CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

INTRODUCTION
If Jung’s seminars are evaluated from the perspective of understanding
Kundalini yoga within its own sociohistorical context this criticism is
doubtless valid. However, within the context of Jung’s collaboration with
Hauer, this was the task of the latter; Jung’s aim was to elucidate the
psychological meaning of spontaneous symbolism that resembled that of
Kundalini yoga. In this respect, Jung stated in a letter that “the entry of
the East [into the West] is rather a psychological fact with a long history
behind it. The first signs are found in Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Kant,
Hegel, Schopenhauer, and E. von Hartmann. But it is not at all the actual
East we are dealing with but the fact of the collective unconscious,
which is omnipresent.” 112 Thus for Jung, the Western “discovery” of the
East constituted a critical chapter in the “discovery” of the collective unconscious.
Jung’s psychological interpretation is predicated on the assumption
that Kundalini yoga represented a systemization of inner experience
that spontaneously presented itself in the West in a mode that
resembled but was not necessarily identical with the way it did so in the
East. This is borne out by an interchange shortly after the Kundalini seminars
in the resumption of the seminar on visions:
Mrs. Sawyer: But in the cakras we always had the Kundalini
separate.
Dr. Jung: Quite, and in this case they are apparently not separate,
but that makes no difference. We must never forget that the Kundalini
system is a specific Indian production, and we have to deal here
with Western material; so we are probably wise to assume this is for
us the real stuff, and not Indian material which has been differentiated
and made abstract since thousands of years. 113
rubric of Gadamerian hermeneutics. For a critique of Jung’s approach to Eastern thought,
see Richard Jones, “Jung and Eastern Religious Traditions,” Religion 9 (1979): 141–55. For
an appreciation, see F. Humphries, “Yoga Philosophy and Jung,” in The Yogi and the Mystic:
Studies in Indian and Comparative Mysticism, edited by Karl Werner (London, 1989), 140–48.
112 Jung to A. Vetter, 25 January 1932, Jung: Letters, vol. 1, 87; translation modified. For
Schopenhauer on India, see Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, 427–35. Schopenhauer had
compared Meister Eckhart’s writings with the Vedanta (ibid., 428). Buddhism featured
prominently in von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the unconscious)
(Berlin, 1870).
113 Jung, The Visions Seminar, vol. 7, 30–31. In his account of spontaneous Kundalini experiences
in the West Lee Sannella also highlighted a notable divergence from the Eastern
depictions: “According to the classical model, the Kundalini awakens, or is awakened, at
the base of the spine, travels straight up the central axis of the body, and completes its
journey when it reaches the crown of the head. . . . By contrast, the clinical picture is that
the Kundalini energy travels up the legs and the back to the top of the head, then down the
face, through the throat, to a terminal point in the abdominal area.” The Kundalini Experience:
Psychosis or Transcendence? 106.
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