshvara is the lord of the dance. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 80

Sangskara-skandha is the instinctual element that differentiates itself from the awareness element. Raja-Vajra is the royal diamond. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 80

The awareness element vijnana-skandha is the vajra-sattva, the diamond being, the actual ultimate being that emerges from these functions sort of as a key, as a conclusion: the Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 80

The text seeks to establish the quaternity of consciousness in the form of an analysis of functions, with a fifth, the Buddha element, in the center. This fifth element serves to dissolve the quaternity, which is still form, in order to bring it into this center, into the innermost being of the yogin, so that he no longer has any distinguishing function of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 80

Then comes an incorporation of the environment into the corpus incorruptibile. I am translating what is described in the East as vajra-sattva (from the root vay, i.e., hard), as diamond being or also as the subtle body. It is also a thunderbolt, a missile that the gods send out, hard as a diamond and penetrating.

This plays a particular role in the later course of this Yoga exercise. This corpus incorruptibile is what we know from Paul in the New Testament as the incorruptible body. In the Middle Ages it was called the corpus glorificationis, i.e., the body that one will put on at the Last Judgment.

Alchemy set itself the task of creating this body by chemical means. One assumed that it must be a kind of subtle substance. The yogi or lama thus experiences that, as Buddha, he is simply vajra-sattva, i.e., the diamond being, and as such he can now incorporate the entire environment into himself, rather as if I would incorporate you as a part of my own personality. So, he extends his personality over his entire environment. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 82-83

The identification with Mahasukha and yogini. This is a declaration that the yogi or lama delivers to his own address: I am the god of ultimate happiness and at the same time its feminine counterpart, i.e., Shakti, who is also paired with the god. The god always appears as masculine and feminine simultaneously, in particular also in Tibetan. In Greece, it is the same. To a particularly high degree this is the case with the gods of Babylon who are always paired with the nameless feminine. This is the yoking together, in Greek: the syzygy, a permanent union of the masculine and the feminine. This is an important psychological motif, which we also encounter in the psychology of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 83-84

The declaration “Shd Heruka Aham”: “I am the divine being who is the lord of this mandala.” Psychologically Mahasukha or Heruka would correspond to what one describes as the Self, namely the whole that one assembles through ego consciousness and the totality of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 84

This four-part meditation climaxes in a fifth. This scheme occurs frequently. There are four points, but they are not arranged sequentially in Eastern psychology as we would order them. The East thinks in a circular way, not in rows. This mode of perception was lost to us at the moment when actual scientific thinking began. In the Middle Ages we too thought in a circular way. Quinta essentia, that is the ultimate, not simply number 5.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 84

1 Corinthians 15:41-46: “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual” [KJV]. On the discussion of this infallible Christian doctrine in eighteenth-century psychology, see Vidal (2011), pp. 325-350.   ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page Fn 283

In his 1939 Eranos lecture Jung mentions the corpus glorificationis in connection with the idea of the resurrection: “It may be a carnal body, as in the Christian assumption that this body will be resurrected. On a higher level, the process is no longer understood in a gross material sense; it is assumed that the resurrection of the dead is the raising up of the corpus glorificationis, the ‘subtle body,’ in the state of incorruptibility.”  (Jung, 1940, § 202)  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page fn 284

So, these are the four parts of the meditation upon which the fifth follows: the analysis of knowledge. Likewise, in the second part B there are four individual functions and then comes, fifth, the analysis of the functions. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 86

Through this the yogi is moved in faith or into an ecstatic state in which he feels one with the highest being. In this state of course, he is at huge risk. For it is impossible for [an] individual human being in a body to be an absolute being. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 87

In fact, this is the critique of pure reason by means of which, apparently, Kant affirmed his religious conviction. He proved that one can assert nothing about an ultimate being because all of this is only thoughts. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 87

“The concept of God is an ‘idea’, an ‘ideal’ of reason. Like all objects of ideas, God is unknowable. For theoretical reason, ‘God’ is not a principle serving the explanation of phenomena, but rather a ‘regulatory’ concept, in order to bring ultimate unity into experience by regarding all connection in the world as if it emerged out of one essential principle. This ‘as if’ occurs frequently in Kantian theories of God; ultimately Kant describes God as something which is only an idea, something that manifests itself in reason; it does not have existence (at least in a categorial sense), which however does not preclude a supernatural ideal God-being. We are not able to perceive God but we probably consider him, in an analogous way to our mind, by means of a symbolic anthropomorphism, as a sentient and intentional being in order to make him more accessible to us. But chiefly, God is a postulate of practical-ethical reason, an object of belief. The ethical world view ultimately requires the idea of God for its completion (not as a foundation) in the sense of a moral theism.” (Eisler, 1930, pp. 216-217) ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page fn 288

Vishaya jnana: knowledge of doubt-everything is doubt, or doubtful. For this reason, there is there the symbol of the moon. One recognizes everything rather as if through moonlight. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 87

Dharma-Dhatu-Jnana. Dharma means truth or law; Dhatu is the element; hence: the perception of principal truth. Within this, my assertion that I am myself the being of Buddha or the diamond being is assured. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 87

The light of four colors emerges from the “hum.” That knowledge is first dissolved into four colors. These correspond in the Tibetan mandala to the points of the compass. At the same time, it is four psychological functions, four ways of knowledge, four ways to truth, etc.; i.e., this light has four different qualities. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 87

In the fourth phase he takes into himself, and also receives, the emanation of the light that he had created through the “hum” and then radiated. Thus arises the Self. All emanation is absorbed back into the Self. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 87

That is the analysis of the four functions:

Rupa-skandha: Thinking; the so-called form function, the individual function par excellence Vedana-skandha: Sensation; the Tibetan translator explains vedana as the sensing faculty: perception through sensation, the sensing function Samjna-skandha: Feeling; the translator says “agreement, harmony” Sangskara-skandha: Intuition; creation of mind ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 88

The Buddha has testified to reaching back into early aeons before the foundation of the world. The hundreds of thousands of lives he has lived, as an animal, an ape, a frog, and many other forms. All this has gradually developed into consciousness. The ability to recall these traces of earlier lives signals a higher consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 88

That’s an unconscious function in us-intuition-a perception through the unconscious. But the East has not applied intuition to the external as much as we have. There, everything goes inwards. An actual perception of sangskara is intuition; such would be the essential correspondence that we have in the West.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 89

Vijnana-skandha: Buddha Vjara-sattva (perception). This is once again the quinta essentia. So, in conclusion: “I perceive all my psychic functions, the eternal being of Buddha is the same as their quintessence.” With this, the cirucmambulatio is again completed, and it is certain that he is the Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 89

When the East declares this to itself, it’s not in the least bit crazy, absolutely not, because it does not proclaim “I am,” but rather, “I, as an eternal being, am the Buddha, for if I move into this state of being, then I am the ultimate being.”  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 90

One has long believed that primitives get up to dance simply when the mood takes them or when the moon shines. Not a word of it! They must first get into the state that lets them perform the dance. I observed this with the Pueblos.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 90

One must say, then, that all these Tibetan and Indian gods have both a positive and a negative aspect, a benevolent and a vengeful aspect. The goddess of goodness is also a goddess of hell. In the vengeful aspect, they have all the vices that humans may not have.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 90

The body is eternal jealousy and all senses are vajra ishvara, the eternal lord. The sense organs are precisely what bind man to the world, through the so-called nidana chain. This is a technical term in Buddhist psychology, the chain of causation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 93

So, we encounter here this element that is thoroughly negative. One can simply say that the claim “I am the Buddha” collides with the experience of the body. I draw your attention to the fact that this claim is outrageous if one realizes it. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 93

That is why the antithesis begins with this explanation: the body arises with temporal and spatial limitation and rages against the claim that it is the eternal Buddha.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 93

When I was a student, everything was explained by ether. One believed that it was a scientific term. But that was not the case, for it was rather metaphysical, having precisely all the qualities that matter does not have. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 94

Souls are flying around and seeking places where sexual intercourse is happening and then they are caught. The Bardo Thodol considers souls in the same way. When they fall into erotic fantasies, they are suddenly snapped up by the uterus. One is in the prison of the sensual world of Maya, the dancing Shakti. It is the goddess Maya who creates the visible realm. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 95

For the Buddhist, the visible is illusory. Maya com.es from the root Ma, i.e., to build. Maya is the built world, and it is created out of the stuff of thoughts.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 95

It is not an actual world in our sense, but rather it is an actual world of illusion, actual but all the same an illusion because it is built of the forms of thoughts. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 95-96

This is why Tantric yoga, which has many connections with Mahayana Buddhism, also says that maya is nothing other than the form of divine thoughts-also a very interesting way of thinking. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 96

When one succeeds through active imagination in making the various intellectual and sensory functions autonomous by saying: seeing is not my function but rather it is a devata, i.e., an autonomous being, then this is a great gain. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 96

We have already encountered the idea that one should imagine the four basic functions of our consciousness as Buddha, and thus as a being in our consciousness, as if the various functions were beings in their own right. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 96

If you imagine this, then it boils down to the idea that through this imagination, every psychic action is transformed into a distinct entity: the process of imagination, of thinking, feeling, etc., this is a distinct entity.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 96

If you imagine that the thinking of the I is no longer your own activity but an autonomous being, then the entire psychic process is completely cumbersome as if I were to dissolve myself into separate parts.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 96

In this way, one empties oneself of these functions. One no longer has them. One pushes them away. Instead of being a personality one is now an entire theater represented by a troupe of actors who are these distinct functions. The whole personality, all my functions, are paraded before me as autonomous figures. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 96

Everything that we do not wish to be true of ourselves, we always see in a dear neighbor. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 97

That’s why we need our dear relations. They are also simply stand-ins that we like to use unconsciously to mirror everything that one hates to see in oneself. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 97

Even the Heruka, the lord of the mandala, is absolutely not only a purely positive apparition, for he also reflects every evil leading into birth, death, illness, and the totality of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 97

This personification has been undertaken here for the senses. If that personification is successful, the same effect is achieved, I place my sensory functions as it were all around me.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 97

Schizophrenia is constructed along these lines. Only there it is an illness, involuntary. For when one leaves this process simply to the unconscious, it just goes on operating, and for people with this disposition a multiplication occurs. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 100

However, if I succeed in dissolving my psychic limitation into so and so many personalities, then it is as if I disperse my entire spiritual possession into so and so many beings throughout the universe and I sit in the midst of many gods. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 100

This is the invocation of the tathagata. “All perfecting holy wheel concentrating Mandala” is the title of the text, but it is also a state. Then: “The wheel is every man and woman,” which means: Invocation of the Buddha who is at the same time this wheel, this mandala, man and woman, i.e., the feminine belonging to him.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 100-101

After these magical procedures comes the invocation, calling upon that being who is to be formed by the lama. This is an utterly remarkable psychological situation. He himself is this Samanta Bhadra Buddha, this Buddha of likeness. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 105

After all, everyone is a mixture of pairs of opposites, and anyone who believes otherwise is only one-sided, they live only one half-side, and they don’t want to know anything about the other side. This is the disease of the West; it arises from the person as such, with all contradictions, not from logic. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 105

There are no completely healthy people. In humanity there is always a certain degree of illness present. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 106

Yoga is not only used to transform oneself into a Buddha, but extensively as a training of the will in which the whole of the actual world is largely removed. One becomes an actor of oneself; one can actually put on such a show.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 106

It is an absolutely typical process in the East: that is, their tendency to allow something to seem objective which for us is purely subjective, while also acknowledging the fact that indeed, in fact, it is objective too. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 106

Dharma is the truth, the law. Sangha is the community, the original Buddhist community, later the enclosure of the monastery. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 109

Shravakas are pupils of the Buddha; Pratyeka Buddhas are mavericks. These are Buddhas who did not come to earth for humanity but who achieved perfection for themselves.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 109

They [Pratyeka Buddhas] do not preach, they do not belong to any community, but they are ones who have stepped clear of the turning of the wheel in their cycle of existence, who have left the world of suffering, of appearance, completely.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 109

In this section a dialogue with the devatas is anticipated. It is often the case that when such ecstatic states are created through active imagination that the generated form achieves so much activity and spontaneity that it responds with a reply, occasionally in a very shocking way. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 110

In order to prevent this-because if something like this happens it would be dangerous for the dogma,-what the devatas would have had to say is now uttered, i.e., they must respond in accord with the dogma…That is how the spontaneous expressions by figures from the unconscious are anticipated and intercepted. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 110-111

The very intention of the exercise is to yoke the kleshas, the unconscious drives. If such an unconscious figure should dare to declare something on its own, the yoking would be interrupted, and the protective power of the dogma would be broken.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 111

In the text at hand, the lama informs his psyche about its own nature and how it ought to behave. Provided that it also befits the psyche, the unconscious willingly flows into these forms. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 111

But if the dogma takes on such a form, through further differentiation of consciousness, that it no longer corresponds to the nature of the objective psyche, then the unconscious can no longer flow into it. Then it’s not the dogma that breaks down, but the psyche.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 111

So very many lives are broken because the living unconscious can no longer enter into the sacred form. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 111

But in India it has been wrapped in the mantle of Hinduism again. The Buddha is now the ninth recognized incarnation of Vishnu. The tenth is on the way, that is the white horse. But it comes only after the Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

Buddhism and its doctrine are now recognizable under the cloak of Hinduism. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

But its [Buddhism] achievements, its supreme integration, its clarity of consciousness, are not known any longer even in India, where it is now a private affair for individual enlightened ones. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

You almost dare not speak its name because so much chicanery is perpetrated in India. Today in India, the yoga thing is a business, and woe betide us if this flummery is set loose in Europe.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

In Ceylon the faith still has a dogmatic form. As to why India was not able to sustain Buddhism as the ultimate expression of the religious creative will, I have no idea. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

But the fact is that polytheism, this unending richness in the form of the divine essence, is somehow a more exact expression of the Indian soul than that of the perfected Buddha.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

That is why we are in the situation today where all those who no longer express their unconscious in this imaginal way demonstrate the highest number of neuroses. That absolutely certain fact stems from the perpetual disquiet caused by things that one cannot, rather than will not, reveal. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

Whereas if the unconscious can be contained in a dogmatic form, then we have those forms of life, ceremonies, and rituals in which the soul’s activity can find expression. For example, the central Australians spend two-thirds of their time in ceremonies of a symbolic nature.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

We say: Well, those are just primitives, we do more useful things. But such things are less meaningful, they are always only about doing business. Whereas those people take care of the business of the world. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 113

A native Pueblo-Indian wrote to me once that Americans should stop getting involved in tribal religious ceremonies. Otherwise in ten years the sun would no longer rise, since they make that happen with their prayers. Therefore one dare not stop them from doing that. There is something in this.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 113

It has become apparent in the West, in complete contrast to the East, that women in particular elaborate such symbols in their unconscious. In the East this occurs only exceptionally. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 114

These symbols of roundness, the mandalas that you find in the East, are produced in Buddhism exclusively by men. The women have fundamentally nothing to do with it. On the other hand, in the matriarchal South, in the area south of Hyderabad, it’s the prerogative of women. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 114

I have seen quite new mandalas, of modern vintage, drawn on that very day. In the great temple of Madurai I observed a woman at work. She could not understand why a man might take it up: in her view only women know all the many significances involved in how the mandala comes into being. But that is the matriarchal South. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 114

In the North you can still find these matriarchal traces, but not by a long stretch to such a degree, because the North has been strongly penetrated by Islam following the Mogul invasion. But in the South it is practiced much more.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 114

There is an exception in the South, where one can penetrate into this mandala symbolism, and where men in fact still practice it. That’s more to the North, in the region of Bengal, where one finds quite a few followers of a certain yoga practice more closely linked to Tibetan yoga, namely Tantric yoga, laya yoga or kundalini yoga.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 115

For the medieval philosopher, spiritual man is a microcosm. Thus, the individual human soul is of the same roundness as the soul of all-being that surrounds the entire universe. The Platonic notion is identical to the Eastern philosophy of the atman or purusha who surrounds the whole world two bandwidths high and yet still lives in the heart of every individual person; he is the size of a thumb, a thumb ling.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 115

The idea of roundness, however, is not conceived of as being present from the beginning, but is to be created by the yogi. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 115

Through this invocation he seeks to place himself at one with that being containing within itself the entire cosmos as a transpersonal atman. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 115

And hermetic philosophy itself is not without blame in this. They practiced chemistry in their own way and sought the soul of the world in matter, thereby becoming the fathers of modern science. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 115

The sixteenth-century ascent into a purely intellectual Western philosophy no longer had room for a way of salvation or doctrine of redemption unless it came via knowledge. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 116

Henceforward one philosophized with the head. Whereas the ancients philosophized with the whole person. From then on they philosophized only about the person, not out of the person. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 116

These days we are blinded by the fear of superstition. Magic is objectionable to us. If someone uses the word “magic,” it is construed as being opposite to science. But “magical” simply means “psychological.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 116

Vajra-Muh is a specific type of invocation: muh means to deceive or to blind. Maha, i.e., the blinding, comes from the same root. A moha mantra is the memorized formula for blinding, i.e., it effects what is spoken: blinding. This invocation vajra-muh, causing blinding, is a moha mantra, a spell-binding word. It is used by adherents to blind the demons who could imperil the sacred exercise, shielding the yoga practitioner from the influence of demons. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 118

And in order to be completely liberated he must also create his female unconscious. This, then, takes place through the ten female devatas. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 119

Kandha means the multitude (at the zenith), while roha is the ascending out of the growing (nadir). We visualize the concept, namely, that above or at the top occurs the unfolding, while below grows the root-where the plant grows upwards. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 119

This is evidently the description of a square mandala with doors. The mandala is surrounded by fire, the heavenly flames. This is the fire of concupiscentia, of desire, that gets entangled in new births. This must burn outwards to defend against external temptation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 119

This is a crucial point for the real magic of the Tibetan: the imagination of magic projectiles. They are conjured up for the purpose of this numinous emanation. It is granted, apart from all these forms, that one can also create magical entities through yoga, projectiles that are taken as vajra, which can be imaginally produced so as to harm certain people or even kill them. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 120

You see to what a huge extent the East honors consciousness as the light benevolently supporting man in the terrible darkness surrounding him. This darkness of the unconscious is what the East construes as the epitome of evil. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 120

All evil comes from ignorance. All evil, the entire sum of life, comes from not knowing. You will find this doctrine in the original words of the Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 120

The two causal rewards are the holiness of effort and jnana, i.e., enlightenment. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 121

These devatas are exactly like the buddhas and bodhisattvas who all fill the heavens so powerfully, just like maya, i.e., deceit, illusion, like the being that populates this world. All this multiplicity is illusion. That is what he should think. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 121

“Man as the measure of all things,” the origin of all aspects of the world. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 121

This means that one’s own consciousness, streaming from the ground of the heart, is the source of all perceptible things, whether seen or otherwise perceived through the senses. Not that they are not, but that our perception of them is nothing but illusion. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 122

Again, meditating on Maya (Gyuma, that is the world) as being Shunyata (the Void) inconceivable by thought, say-Om: I am of the nature of the Void and Varja knowledge. [SCST, p. 15] This is the knowledge that anything that we can know of the world, in either the physical or spiritual sense, is psychic. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 122

And while certain psychic things originate in a material world of images and others in a spiritual one, who can say what is physical and what is spiritual? ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 122

We simply have one psychic world of images with two labels, “physical in origin” and “spiritual in origin,” whose reality, however, is purely psychic. If that were not so one wouldn’t know that the world exists. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 122

Shunyata means void. It is an absolute nothing, but a nothing of positive being, a paradox that we simply cannot imagine. Whenever Buddha himself was asked about eschatological concepts, his answers were mostly evasive; he was tight-lipped towards his pupils about certain things, for whatever reasons. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 124

out of the ultimate spiritual concept of shunyata the earth emerges as quinta essentia, as if the imagination did not have spiritualization as its goal but aimed instead at the becoming-real of the tangible earth. That is fabulously different from the Western attitude. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 125

This square earth is also a foundation for the architecture of temples in the Tantric system and for another form of yoga, namely the so-called Kundalini yoga. . ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 125

Herakleitos of Ephesos, pre-Socratic philosopher, who lived around 500 BCE, is reported to have said: “For it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and from water, soul” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 125, fn 332

North=white West=green East= yellow South=red These four different colors also occur in the Bardo Thodol, the four paths to salvation via enlightenment. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 126

The ultimate ideal of the Western intellect is to think without feeling, because feeling is a cosmetic blemish that destroys thinking. In the East that is not the case. The East always thinks as a totality and much more substantially, from the whole person. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 126

We violate the psychic phenomenon if we don’t grasp it with the whole person. Otherwise we’ve understood only one quarter of it, for the intellect amounts to only a quarter of the functions. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 126

For if something is imbued with feeling then you can be sure that in practice it will play a great role, even if the intellect sees it as madness. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 127

Mark Twain, I believe, enumerated every last condemnation of Christian Science. He believed it was complete nonsense. A distillation of human stupidity. But he added that it’s this stupidity that rules the world. A thing need only be really stupid for it to be believed. Everyone understands stupid, whereas intelligent things reach only a few. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 127

Love is warm, otherwise, as is well known, it is not love (South). Sensation has to do with the green earth; it perceives the actual being (West). Thinking is cold and white like snow (North). Intuition is yellow, luminous, radiant, through the sweepingly immediate perception one encounters with this function (East). ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 127

A typical example are Goethe’s eyes in Stieler’s painting, which do not see but rather look; that’s the intuitive glance. It is not directed towards the concrete phenomenon, but keenly absorbs the reality, the whole atmosphere. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 127

The East uses yellow to illustrate the quality of intuition-for with it one feels being rather than formulating it intellectually or more abstractly.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 127

As you see, then, the symbol for the mind is not a masculine symbol as it us for us. Think of logos, God the father, or think of the male Greek god Hermes. It is much more a feminine symbol that characterizes the mind. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 130

And there you see what sort of mind is characteristic for the East, a type of feminine mind (as seen by the man), a sort of unconscious mind. Not the generation of a creation or figure of consciousness but much more a creation of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 130

This is now, as you see, a complete unification of the masculine consciousness with the unconscious feminine mind. We also have certain reference points in Western culture, in that the Holy Spirit would be called upon as mother by the early Christian Gnostics in the Acts of Thomas.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 130-131

The Holy Spirit, Sophia, is a feminine being. There is even a famous love story between Bythos, the primal father, and Sophia, his youngest granddaughter, who falls terribly in love with him. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 131

Jung stayed in Puri with Fowler McCormick from 13 to 15 January 1938, on which occasion he visited the Jagannath and Konarak temples. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 132, fn 343

One often finds wheels on Buddhist monuments because it is said that Buddha set the wheel of the law in motion in his first sermon in the grove at Benares.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 133

The ancient stupa form is similar to the baroque church towers of the Jesuits. It emerges out of a lingam. The stupa building stands exactly at the place where the lingam stands in a Hindu temple. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 133

Krishna as an incarnation of Vishnu is blue, like Osiris in Egypt. The blue body symbolizes the body of a god.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 135

Kamaloka is the world of the senses, rupaloka is the world of form, arupaloka is the formless, spiritual world.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 135

The Indian gods are often represented with three eyes. Here we learn that this is in order to see the three times: past, present, and future. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 135

Rupaloka, i.e., the world of forms or ideas, corresponding to the Platonic world of ideas. According to Plato there is “a place beyond the skies” when the soul lifts above heaven and leaves behind the outer surface of the world, thus arriving at that place where one sees the forms, the eternal ideas; so, that is the world of the manifold ideas, or forms ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 137

 Arupa, i.e., the world in which there are no more forms, where everything becomes Maya, passing away into nothing. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 137

 In Western iconography we have a similar representation of the Trinity: a three-headed divine being in the Christian church. Although this vivid representation has been banned by the pope, in the monastery at Stein am Rhein such a tricephalous Trinity can still be seen. But in India this is still quite common. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 138

 These twelve hands represent the so-called twelve projections. According to the Tibetan definition these are twelve ways in which one can transfer oneself into the consciousness of another human being. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 138

 The twelve nidanas point to one of the basic teachings of Buddhism: this is the so-called nidana chain. This is a doctrine that goes back directly to the Buddha. The classic representation can be found in Nidana Samyutta, one of the collections of the Buddha’s talks. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 138

 Here you see how the entire world-form is derived from the inner realm, from the unknowing or ignorance about the cause of things (avidya). Out of this arise the forms (rupa). Out of these forms arises consciousness that perceives the world. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 139

 The power is Shiva, the creative and destructive god, and his wisdom is Shakti, his consort. The spirit is considered female. This corresponds to the ancient Christian conception of the Holy Spirit as female, as Sophia. Also as sapientia, i.e., wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 140

 Vajra means eternal, and varaht is the feminine of varaha, the third incarnation of Vishnu. In this incarnation, God has taken on the form of a boar named varaha, and is represented as having a human body and a boar’s head. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 140

 The demon is called Hiranyaksha. Hiranya means gold, aksha is the sense organ, akshi is the eye. So this would be translated as golden eye. So this is the demon who sits beneath the sea and holds down the earth beneath it. The remarkable thing is that in the Upanishads, a Hiranyagarbha appears, a golden seed comes out of the womb of the world and has a redemptive significance. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 140

 It can happen that you might wake out of sleep with the feeling that half your soul has wandered off. It must be found again. Among primitives the medicine men have their ways and means of reclaiming lost souls. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 141

 This submersion of consciousness is described here as an extremely unfortunate state. This is due to the primitive fear of the end of the world, for when consciousness perishes the world also perishes, because no one is there to perceive this consciously. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 141

 We do not realize the importance of our consciousness; it is a cosmogonic factor of extraordinary significance. The ancient Indians knew this, and that is why they experienced the end of the world, i.e., of consciousness, as an evil trick played upon them by their evil demon. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 141

 Hiranyaksha is related to Hiranyagarbha. Hiranyagarbha is one of the most significant symbols of the Self, corresponding to the atman-purusha in the atman philosophy. There it is a thoroughly positive figure, but here it is negative. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 141-142

 Yoga is one such technique that aims at creating just that: namely, this descent of consciousness into the depth of the unconscious in order to find God there, for then the Lord of blessedness will arise as Mahasukha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 142

 In the famous cliff temples of Mamallapuram on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Bengal there is a wonderful figure of the Varaha with the boar’s head, his small Shakti sitting upon him, kindly embracing and kissing him on the snout. This seems grotesque to us, but in no way is it repulsive to the Indian. For he sees the idea. Such images are not made for beauty. For an Indian the idea is ceaselessly meaningful and holy. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 143

 The mandala devatas, those divine figures that we have seen so often, are sambhogakaya beings. Sambhogakaya means embrace, relationship, unification, joy in connection. One might very suitably translate it with the alchemical expression of the coniunctio.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 143-144

 We have already seen in Buddha’s talks that the nidana chain unites both worlds. On the one side is nirmanakaya, the kamaloka, the visible world, and on the other side the dharmakaya, the arupaloka, the formless spiritual world of perfect truth.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 144

 Between the formless and the fullness of form stands sambhogakaya. Psychologically expressed: between the one unknowable unity of psychic being and the one essence split into the multiplicity of psyche is a world of form and idea. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 144

 Sambhogaka corresponds precisely to the concept of the collective unconscious. There one finds archetypal forms corresponding to the devatas, those divine beings who represent the intermediary world. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 144

 The gods too disappear again, they are only temporary forms. That is why the gods come to the birth of Buddha and to his death, that is why they need the teaching of the Buddha. They must even become human in order to be redeemed, for that leads to perfection. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 147

Then follows the analysis of perception. There it is demonstrated that the lama is in possession of all of his forms of perception. This is rather like an examination that he conducts upon himself. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 150

The four functions are described as horizon lights. These exist in all religions. In Islam these are the angels of the North, South, West, and East. Here it is the essential components of the all-Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 151

Out of the void (shunyata) the four elements are brought forth. Out of this Mount Meru is constructed. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 152

I am hoping that when you think of alchemy you do not conjure up the art of gold making. That’s an understandable prejudice, a chronic misconception that one can count on. But it is quite doubtful that the making of gold has anything to do with it. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 152

Alchemy has existed since the first century BC, probably longer. It was a peculiar process of initiation, a form of practical yoga, but regarded superficially it can in no way be compared with Indian yoga. However, if one looks into the symbolism more closely, one sees the same initiatic intention. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 152

Yet the procedure is completely different. In alchemy, substances were always worked with. In yoga it happens within the person. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 152

Lat. for “Our gold is not common gold,” a saying that Arnold de Villanova (c. 1240-1301) in the Rosarium Philosophorum attributed to “Senior,” which was the Latin name under which the Arab alchemist Muhammad Ibn Umail (900-960) was known. ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 152, fn 369

One of the earliest alchemists who is well-known to us is Zosimos. He belongs in the third century. A series of Greek texts originates with him. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 153

Women played a great role in alchemy. That is something completely foreign to Eastern yoga, with the exception of Kundalini yoga where the devotion of the community is also shared by women.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 154

“To divide philosophy into four.” Matter was divided into four elements and therefore philosophy had to be divided into four parts. This division into four was described as the series of the four colors: nigredo, i.e., darkness; albedo, i.e., the ascent of light, becoming light; citrinatis, i.e., becoming yellow, and finally the strange color suggested by the Greek word “iosis”: “becoming iosis.” Berthelot sometimes translated it as violet, but that is questionable. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 155-156

An idea one also finds among primitives who differentiate the subtle body, the breath body, from the visible body. The subtle body is also described as anima. In Latin, animus, in Greek anemos, meaning wind or breath, thus a being of breath. This notation runs through the whole of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 156

This separatio elementorum was also equated with the four seasons. The four seasons are the attributes of homo philosophicus. So this primordial man is also paired with time. We find the same ideas in India where Prajapati377 is connected with the year. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 156

“Knowest thou not that heaven and the elements were formerly one, and were separated by a divine act of creation from one another, that they might bring forth thee and all things.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 158 Dorn

In Buddhism it is the sacrifice of the dvidya, of the unknowing, unconsciousness. Out of this arises a differentiated conscious awareness. The instinctive unity is therefore quartered and re-unified. This second unity is Mount Meru.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 160

The mountain was also used symbolically. For example, there is a point in Michael Maier where a vulture sits on the mountain top and says: “I, says he, am the black from the white / and the yellow from the red / the veritable truth that does not deceive.”  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 161

So Christ is the small stone out of which an entire mountain has come. Conversely, Mary is also described as a mountain because the small stone comes from her. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 162

The four elements that emerge from shunyata are the division into four psychic functions or four elements of nature. This corresponds to the divisio aqaue of the primordial water into four elements. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 163

Then to Mount Meru. You know many parallels related to this: Mons, upon which the lapis philosophorum is found, or where the miraculous plant lunaria (flax or darnel) grows. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 164

In the book of Daniel. This stone was always related to the cornerstone, the lapis angularis, and hence Christ was also called lapis angularis or parvulus or exillis in mediaeval language. It was hewn from the mountain, and for this reason the mountain is also Mary.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 164

We must know how the human spirit was originally created. This is a kind of comparative anatomy of the spirit. In comparative anatomy we cannot understand the form if we don’t know the biological antecedents. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 164

If we seek to understand the unconscious psyche, we must understand its history and hence reach back to the earlier functioning of the human spirit. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 164

In the summer we will have the opportunity to discuss the exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the only official medieval form of yoga in the West. The unofficial Western yoga that concurs fully with that of the East is precisely this yoga of alchemy.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 164

Now for the symbol of the city of Brahman. In alchemy we have parallels with civitas (city) or castrum (castle). Mainly we find that civitas or castrum is a symbol of Mary, therefore feminine in meaning, because the city is the cherishing one. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 165

The same idea was present in mediaeval alchemy, that the sapientia Dei was like four castles: one is crystal, the second silver, the third diamond (vajra), and the fourth beyond the domain of the senses, i.e., humanly indiscernible. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 165

 The love of philosophy, the striving for truth, of transformation into incorruptible substance: for these natural philosophers, philosophy was a way to the inner transformation of man, and therefore, as I said, a problem we no longer know anything about. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 165

Hippolytus informs us that there used to be Gnostics who spoke of walls and a castle in which the human soul resides. There is in fact such a text in the Bodleian library in Oxford, the Codex Brucianus. There, a Coptic text has been discovered that is a proper gnosis. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 167

 In Egypt, a series of such texts has been discovered in which there, too (thank god), the writings of Mani were found. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 167

 In the Gospel of John, the Monogenes is replaced with Logos, the Word, the Son of God. This primal being corresponds absolutely to the Indian idea of the purusha, i.e., the original man. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 168

Already in Gnosticism, in this Codex Brucianus of Coptic Gnosticism, we encounter the idea that Christ is the Monogenes, standing on a four-legged podium. That’s the gnostic idea of Christ on the Tetramorph.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 169

This number four is the tetraktys. Other Gnostics describe man as a tetrad, probably referring to our four extremities. Also one revelatory goddess is the tetrad. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 170

 “Leisegang says the word Barbelo comes from the Hebrew words: Barbhe Eloha=’In the four is God.'”  Leisegang adds to this in a footnote: “The tetras of the Ophites: father, son and feminine pneuma, Christ or in the Baruch book: the good, Elohim, Eden, Baruch [ … ] . Barbelo is perhaps also play on words on ‘bar’ and baal.” ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 170, fn 411

What arises from the alchemical retort is the soul, and its ascent is called “blossoming.” Comarius, the archpriest, instructed Cleopatra that the dead who dwell in Hades, i.e., in chaos, will become spring blossoms by sprinkling chaos with the divine water.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 172

 Of course, I’m fully aware that this problem of the active exercise of the imaginative capacity is a matter that is not exactly popular, especially these days while the world resounds with war and rumors of war, and our culture is gradually disappearing into obscurity or at least is threatening to disappear.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 177

 Those of my audience who were here last semester will know that by active imagination we understand an active engagement with otherwise passive fantasy. By fantasy we mean something usually quite useless. Like a leisure activity for people with time on their hands. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 178

 It must be admitted that fantasy is a game, a creative game. In Indian mythology the play of the gods is the making of the world. So, in microcosm, man can become creator? at least “the little god o’ the world” as Faust says. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 178

 In the Middle Ages and in the East fantasy as imagination played a specific role. They trusted it more than we do today.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 178

 The Amitayur-Dhyana-Sutra is the older text. We have a Chinese translation from the fifth century. The Sanskrit original is lost.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 179

 I’d like to remind you that as far as Eastern fantasy is concerned everything has a different character than it does for us. The East, unlike us, does not suffer from a morbus sexualis, in this regard being absolutely normal.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 179

 So when a lotus is imagined upon the firm floor of the real it means that the lotus is really made through the imagination. This is an extremely particular Eastern requirement, this imaginal exertion to create something psychically real through practice and the utmost concentration.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 179

 As a rule it is accepted that psychic reality is nonspatial, for in the East psychic reality is a thing which exists in and for itself, it can be perceived and even induced to appear, but it cannot be invented. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 180

 In the final chapter of the book With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet by Mme. David-Neel, there is a description of how she was guided to produce such a splinter figure within herself, who then however became truculent, and how it took several months to work free of this figure once again. The reality of this description cannot be doubted. I know Mme. David-Neel personally.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 180

 When I went to East Africa to visit the Negroes, a medicine man asked me: “What, you want to study these negroes? That’s not interesting at all. Here you must study the Europeans who come to Africa!” And he was right. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 181

 When the lama imagines something real and it succeeds, then he has made something real. He has created something with his fantasy that adheres to him. His conscious psychology has changed, and he has made another being.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 181

 In any case it is evident that this Buddha corresponds absolutely to the mystical idea of the inner Christ. In the New Testament there are individual places referring to this idea, namely that everyone is in fact a Christ, inasmuch as he succeeds in identifying himself in imagination with Christ. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 181

 Active imagination serves the purpose of introducing psychic enlightenment into this void and thus transforming the inner dark unknowing into the light so that one is not in nonexistence, but one knows that one exists.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 182

 You can also divide the circle into sixteen parts, but the division into four is the simplest, and for this reason it is an archetypal, basic attitude of the human spirit. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 182

 The moon is considered nearly everywhere to be feminine, although it is a masculine noun in German. However, in middle High German mane is feminine. It is the “reflecting light.”  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 183

 With us, in the choir of Christian churches there is the high altar and suspended above it is the cross. In contrast, in the East the holy of holies is in a deep shaft in the earth, three to four meters deep: beneath is a yoni in a lotus, upon which is the lingam, the phallic symbol.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 183

 We associate the spirit with above; in India it is below, in the muladhara, meaning in the root support from which the whole of life ascends.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 183

 In samkhya philosophy, or in Vedanta altogether, the lingam means the subtle body containing the

ancient idea of the anima. The subtle body is thought of as half matter. The soul has a fine subtle body, and it is called lingam. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 184

 The moon (manas) means reflective knowledge, understanding, consciousness, truth. Consciousness ( or psyche) unified with the subtle body (lingam) creates the holy gathering. This is the reality of the Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 185

 All researchers of alchemical history have overlooked the fact that the main point in what they said and thought was not the making of gold. The most important and most interesting thing is that it is a Western form of yoga. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 184

 But in the Middle Ages no one in Europe understood Greek. Not until the time of the humanists, when Byzantium was conquered from the Turks, did part of this Eastern spiritual culture arrive in the West.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 192

 A conjunctio now becomes the ultimate composition. Even the difference between the sexes is removed. I must add that the difference between sun and moon is not thought of as physical. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 192

 Despite the palpable symbolism, the conjunctio is not to be thought of as a physical connection, but rather as a unification of the spiritus, the subtle body. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 193

 Now follows the holy enclosure, the house, the secret chamber. The monastery vihara corresponds to the mysterious vas hermetis in alchemy in which the conjunctio took place. In the Chinese Book of the Yellow Castle it is described as the “purple room in the Nephrite city.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 193

 Then, at last, in the Tibetan text the lord of the whole appears, the personality, the end product: identification with the Buddha. This is where the identification with Christ logically follows. Alchemy compared Christ with the lapis. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 193

 This is that secret, feminine influence. He is also sometimes symbolized by some of the Church Fathers in a feminine way, as “the woman” (mulier), for he could not be the savior if man and woman had not been united in him. All opposites had to fuse within him. That is where the psychological secret gathers itself home. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 193-194

 In the Greek alchemists, in particular with the philosopher Zosimos, a gnostic from the third century, we encounter the symbol of light: photeinos, i.e., of the luminous one or the man of light. This plays a great

role in Gnosticism: the man of light is a spark from the eternal light that has plummeted into the darkness of matter (scintilla, i.e., the spark). Man is to redeem light out of the darkness. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 194

 Alchemy has this belief in common with the East, as you will see: the individual works at what is necessary in order to deliver himself into the state of salvation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 194

 That is why Freud named his work psycho-analysis, i.e., the dissolution of the dark state. In that way one manages to bring a bit of order into the situation. And this bit of order is always a system of four.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 195

The circle signifies the encompassing of the individual who, through insight, has found himself to some degree and who has established his perimeter, his wholeness. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 198

 This division of a circle is not only found in Tibetan symbolism but also in alchemical philosophy where the work is first described as [a] rota (wheel), as a circulating operation or circulating distillation. Somehow a circle had to be produced in order that, through this, the gold, the primal image of the sun, would be formed. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 199

 In this center the four are combined. This corresponds psychologically to a situation where the boundary of the individual has been established through self-knowledge. One has realized: “I am like this and like that. I am not only a light but also a dark person, with positive and negative qualities.”  Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 199

 Within hermetic philosophy, the idea of colors belongs to this synthesis of the quaternity. Cauda pavonis, i.e., the peacock tail, as one calls the stadium. Here unfolds the fullness of colors. These are feeling values.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 199

This wholeness is first understood as a type of intuition about the wholeness of the personality. We must not imagine anything familiar by this. Only a small part of the human personality is known to us, and we do not know how far this unconscious expanse of the human personality reaches. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 199

 There is only one intuitive apprehension of totality. This is the symbol in both the Tibetan and the alchemical series: the lotus, or the golden flower as it is called in Chinese. This is a living symbolization of the quinta essentia. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 200

 The lotus has had a mystical meaning since time immemorial-the plant  that arises from the mud and dirty water. The blossom towers above the surface of the water and unfolds itself onto that surface. For this reason it is always the seat of the gods. Buddha is always depicted enthroned upon the lotus. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 200

 There are people who, being over-modest, always start off putting the wrong foot forward, always living beneath their level. This appears very modest. But beneath, a great list is hidden.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 201

 The Self is never experienced as the I, but, in the ancient texts as well as in personal experiences, the Self is encountered as being quite other than the I, as something superordinate, in which the I is contained. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 201

 This Self is greater than the I due only to its wholeness and expansive nature, with the consequence that it has often been symbolized, as gods always are, as that circle which alchemical philosophy proclaims as the “Circulus aeternitatis symbolum.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 202

 The medieval philosophers said that every man carries his Eve hidden within him. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 205

 Alchemy says that the work should be undertaken in the shadow of the sun. That is the moon. The work must be done out of the sun and the moon, which psychologically means that consciousness and unconscious are yet to be combined. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 205

 A woman is made: in alchemy the femina alba (white woman), the anima or soror mystica, in the Tantric text in the form of the yoni. These extracts of both the masculine and of the feminine are put together, and out of this emerges a true wholeness.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 207

 This is the same as what the East calls maya. Generally it is translated as illusion or delusion but comes from the root “ma,” i.e., to build, hence maya is the building material. Whatever I can touch and perceive is maya. It is a real illusion, an illusion that has become actual. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 209

 The East thinks from inside out, not from outside in as we do. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 209

 The process of sublimation is a process of evaporation where a solid or fluid component is converted into a volatile substance. Freud unwittingly borrowed this description from chemistry. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 209

 Helena is not a feminine figure to be encountered in life, but rather the classical anima figure of Antiquity. She represents what he had first projected into Gretchen in a pure form. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 210

 Namely, this union has a remarkable consequence: in the Gretchen tragedy the biological union leads to a pregnancy and in time a child is born. This ordinary event becomes essential symbolism in alchemy, which is not present in the Eastern series. Such is the secret pregnancy, the soul pregnancy. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 211

 Christ is also worshipped as a child, an infant. In one hymn, Mary is compared with a sea flower. A water flower, growing up out of the water, holding Christ in its lap. Or as a sea flower in which Christ settles as a sea bird. We find the same symbol in Mahayana Buddhism where the Buddha is enclosed in the lotus blossom. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 212

 Whoever has achieved enough merit will have their soul enclosed in a lotus blossom for countless aeons. Then it blossoms one day in the miraculous kingdom of the Amitabha. This is the child being raised from the coniunctio. In Chinese, it is a diamond being. In medieval philosophy it is the incorruptible body, the subtle body, which is seen as the result of this coniunctio.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 212

 These remarkable ideas all point to the basic idea of the man of light, which we all know from gnosticism. For this man who is born is an illuminating being, comparable to the diamond or gemstone. The grail is also a gemstone in Wolfram von Eschenbach. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 212

 For to the extent that this second personality develops, the I dissolves. According to the description in Indian texts, it is as if consciousness dissolves its ties to objectivity, as if abstracting itself from it, from its attachment to objects, so that it almost appears content-free. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 213

 In Buddhism this emptying is taken so far that an unconscious state arises called the void, shunyata: the absolute void. Of course, that is a contradiction in adjecto. I cannot be conscious of the absolute void. But Eastern philosophy doesn’t fret over these nuances. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 213

 There is a very fine Chinese text about this in the Secret of the Golden Flower, which says in poetic language what is also described in Indian yoga.

The Hui Ming King says of this letting-go:

A halo of light surrounds the world of the law.

We forget one another, quiet and pure, all-powerful and empty.

The emptiness is irradiated by the light of the heart of heaven.

The water of the sea is smooth and mirrors the moon in its surface.

The clouds disappear in blue space; the mountains shine clear.

Consciousness reverts to contemplation; the moon-disk rests alone. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 213

 Western man is a good philologist, but he has no clue about yoga experiences. One must have already spoken to the people themselves, the practitioners, in order to pursue these practices. What we get to see in this country are acrobats, not philosophers. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 214

 You know that India does not have a written history. The only historical dates we have about India come from the Buddhist chronicles, aside from which there are no historical records. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 214

 We learn from certain evidence in the writings of Patanjali that he lived in the second century BCE. This comes from a battle report dating from 150 BCE ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 214

 The aim of yoga as Patanjali formulates it is the promotion of the samadhi, contemplation, rapture. There is another word: dhyana, i.e., the state of extasis, rapture in an active sense. Samadhi is contemplation in the passive sense. Therefore the goal of yoga is so-called rapture. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 215

 Ignorance comes down to esteeming or believing in the non-eternal, the impure, and suffering, all mistaken for being eternal, sensual, and the Self. That is why all those things are desired. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 215

 Remarkably, in Buddhism the dominant belief is that karma is not personal in nature. I can accumulate merit in my life, but because I do not have a soul, when my life ends my karma survives and requires a new existence. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 215

 Buddha left the answer absolutely open as to whether this survival of karma means a continued personal existence after death or not. He leaves the question open as to whether karma is not potentiality created by my life, causing another life that is absolutely not connected to me. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 215-216

 Hauer translates “the ‘consumption of the world’ by the ‘man-in-himself.'” He means that if the two are not differentiated, the world is consumed by the purusha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 216

 According to Hauer:

“Man-in-himself” and the “luminous world substance” which forms the organ of the mind are eternally unalloyed. The “consumption of the world” by the “man-in-himself” is made possible by the fact that “luminous world substance” and “man-in-himself” are not differentiated in the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 216

If the concepts one has of sattvam and purusha are not differentiated, then a certain psychic state arises out of this, which Deussen translates as the “world’s pleasure” and Hauer as “eating the world.” Before we can understand this line, we must know what is meant by the terms sattvam and purusha. Page 219

 There, in Krishna’s teaching, we learn what liberation from the gunas means. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 219

The Eastern spirit does not engage in logic, it is perceptual and intuitive. Purusha is better rendered as primal man, man of light, photein6s or luminosum. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 220

Tamas is the opposite: the dark, darkness, heavy, also a state. These are obviously opposites. Rajas is in-between, being dissatisfaction, energizing, because energy resides in dissatisfaction. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 220

aside from the purusha, the primal man or man of light, there is a further, feminine principle: the so-called prakriti. This is nature or matter, the material phenomenon, also described as Shakti in another context. This is materia, the mater natura. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 221

Nous gazes down into the darkness and glimpses his reflection. Attracted by this, the loving arms of Physis reach him, entwining him and pulling him down. It cannot be ruled out that these gnostic ideas were associated with India, as there was some traffic with the Near East from ancient times.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 221

So when the purusha has come down into the darkness of the prakriti and then serves as a lamp to the sattvam, this is obviously a description of the unrecognized Self within man, who employs consciousness in order to orient himself in the darkness of his world.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 222

So when the purusha, this man of light, is located in the prakriti, it is not unitary but multiple. When it enters into material phenomena it splits into very many different figures. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 222

The unity of the purusha is an intuition in Eastern meditation about the nature of man. It is understood that all are only one and that the Self of man, despite all differences, is only ever the one. We find this idea in the philosophy of the Upanishads in the concept of the atman. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 223

At the same time, it is simply the general being of the world. So the purusha is also the individual being, but at the same time the maha-purusha, i.e., the great soul of the world, exactly like the atman.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 223

The idea of samkhya philosophy is that the purusha is always connected to matter. This state is described as samyoga (being yoked together, connected, fettered, bound). Without this connection with the purusha, the prakriti is absolutely inactive. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 223

It unfolds under the influence of, and the causal connection with, the purusha, the man of light. Out of this arises the so-called samsara. This is the result of births, the cycle of existences in which the prakriti unfolds. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 223

The purpose of this unfolding in samsara is to transmit self-knowledge to the purusha through the fullness of phenomena. This is why the prakriti is also portrayed as a female dancer who reflects the fullness of the world, and dances before the purusha so that the purusha can acquire self-awareness out of this fullness. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 223

 The connecting link is now thought of as the subtle body, a finely ethereal body, which the purusha forms with the elements of the prakriti around the sattvam. This linking body is described as lingam. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, 224

It is eternal time, which runs alongside our time. The word for this is altjiranga mitjina.  Aljira is the dream, the unconscious; it is also the place beyond, in which the ancestors, the primeval men live. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 227

The god of the Neoplatonists was called Chronos. He was a god of fire, light, and time. Equally, he was the first cause of all things, therefore the creator of the world, the demiurge. It is the same in gnosticism. There, the creator of the world has the name Abraxas. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 228

If we insert the numeric value of the letters of the word “Abraxas” in Greek, 365 is the result: the creative cycle, the course of the years. This idea also plays a great role in the Mithraic mysteries. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 227-228

This idea of the purusha reaches back into the very beginnings of human thought and represents an identification with nature which has long since become foreign to us. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 228

 The non-differentiation between the representations of sattvam (as proponent of the prakriti) and of the purusha, which are both absolutely distinct, is pleasure [and suffering]: … [YSD 3.35, p. 532)515

Hauer translates it as: “Man-in-himself” and the “luminous world substance” which forms the organ of the mind are eternally unalloyed. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 230

 Tamas is unconscious, for it is darkness. Rajas is energy, described in modern times as libido.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 231

 Yoga therefore demands that the differentiation should be made between purusha and sattvam and that one recognizes that sattvam comes from prakriti. Psychologically, this means that one should differentiate between purusha and sattvam, in other words, between Self and I, because otherwise a connection with prakriti, the world, enters in which also devours one, as one devours it.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 231

 So the non-differentiation of sattvam and purusha means the same as the eating of the world, which is yet the source of suffering.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 232

 The meaning of both translations is that one uses yoga for mastery, yoking, containment of the drives, of the kleshas, so that the other’s interest in the prakriti is separated from one’s own interest in the purusha. In other words: knowledge of the purusha arises through the containment of the energies of the drives manifesting in the world.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 232

 The Vedas speak of three Gunas: nevertheless, 0 Arjuna be thou indifferent concerning the three Gunas, indifferent towards the opposites (nirdvanda), ever steadfast in courage. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 232

 In an old text, the Book of Manu, it says that the creator of the world created the opposites in order to bring about differentiation: Moreover, in order to distinguish actions, he separated merit from demerit, and he caused the creature to be affected by the pairs [of opposites], such as pain and pleasure. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 232

 Now it is an essential ethical task not to be influenced by the opposites, but to rise above them, because liberation from the opposites leads to redemption. In the spirit of the Yoga Sutram, it means that if one separates from the sattvam, one comes to the purusha and finds redemption in the being of the world. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 233

 I repeat this from the Book of Manu:

When by the disposition [ of his heart] he becomes indifferent to all objects, he obtains eternal happiness both in this world and after death. He who has in this manner gradually given up all attachments and is freed from all pain [ of opposites], reposes in Brahman alone.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 233

 Through the containment of the drives the outflow is suppressed, the eye is turned away from the world. One differentiates oneself from one’s own desire for the world by liberating oneself from the attachment to and relationship with the world.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 234

 We must not imagine that we can simply grasp the nature of Indian psychology with our consciousness. Impossible. The essential difference resides in the structure of consciousness: Western consciousness is an absolutely egoic, definite consciousness, which is different in many respects, especially as regards the intensity of Eastern consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 234

 In the East, yoga is not exactly what we would describe as a religious matter. An Indian would laugh at us if yoga were considered a religious act. It is completely banal and quite as ordinary as brushing our teeth is with us; it is not exaggerated or even hysterical. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 235

 The whole mysterious fuss over yoga in the West is seen as ridiculous in the East. These people are trained through education and habit to transport themselves into the void through corresponding education, breathing exercises, sitting exercises. When we do these things they are simply meaningless acrobatic contortions. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 235

 Purusha is a super-consciousness. This is why it is almost impossible to translate the term “unconscious” into Hindi. There is a term: bodhi, i.e., enlightenment, a higher or super-consciousness, an extended superhuman consciousness, namely the consciousness of purusha.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 235

 Meister Eckhart. In his meditation “On the Abandonment of Things” he says:

People say: “O Lord, how much I wish that I stood as well with God, that I had as much devotion and peace in God as others have, I wish that it were so with me!” Or, “I should like to be poor,” or else,

“Things will never go right for me till I am in this place or that, or till I act one way or another. I must go and live in a strange land, or in a hermitage, or in a cloister.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 235

 Meister Eckhart has another term related to this: the concept of detachment. This is directly a differentiation between purusha and sattvam. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 237

 [ … ] but God is apter to adapt himself to me and can easier communicate with me than I can communicate with God. Detachment forces God to come to me, and this is shown as follows. ~Meister Eckhart, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 238

 And humility the masters laud beyond most other virtues. I rank detachment before any meekness and for the following reasons. Meekness can be without detachment but complete detachment is impossible without humility. ~Meister Eckhart, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 239

 Another reason why I put detachment higher than humility is this: humility means abasing self

before all creatures and in that same abasement one goes out of oneself to creatures.  ~Meister Eckhart, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 239

 Know, it was his loving meekness that made God stoop to enter human nature while it remained within itself as motionless, what time he was made man, as it was while he created the heavens and the earth, as I shall show you later. ~Meister Eckhart, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 239

 When anyone asks me, why do we pray or why do we fast or do our work withal, I say, so that God may be born in our souls. What were the scriptures written for and why did God create the world and the angelic nature? Simply that God might be born in the soul. All cereal nature means wheat, all treasure nature means gold, all generation means man. ~Meister Eckhart, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 243

 There is an extraordinary relationship between Eastern ideas and the ideas of Meister Eckhart, which is yet to be fathomed.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 244

 These ideas about the soul as the kingdom of God, these surely already existed in the early Christian period; they were certainly heretical and gnostic in nature, for in them primal man, Adam Kadmon, is sometimes depicted in the soul.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 244

 The purpose of the gunas is the carrying out of world events. This purpose is achieved when cittam sinks back into the prakriti and purusha has returned to its original state. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 249

 This means that he has become eternity insofar as he no longer participates in the dance of the prakriti. Whoever liberates himself from the dance of the prakriti has become the light. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 251

 Emptiness comes as the first of the three contemplations. All things are looked upon as empty. Then follows delusion. Although it is known that they are empty, things are not destroyed, but one attends to one’s affairs in the midst of the emptiness. But though one does not destroy things, neither does one pay attention to them; this is contemplation of the center. While practicing contemplation of the empty, one also knows that one cannot destroy the ten thousand things, and still one does not notice them. In this way the three contemplations fall together. But, after all, strength is in envisioning the empty. Therefore, when one practices contemplation of emptiness, emptiness is certainly empty, but delusion is empty also, and the center is empty. It needs a great strength to practice contemplation of delusion; then delusion is really delusion, but emptiness is also delusion, and the center is delusion too. Being on the way of the center, one also creates images of the emptiness; they are not called empty but are called central. One practices also contemplation of delusion, but one does not call it delusion, one calls it central. As to what has to do with the center, more need not be said. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 252

Purusha, eternal consciousness, combines itself with prakriti in absolute distinctiveness. The conjunction takes place through the co-joining of sattvam (luminous being) with cittam, where human consciousness is the mediator, in order to create a relationship between purusha and prakriti. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 254

 The first question I received asks where one can look up the Upanishads. The best and most comprehensive translation is really Deussen’s. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 255

 Whatever makes its way into the country is assimilated over centuries, and eventually there are 400 million Chinese, and then it partly vanishes, and it’s the same in India.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 255

India has an incredible continuity. Its gods and the basic philosophy of yoga are maybe 6000 years old, and the Hindu religion as we know it today carries within itself the roots of a primeval, primitive religion. It has truly grown up out of its roots. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 255-256

 These are the Germanic peoples who were still absolute barbarians around 1500 years ago. They had a civilization, not a primitive one, but quite barbaric. Even when they began to have contact with the Romans, they were still completely barbaric. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 256

 As you know, through this encounter with high Roman culture, Christianity spread throughout the Germanic territories and fundamentally modified a primitive polytheism that, not yet theistic but still in the stage of demonism, was obliterated by it except for a few traces. That never happened in India. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 256

 An Indian god has never been obliterated, but instead, from the very beginning religion evolved peacefully and sequentially. It emerged out of the primitive stage. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 256

 Brahman, purusha, Prajapati, atman. These stages all exist in India alongside each other. Just as tribes of people exist in India who still wear no clothes but alongside them are highly differentiated, cultured people. The whole of nature has grown along with the Indian. They have developed and differentiated themselves. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 256

 When a young man says to his spiritual adviser: “I can’t believe this or that,” and he says, “You must believe,” then I ask myself: How can one say such a thing? I can believe because I know something, but if I do not know something, then I simply cannot believe it. Faith is a grace I have never had. Either I know something, or I don’t know it. A religious fact must be an experience; belief is not an experience. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 259

 In the East, this is nature. Like flowers and animals. They obey the law of God as flowers do. Religion is everything, except an effort, and if it is an effort it is natural. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 260

 … by this kingdom of God we understand the soul, for the soul is of like nature with the Godhead. Hence all that has been said here of the kingdom of God, how God is himself the kingdom, may be said with equal truth of the soul. St. John says: “All things were made by him.” This refers to the soul, for the soul is all things. The soul is all things in that she is an image of God and as such she is also the kingdom of God; as God is essentially in himself without beginning so in the kingdom of the soul he is, as essence, without end. “God,” says one philosopher, “is in the soul in such a fashion that his whole Godhead hangs upon her.” It is far better for God to be in the soul than for the soul to be in God. The soul is not happy because she is in God, she is happy because God is in her. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 242-243

 Without me, this I know, God cannot live one minute; I perish, and God must as soon give up God’s spirit.

God would not make one worm without me;

yet if I Don’t help God to preserve it, it rots immediately.

I am as big as God, God is so small, like me.

God cannot be above me, I cannot below God be.

God is the fire in me and I in Him the shine; Are we not with each other, most inwardly entwined?

God loves me above all; if I love Him the same, I give Him just as much as I receive from him. For me God’s God and man, I’m man and God, indeed,

For God. I quench God’s thirst, God helps me in my need.

God pleasures us. God is, for us, whate’er we would.

Woe if we don’t become, for God, that which we should.

God is what God is, I am what I am, you see?

Yet if you knew one well, you’d know both God and me.

I am not outside God, God is not outside me.

God is my jewel, I God’s light and radiancy.

I am vine in the Son, the Father plants, manures,

The Holy Ghost’s the fruit which out of me matures.

I am God’s child and son, and yet my child is He.

How can it ever happen that both these things should be?

Myself I must be sun, whose rays must paint the sea,

The vast and unhued ocean of all divinity. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 244-245

 As necessary as the state organization of the masses might be, the value of the whole also very much depends upon the value of the individual. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 266

 So then-going over to the West-I have given a comprehensive portrayal of the Ignatian Exercises, which are a precise counterpart to Buddhist yoga, only in a Christian form and suited to the particular psychology of the West.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 266

 More recently, the spirit has also been portrayed as the “antagonist of the soul” and as an anti-life principle (Klages). Inasmuch as the spirit forfeited its spontaneous revelatory activity, nature also became nothing but matter, the cpucm; (physis) became physics. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 266

 When the “deesse raison,” so-called, arrogates violence, she becomes the murderous “raison d’etat,” which is useful only to rulers, but never any good to humanity. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 267

 A deeper analysis of the phenomena makes us doubt whether spiritual nature is really that different from the physical. Indeed one often has the impression that, in the end, it is one and the same nature that confronts us in two modalities, both drawing upon so-called reason in order to infiltrate the human domain and make the kingship of reason illusory. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 267

 Nature was originally not only matter, but also as much spirit as matter. For ancient man, nature was imbued with spirit, and the theologica naturalis still radiates the face of God out of nature. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 267

 The democritean formula arises from the ancient feeling for nature in which the physical world was not yet devoid of soul. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 267

 The nature of science is knowledge; it does not recognize the piety of faith, but that of research and Knowledge. This side of modern science originates in ancient astrology and alchemy. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 267

 If, in a certain sense, the Exercises delineate a high point of Christian determination to elevate human being, then in alchemy they are countered, by an equally far-reaching effort towards the unconditional liberation of the unconscious spirit, through a spiritual methodology that in every respect is dissimilar to the former. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 268

 “Chakra” is another word for mandala. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 273

 The symbol, the dhvaja lying beneath, is a so-called mandala, which means a circle, a magic circle, and generally has the meaning in the East of a yantra, a cultic instrument for the purpose of supporting meditation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 271

 The Western counterpart of this is the rose window in the West wing of our Gothic cathedrals, or the rosa mystica in the Litany of Loreto. In the East the correspondence with this rose is the lotus or the padma, which is another word for mandala. Mandala is a general description. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 271-272

As with us, in the center of the great wheel sits the rex gloriae, Christ the King, so in the East the Buddha either sits or stands in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 272

 According to the birth legend, Buddha stepped into the lotus immediately after birth and proclaimed the dharma law to the world. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 272

 The text says: “In the end, it is your mind that becomes Buddha, nay, it is your mind that is indeed Buddha.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 272

 Buddha is the inner sun, exactly as Christian mystics describe the experience of God as a rising inner sun. He is the inner Christ. He is the rising sun, for example, in the Acts of the Apostles: “For in him we live and move and have our being” ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 272

 Shunyata is actually the nature of this world, the abysmal void, consciousness, which brings forth only illusory figures, reflections of our own psychic state. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 274

 As you know from the several times it has been mentioned, the lotus means the seat of divinity or the Buddha.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 278

 Upon this there is another lotus, this time signifying the feminine. It is described as padma. padma means womb. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 278

 Then above this, the moon with the symbol of the lingam. This actually symbolizes the unification

of the masculine with the feminine: the moon is the symbol of the feminine, the lingam of the masculine. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 278

By separating himself from the whole environment, he ascends by heaping together into a mountain what was previously scattered over the whole world. In this way he steps forth as a form, his inner being; his inner man becomes visible. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 278

 Hence these many symbols, which we also know in the West: the tree with its roots on top and its leaves below: the tree of yoga. This is a typically Indian idea. However, you can also find it with Ruysbroeck, our European Dutch mystic who certainly could not have known anything of Indian philosophy. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 280

 The idea of the spiritual is also indicated by the moon. In the Upanishads it says: “the moon is formed from its manas.”  Its stem also relates it to the word “mind.” The moon was formed from mind or spirit. The moon represents the spiritual. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 281

In the methods of meditation known in the West, the spiritual is always sharply distinguished from the physical, but this is not the case in the East. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 281-282

 For meditation originates entirely in the body and not at all from spirit. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 282

 Three names became famous in the twelfth century: Hugh of St. Victor, Richard of St. Victor, and Adam of St. Victor, the famous sequences poet. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 284

 The first and principal thing for the soul that strives to ascend to the height of knowledge must be the effort to know itself. ~Richard of Hugo, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 285

 What so excellent did Aristotle or Plato discover; what so excellent was such a crowd of philosophers able to discover? Truly, without doubt, if they had been able by the keenness of their natural ability to ascend this mountain, if their efforts had sufficed for them to discover themselves, if they had known themselves fully, they would never worship idols, never bow the neck to a creature, never raise up the neck against the Creator. Here those searching failed in the search. Here, I say, they failed and were not able at all to ascend the mountain. “Let man ascend to a high heart, and God shall be exalted” (Ps. 63: 7, 8).628 0 man, learn to know; learn to think about yourself and you have ascended to a high heart. The more you advance daily in the knowledge of yourself, the more you always tend to higher things. He who arrives at perfect knowledge of himself already takes possession of the summit of the mountain. 0 how few are those who ascend this far, either because they do not know or because they are not able. It is very rare to ascend this mountain but much rarer to stand on its summit and to stay there. ~Richard of Hugo, Psychology Yoga Meditation, Page 285-286