The desire for self knowledge is just as much a desire as the desire for food or sex.
The most enigmatic model for metaphysical fascinations of the mind in our age is undoubtedly the Eastern, particularly the Hindu, which consistently employs metaphysical and cosmological language to express what to Jung would appear to be psychological statements.
Jung contended that the search for the wisdom of the East had almost darkened the mind of the West and that, in fact, it is a search that continues to lead countless persons astray.
The alms of the East should not be accepted by us as if we were beggars, said Jung, and the thinking of the great alien cultures of the Orient should not be imitated by Westerners unthinkingly.
In the words of Jung, those who, after the fashion of homeless pirates, settle with thievish intent on foreign shores are in the gravest of all dangers, that of losing their souls. (See C.G. Jung’s Commentaries on The Secret of the Golden Flower, and also “Yoga and the West,” in Jung’s Collected Works, Vol. 11, pp. 529-539.)
The greatest peril we may run with such imitative exercises, however, is not merely the result of the alien cultural impact of the traditions thus imitated, but of some of their content.
The approach of much Indian thinking, Hindu and Buddhist alike, appears to be the very obliteration of individual consciousness which Jung warns us about in connection with the submerging of the soul into the Pleroma.
When desire is killed out by a variety of methods of meditation and contemplation, what remains is a psychic corpse from which the libidinal cosmic force of the vital surge has been artificially removed.
One can perish of psychic pernicious anemia as well as from its physiological analogue, and the fulfillment of such objectives as desirelessness and egolessness may very well lead to just such a condition.
The desire for self knowledge is just as much a desire as the desire for food or sex.― Stephan A. Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung, Page 71-72
