CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

APPENDIX 3
symptomatology of the case, and it was that which forced me to look into
things; I had the idea that something of the sort existed in the East. It was
soon after Avalon’s book The Serpent Power was published, 23 and there I
found the parallel. You see, first was the elephant in mÖlvdhvra, second
was svvdhiü°hvna, the water region, and after that the emotional center,
maõipÖra; and then it did not go on continuously—something came
from above, and this brought about the dissolution. At first it was absolutely
dark to me; I could not understand what had happened. But subsequently
I understood that this was the awakening from above, and she
could then disentangle herself from the maze of the exotic jungle. She
could objectify the Indian psychology that had been grafted upon her
with the milk she drank from that ayah and through the suggestion of
her surroundings. She became liberated by the objectivity and could accept
European life. And, quite naturally, she objectified her whole development
in the most beautiful mandalas. Now, mandalas are really
cakras, though in our experience there are not just six but innumerable
mandalas. But they really should be arranged like the cakras, one above
the other. The first ones are usually connected with mÖlvdhvra, andthen
they gradually come up, and wind up with analogies to the vjñv center,
or even the sahasrvra, the highest, the seventh center—they are really an
equivalent in a way.
Since then I have had a number of experiences, and found a certain
regularity in them: it was quite clear that a certain set of mandalas, or
psychological conditions, belonged to the psychology of the mÖlvdhvra
region, namely, a sort of complete unconsciousness in which one lives
merely instinctively. Then the next is the region of the diaphragm, and
the third is the heart. Now, among the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico I
made friends with an interesting fellow who was the chief of religious
ceremonies. He confessed to me that they believed all Americans were
crazy because they said they thought in the head, whereas the Indians
knew that the normal thing was to think in the heart. I stared at him and
23 The Serpent Power was published in 1919. The copy in Jung’s library is the first edition.
In “The Realities of Modern Psychotherapy” Jung stated: “It is, as you see, quite impossible
that the patient knew the book beforehand. But could she have picked up a thing or two
from the ayah? I regard this as unlikely, because Tantrism, and in particular Kundalini
Yoga, is a cult restricted to southern India and has relatively few adherents. It is, moreover,
an exceedingly complicated symbolic system which no one can understand unless he has
been initiated into it or has at least made special studies in this field” (§559). Jung overestimated
the obscurity of Kundalini yoga—for instance, Swami Vivekânanda had included an
account of the cakras and the means of awakening the Kundalini in his Yoga Philosophy:
Lectures Delivered in New York, Winter of 1895–1896, 5th ed. (New York, 1899), without, however
going into detail concerning their iconography.
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