Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
There is an interesting legend in one of the books of Madame David-Nee!.
A young girl was fetching water at a spring when a man suddenly approached her and tried to have intercourse with her.
She was very much frightened and escaping from him ran b ack to her mother.
The mother listened to her story and asked her to describe the man.
The girl did so and the mother said : “That was a Holy Man, you should have done as he asked. Put on your best dress and run b ack to the spring and offer your self to him.”
The girl obeyed but when she got back the Holy Man replied:
“It is too late now, it has already happened. A rich lama who was lazy and ignorant has just died in complete darkness. His soul immediately sought for reincarnation and I wanted to give him a better Karma with you. But you refused, and while you were away the male donkey in that field covered a female donkey and the lama’s soul was caught in that uterus, so now he will be born as a donkey.”
This story is exceedingly typical of the eastern point of view.
Souls have sexual phantasies and by that they are attracted to the places where such things are happening and then they are caught in the life which the East calls Maya.
Easterners think of the visible world as an illusion, a sort of thought stuff.
The lady with the lotus net is the mistress of that prison.
The Yogin sees the visible world as the distinctness of divine thought.
The text continues:
“As one desires a precious object by means of which only one can acquire merits the purification and mental transmutation of all the
aggregates the elements, and the functions of the various organs of the senses into Devata furnish such an object.”
The meaning of this passage is that through active imagination the Yogin succeeds in making his senses a-nd functions independent. It is the purification of the senses.
They are Devatas, autonomous beings , it is no longer my act but a divine being.
There is enormous psychological merit in such a procedure.
We saw before that the functions became “each a Tathagata” .a Buddha .
It is possible through active imagination, to make all the psychic activities into separate entities , in this way they are removed from oneself.
One’s thinking, for instance, becomes a separate being, you see it no longer as your own action but as a daemon.
If all the parts of myself are outside myself I become helpless,
I cannot think. I must say to Mr. A: “Think please..” Or if feeling is called for I must ask Miss B : “Smile a little please.”
Through delegating the functions I become a whole theatrical comp any, instead of one person, who act me to myself. I am emptied of them, and then I find that I am Shunyata, the Void, everything is outside me.
We, in the West, do the s ame thing but not in the s ame way, we simply naively project.
We keep a best enemy who acts us to ourselves ! Every neurotic does this , but in this case we need make no such distinction, the “normal” do it just as much. Projection can even lead to ideas of persecution.
Everything which we do not w ant to see in ourselves is there all the same and we must get excite d about
it, so we excite ours elves about someone else , he does it, anything in order not to see it in ourselves .
We can see this process everywhere, the generous person with the miserly friend, the spendthrift who saves matches , etc . , etc.
This process is entirely unconscious with us , the things leave us, and we are free of them but we are bound to the people who do them for uss . Or family , friends, a n d whole social circle are all put to this unconscious u s e . ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 59-60
