CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

19 OCTOBER 1932
can criticize and judge, recognize and understand. For when you are just
one with a thing you are completely identical—you cannot compare it,
you cannot discriminate, you cannot recognize it. You must always have
a point outside if you want to understand. So people who have problematic
natures with many conflicts are the people who can produce the
greatest understanding, because from their own problematical natures
they are enabled to see other sides and to judge by comparison. We
could not possibly judge this world if we had not also a standpoint outside,
and that is given by the symbolism of religious experiences.
Now, if the yogin or the Western person succeeds in awakening Kundalini,
what starts is not in any way a personal development, though of
course an impersonal development can influence the personal status, as
it does very often and very favorably. But it is not always so. What starts
are the impersonal happenings with which you should not identify. If
you do, you will soon feel obnoxious consequences—you will get an
inflation, you will get all wrong. That is one of the great difficulties in
experiencing the unconscious—that one identifies with it and becomes
a fool. You must not identify with the unconscious; you must keep outside,
detached, and observe objectively what happens. But you then see
that all the events that happen in the impersonal, nonhuman order of
things have the very disagreeable quality that they cling to us, or we cling
to them. It is as if the Kundalini in its movement upward were pulling
us up with it, as if we were part of that movement, particularly in the
beginning.
It is true that we are a part, because we are then that which contains the
gods; they are germs in us, germs in the mÖlvdhvra, and when they begin
to move they have the effect of an earthquake which naturally shakes us,
and even shakes our houses down. When that upheaval comes, we are
carried with it, and naturally we might think we were moving upward.
But it makes, of course, a tremendous difference whether one flies, or
whether it is a wave or a great wind that lifts one. For to fly is one’s own
activity, and one can safely come down again, but when one is carried
upward, it is not under one’s control, and one will be put down after a
while in a most disagreeable way—then it means a catastrophe. So, you
see, it is wise not to identify with these experiences but to handle them
as if they were outside the human realm. That is the safest thing to do—
and really absolutely necessary. Otherwise you get an inflation, and inflation
is just a minor form of lunacy, a mitigated term for it. And if you get
so absolutely inflated that you burst, it is schizophrenia.
Of course the idea of an impersonal, psychical experience is very
strange to us, and it is exceedingly difficult to accept such a thing, be-
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