CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

HAUER'S ENGLISH LECTURE
and the thousands of very good intellectual heads that have worked at it.
Of course it becomes dogmatic.
Miss Hannah: Is psychology already dogmatic?
Dr. Jung: Yes, when people say there is no such thing as the unconscious,
and you say, “That is heresy.” Then you are getting dogmatic
under your skin, and you do not notice it—like going black in Africa. 7
Miss Thiele: Professor Hauer said yesterday that no European had ever
actually awakened the Kundalini in a higher sense except possibly Suso, 8
but would it be possible with the help of the analytical process to get to
the stage at which one might?
Professor Hauer: In a thousand years perhaps.
Dr. Jung: You must never forget that India is a very peculiar country.
The primitive man has lived there since time immemorial and has grown
up in absolute continuity. We have not grown up in continuity. We were
cut off from our roots. Moreover the Hindu is a very different race. Not
only is it Aryan but there is a great deal of the aboriginal influence of
Dravidism. Therefore there are very old chthonic things in the tantric
yoga. So we must admit that this particular yoga philosophy is strange to
our very blood, and whatever we may experience will take an entirely
different turn. We can never take those forms over literally. That would
be a terrible mistake, for to us they are artificial processes.
Remark: I thought some of the process according to our Western conception
was similar to that of the Indian yoga.
Dr. Jung: Yes, analytical psychology is, of course, an attempt of a similar
sort. We did not know that there was such a close analogy with tantric
yoga when we were elaborating the beginnings of it. The tantric texts
were not translated, and even the experts on that sort of thing knew very
little of the tantric yoga. Only recently has it become known, through Sir
John Woodroffe’s translations. Our attempt is a perfectly genuine naive
attempt in the same field—of course, with different means, according to
our different temperaments and attitude.
Professor Hauer: You know, you must compare the preparatory work
which is done now by analytical psychology with the stages of yoga four
or five hundred years before it became a system. It first became a system
at the time of Buddha, or not long before. What is being done by analytical
psychology was done by the thinkers and brahmins of about five hundred
years before Buddha. The names have been lost. We see only little
7 On Jung’s fears of “going black” during his visit to Africa, see MDR, 302.
8 In answer to Dr. Shaw’s question “Do you mean that no one has awakened Kundalini?”
Hauer replied: “No one in the West, I think, but I do not know. . . . I do think that Suso, the
German mystic of the Middle Ages, had the same kind of experience” (HS, 99).
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