Western Consciousness and Eastern Spirituality
During C. G. Jung’s lifetime and after his death, the reproach was voiced from various quarters that the Swiss depth psychologist had not only encouraged interest in Eastern religiosity, but strengthened syncretistic tendencies toward the blending of religions in modern people.
The well-known Dutch theologian Willem A. Vissert Hooft, for many years general secretary of the Ecumenical Council of the church, described C. G. Jung’s school as “the strongest force” on which such a fundamental syncretistic mood was based.
Although Vissert Hooft did not declare Jung’s efforts in the psychology of religion to be unfounded in principle,
he did draw the conclusion: “In any case Jung’s psychology contributed directly or indirectly to the creation of a religious eclecticism in which the most diverse religious conceptions are assembled without any possibility of real spiritual judgment.”1
These words from the Dutch Protestant were preceded by a statement of Jung’s in 1936, in which he objected to the “bankruptcy” of Protestantism, splintered as it was into hundreds of denominations, which “syncretistic outgrowths and … the importation on a mass scale of exotic religious systems” had at least alleviated.
The picture that had arisen, he said, was approximately equivalent to the Hellenistic syncretism of the third and fourth centuries. 2
Nonetheless, it cannot be entirely denied that Jung did in fact sometimes omit certain possible distinctions, for example in this very essay on “Yoga and the West,” where he mentioned in the same breath such hardly comparable movements as Christian Science, the Theosophy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Annie Besant, and Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy.
For all that, though, against sweeping suppositions it must be maintained that on the one hand Jung wished to be understood as neither a religious historian nor propagandist for Oriental religiosity, and on the other his psychological statements must not be mistaken for theological or philosophical ones. Hence in Jung’s case the
usual ecclesiastical argument falls short.
There is no lack of investigations of comparative cultural morphology that make it reasonable to distinguish between Eastern (Asiatic) and Western (European and American) culture, and indeed “on clearly demonstrable structural principles,” according to William S. Haas.
Differing conceptions of time and reality and differences in philosophical thinking on both sides have been presented and examined often enough.
This would probably be agreed to by Jean Gebser, who stresses that the concept of “opposition,” which arises from Western rationality, is by itself insufficient to characterize he comparison of the two intellectual and cultural hemispheres.
“The view that West and East are opposites is false …. West and East are complements.
Compared with the dualistic, divisive character of opposites, that of complements is of a polar, unifying nature. The opposite is a concept, the complement a constellation …. Thinking that is nothing but rational and oppositional leads to division, and in the long run to death.
If in contrast one consciously moves in the field of Western Consciousness and Eastern Spirituality polar tension of complementarity, the possibility of a harmonious wholeness appears.”3
The central premise of Jean Gebser’s assertion is based on insights of Jung’s. It should at least be noted that beyond this there were further noteworthy parallels in the work of Rudolf Steiner, who undertook to elaborate this theme long before
either of them.4
Above all there are two polar pairs of Jungian psychology which are involved here: conscious and unconscious, and the extraverted and introverted attitude types.
The one factor from time to time requires a certain reconciliation to and harmonization with the other, and only thus does wholeness come within sight.
In other words, the encounter of East and West has to do with the individuation process of humankind, with that great task of the present and future whose depth and full scope have hardly been considered up to now! To be sure, Rudyard Kipling’s verse from 1889-“0h East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” -has become a household saying, but the assurance has long lost its validity, even though until now this “meeting” has occurred primarily in the economic and technical sector, and large parts of Asia have been inundated by Western rationality.
Conversely, Eastern spirituality, from which the westernized Chinese, Japanese, and Indian is largely estranged, has come to the West.
Jung pointed out the danger that traditional religious notions can perish from the lack of understanding of their “guardians”:
“The same thing could happen to us as in China, where for example a Chinese philosopher like Hu-shih is ashamed to know anything about the I Ching, and where the profound significance of the concept of the Tao has been lost, and in its place people worship electric locomotives and airplanes.” s
In the context of his coming to grips with a publication by Arthur Koestler, Jung, at the age of eighty-five, expressed his view of the Eastern and Western approaches to reality, shedding light on the intellectual stance peculiar to Western people, determined by ratio and extraversion:
Rationality is only one aspect of the world and does not cover the whole field of experience. Psychic events are not caused merely from without and mental contents are not mere derivatives of sense-perceptions.
There is an irrational mental life within, a so-called “spiritual life,” of which almost nobody knows or wants to know except a few “mystics.”
This “life within” is generally considered nonsense and therefore something to be eliminated-curiously enough in the East as well as in the West. Yet it is the origin and the still-flowing source of Yoga, Zen, and many other spiritual endeavours, not only in the East but in the West
too.6
Thus C. G. Jung recognized, on the one hand, the need of the intellect-ruled Western mentality to be supplemented; he knew that East and West each represented half of the one spiritual universe and that each of these standpoints, though they were at variance with each other, had its psychological justification.
But on the other hand Jung made no bones about his rootedness in the Western tradition, which bore the stamp of Christianity, and which made it seem impossible to him to accept untested or simply imitate the arrangements by European people of the Eastern spirit, which he also admired.
Before dealing with Jung’s numerous statements on general and specific problems of the spiritual life of the East-the pertinent works are assembled in Volume 11 of The Collected Works: Psychology and Religion: West and East-it should be asked what significance he attributed to this area. In the preface to the second edition of his commentary on the Chinese text The Secret of the Golden Flower, edited by Richard Wilhelm, Jung commented on misinterpretations like those mentioned at the outset, which many readers of the book might make.
It had often been found, he said, that people thought that the aim of its publication was to put a method of
finding salvation into the hands of the Western public. “Such people have then tried-failing completely to understand anything I said in my commentary-to imitate the ‘methods’ of Western Consciousness and Eastern Spirituality the Chinese text.
Let us hope there were only a few of these representatives of the spiritual nadir. “7
Jung saw the second misconception in the notion that he had in his commentary been describing to a certain extent his own special psychotherapeutic methods, which consequently were supposed to consist in his suggesting Eastern ideas to his patients as possible healthy goals.
Such a notion, he said, was wrong and based on the still widespread assertion that psychology was an invention for a specific purpose and not an empirical science, as he had always represented it.
Jung also refuted these misunderstandings in other contexts.
Characteristic of his attitude toward the East, for example, is the commemorative address he gave in Munich on 10 May 19 30, on the death of Richard Wilhelm.
There he demanded, for the understanding of Eastern spiritual culture, the overcoming of the prevailing prejudice along with a simultaneous opening up to foreign mentality.
By this he meant an “understanding openness, beyond any Christian resentment, beyond any European arrogance.” Then:
A mere sensation or a new thrill is of no use to the European mind. We must rather learn to earn in order to possess. What the East has to give us should be merely a help to us in a work which we still have to do. What good is the wisdom of the Upanishads to us, and the insights of Chinese yoga, if we abandon our own foundations like outworn mistakes, to settle thievishly on foreign shores like homeless pirates?8
The speaker was no less clear in pointing out the need to expand the European concept of science, emphasizing that those who wished to experience the living wisdom of China must first begin with themselves, with the self-knowledge that stems from European tradition, for “our way begins with the reality of Europe, and not with yoga exercises that are supposed to blind us to our own reality.”
Jung foresaw-even in 1930-that “the Spirit of the East is really ante portas!” And he already saw two possibilities in the approaching confrontation between East and West.
A healing power could by all means be concealed in it, but so could “a dangerous infection.”
Consequently the diagnostician left it to his client’s judgment to make what he could of these possibilities.
In the meantime, after more than half a century corresponding experiences could be attained-positive as well as negative.
Some five years after this address in Munich, in February 1936, Jung published in English in the Calcutta journal Prabuddha Bharata the already-mentioned article “Yoga and the West.”
If his studies together with Richard Wilhelm had earlier prompted him to delve into the nature of East Asian tradition, this small treatise showed how he evaluated the Indian system of mental and physical education as a Western psychologist.
No doubt the studies on Kundalini Yoga he had carried out with the Indologist Wilhelm J. Hauer made themselves felt here.
Jung looked first at the developments that had introduced Westerners to the conflict between faith and knowledge, between religious revelation and rational deduction.
Jung found a lack of direction [ which J borders on psychic anarchy ….Through his historical development, the European has become so far removed from his roots that his mind was finally split into faith and knowledge, in the same way that every psychological exaggeration breaks up into its inherent opposites. 9
With this statement the author did not fail to appreciate that aspects of the history of consciousness could be won from this route which Erich Neumann had placed under his lens. 10
Jung’s finding-which, significantly, he published in an Indian journal-was:
The split in the Western mind therefore makes it impossible at the outset for the intentions of yoga to be realized in any adequate way …. The Indian … not only knows his own nature, but he knows also how much he himself is nature. The European, on the other hand, has a science of nature and knows astonishingly little of his own nature, the nature within him.11
This is reminiscent of his demand for a picture of man that embraced all of reality, consciousness as well as unconscious.
Further, the psychologist looked at the differing psychic disposition which is something quite other in Eastern people.
Therefore his advice was to study yoga carefully after all, which did not mean, however, to practice it at all costs. The question of practicing an Oriental course of training was indeed one that could not be taken seriously enough.
Jung’s thought culminated in the provocative forecast: “In the course of the centuries the West will produce its own yoga, and it will be on the basis laid down by Christianity.”12
Even this statement should probably be taken with a grain of salt, if confusion is to be avoided with what has occasionally come into circulation as “yoga for Christians” or ”yoga for the West.”
Clearly more was intended than simply a pragmatic evaluation of Eastern practices for Western people. So it remains to ask what such a yoga might look like, that would be suited to Westerners, their specific human burden, their particular state of consciousness, and would-in contrast to Eastern yoga-be oriented to the experience of Christ.
In speaking of such a path of initiation and the search for spiritual knowledge which corresponds to the modern state of consciousness as well as continuing the tradition of an esoteric Christianity, one cannot ignore the mention of
anthroposophy.
Rudolf Steiner presented his “anthroposophically oriented spiritual science” primarily as a “way of knowledge, which might guide the spiritual in man’s nature to the spiritual in the cosmos.” 13
Compared with the humanistic and scientific disciplines, it was an “enlargement” of the view of natural science. This amounts to an overcoming of the one-sidedness’ whose correction concerned C. G. Jung in his own way, although there can be no question of a direct contact or even ideological connection.
Jung did not pursue the thought of a Western “yoga” path any further. Anthroposophy was just as suspect to him as was its founder. “I have already read a few books by Steiner and must confess that I have not found anything in them that would be of any use to me at all,” Jung wrote in 19 3 5 .14
And a quarter century later the old man told a pair of English visitors, partly in earnest and partly in jest, that he would have preferred to have Steiner locked up.15 Of course it is not out of the question that Jung referred less to Steiner than to his uncritical disciples. Thus the letter from 1935 reads:
I have also become acquainted with very many anthroposophist’s and theosophists and have always found to my regret that these people imagine all kinds of things and
assert all kinds of things for which they are incapable of producing any proof at all. 16
And Jung cannot have been entirely uninformed. His cousin Ernst Fiechter (1875-1948), the architect of his home in Kiisnacht, was an anthroposophist, a student of Steiner himself, and toward the end of his life he was a priest in the service of the (anthroposophical) Community of Christ. 17
In family relationships the subject of anthroposophy cannot have been excluded.
Jung’s misgivings regarding a path of spiritual knowledge were undoubtedly of a fundamental nature and not at all directed against any particular method, be it an Eastern or a Western discipline.
As can be gathered from one of the late letters to Melvin J. Lasky, the experienced depth psychologist saw the problem where people sought to bypass spiritual originality and spontaneity by means of a practice of one kind or another.
But naturally, primal spiritual experience cannot be manufactured at will. As can be observed, the number of those who travel the path consistently is small, while the mass of adherents devote themselves to the mere recitation of the sayings of the master:
[One seeks,] through the application of a method, to attain the effect of the primordial experience, namely, a kind of spiritual transformation. The depth and intensity of the original emotion become a passionate longing, an enduring effort that may last for hundreds of years, to restore the original situation. Curiously enough, one does not realize Western Consciousness and Eastern Spirituality that this was a state of spontaneous, natural emotion, or ekstasis, and thus the complete opposite of a methodicallyconstrued imitation. 18
Great as Jung’s skepticism was, he had to concede in all honesty that a patient and careful effort did have a definite psychic influence, positively as well as negatively.
Thus, for instance, people eagerly pursued Zen and yoga-instead of concerning themselves with the irrational life within themselves-and preferred to consider only that which lies within reach on the surface.
But the secret longing for wholeness remains. The state of affairs remains that the West is too much cut off from the unconscious and the East tends to identify itself with it completely.
An encounter of East and West is especially not without danger when Eastern magical methods are adopted without control, when the necessary safeguard that is always called for in the face of the unconscious is dispensed with.
Otherwise it is all too easy for a kind of inflation to take place, an inundation from the unconscious for which the ego is no match.
For, as Jung continued in a letter he wrote to Australia in December 1960:
These Eastern methods don’t enrich consciousness and they don’t increase our real knowledge and our self-criticism, and that is the thing we need, namely a consciousness with a wider horizon and a better understanding. That at least is what I am trying to do for the patient: to make him independent and conscious of the influences of the unconscious.19
Thus Jung’s relationship to the subject of a process of initiation was rather a broken one. This does not exclude the possibility that analytical psychotherapy can lead to insights which benefit spiritual development.
The path of individuation and the process of initiation correspond to one another.
This is shown by the confrontation and collation with the anthroposophical way of knowledge20 and also by undertakings such as Count Karlfried Diirckheim’s “initiative therapy.”
21 Jung himself did not feel called upon to be a renewer of culture or founder of a science of initiation. But a psychologist with his innate far-sightedness would have found an investigation into the ways of spiritual training practiced in the West desirable.
One wonders whether this suggestion-beyond an interpretation of the Exercitia Spiritualia of Ignatius and the alchemistic process-was ever made to him.
It remains to establish that C. G. Jung did indeed compose psychological commentaries on texts from the area of Eastern religions and philosophies, and wrote detailed forewords to the books of D. T. Suzuki and Heinrich Zimmer, as well as the I Ching.
But anyone who wishes to go further into his call for a Western “yoga” finds himself continually faced with skeptical statements.
At decisive moments-such as on his journey to India-Jung’s own unconscious directed him to the center of Western esoterism, the search for the Holy Grail. And it is left to the readers of Jung’s works to take up the abundantly scattered references to Gnostic elements, Rosicrucianism, and the mystical path and make them bear fruit for themselves
and their own inner way within the context of his interpretation of alchemy. Here lies a treasure that has as yet hardly been raised, a treasure for both religious and spiritual seekers. ~Gerhard Wehr, Jung: A Biography, Page 459-469
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