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JUNG AND SRI AUROBINDO:
COMPARISONS AND DIFFERENCES
Running Head: Jung and Sri Aurobindo
David Johnston
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
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ABSTRACT
In this paper, I favourably compare the psychology of C. G. Jung and the yoga of
Sri Aurobindo.
In particular, I show where each of the two approaches to
yoga/psychology fully accepts both the masculine principle and the feminine
principle. In Jung’s case, the feminine principle of Eros is particularly evident in
his study of alchemy whereas, in the case of Sri Aurobindo, one can see it in his
high regard for Tantra and the feminine creative power, Shakti. Sri Aurobindo
also extols the Bhagavad Gita with its Karma yoga, which involves devotion to
the maculine principle, the Purushottama, the Divine Will.
Likewise, Jung
emphasises the Logos, the masculine principle of discernment, and the need to
align one’s life with a superior Will.
I also discuss the nature of the ego and the incarnated soul from the point of view
of both Sri Aurobindo and Jung and conclude that they are essentially saying the
same thing. In both cases there is a need to disengage from illusory aspects of
life and to find one’s true individuality.
For the sake of putting things in
perspective in relationship to mainline Western psychology, I then show how
different Jung’s view is from other schools of Western psychology, which either
undervalue what Jung refers to as the ego [and Hindu tradition refers to as the
purusha/ego] or overvalue it.
Finally, I describe what I believe to be the key differences between Jung’s path
and that of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. For one thing, when they were alive,
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the formers disciples were mainly Westerners, while those of the latter were
mainly Indians. However, the principle difference is related to the fact that the
disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother accept them as the Avatars for our
time, whereas some of Jung’s main disciples consider him to be a prophet.
Avatars embody the Word, whereas the prophet is compelled to announce to the
people what he sees and understands the Word to be. This suggests that Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother understand more clearly the nature of the new integral
consciousness seeking embodiment, but that Jung also sees it, although a little
less clearly.
In the final analysis, in my personal experience, both paths
converge and can contribute to one’s quest for understanding and psychological
assimilation of the new consciousness incarnating today.
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JUNG AND SRI AUROBINDO:
COMPARISONS AND DIFFERENCES
Introduction
Once I had agreed to make this presentation on the work of C. G. Jung and Sri
Aurobindo I wished that I had not so readily undertaken such a foolhardy
challenge. How does one compare the many-sided genius of two such men, two
giants of civilization, one from Switzerland and Europe and the other from India?
To make a comparison in any critical sense of the word is simply not possible for
me to do. My experience of their respective paths, that is to say my
understanding, is far too limited to have any such pretensions. It would only be
possible for Jung and, perhaps, his most important disciple, Marie Louise von
Franz, and Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual colleague the Mother, to do justice to
such an undertaking.
I present these ideas then with the caveat that it is, by
definition, subjective and based on my own limited experience and understanding
Before I go on I should state that sometimes I refer to Sri Aurobindo alone, other
times I refer to the Mother and sometimes I refer to both. In all cases, however,
the other is always implied. In a deeper sense, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
really come together as two sides of the same consciousness, the masculine and
the feminine. “Without him,” writes the Mother (1961, p.29), “I exist not, without
me he is unmanifest.” In this paper, however, I refer mainly to Sri Aurobindo
because he is the one who laid out the main conceptual framework for their yoga.
Acknowledging the reality of such a phenomenon no doubt seems very strange
for the average person, especially from the West. What I would ask the reader to
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do at this point is to hold it in the back of your mind, while reflecting on the fact
that the new consciousness trying to incarnate today is based on the
reconciliation of the masculine and feminine principles. In fact, being faced with
this kind of perception of reality is a good way to begin one’s encounter with the
mystery that is India.
Although they were contemporaries: Sri Aurobindo was born in 1872, the Mother
in 1878 and Jung in 1875, and Sri Aurobindo and Jung knew of each other’s
existence, neither really knew the full extent of the other’s work and the direction
it was taking. In my estimation their respective psycho-spiritual paths are very
much along the same lines although Sri Aurobindo and the Mother take the
process further. Whereas Sri Aurobindo is firmly planted in the spiritual traditions
of the East, in particular India, he fully embraces the truth of the more extraverted
and materialistic West. In fact, he was educated in England from the age of
seven [7] to twenty-one [21] and was a first-class Cambridge scholar. Likewise,
although Jung is fully ensconced in traditional Western values he turns inwards
to esoteric Western traditions, such as Gnosticism and alchemy, and the East.
I hope that it becomes clear that, although both these two men were rooted in
their respective cultures and spiritual history, their legacies to humankind are
unique and, in both cases, they represent a further impetus to the evolutionary
spiral of consciousness.
I am not pretending to make a definitive critical
comparison. All I can hope to do is, in a general way, outline what I understand
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their respective schools of psychology and yoga-psychology are all about. I am
making this presentation in the spirit of deep respect and gratitude to both men.
India
India is the land of the snake charmer and, in my subjective feeling experience,
moonlit nights perfumed by the sweet smelling flower, the rath ki Rani or Queen
of the night. It is the land of unfathomable mystery with countless temples raised
from the rich loam of the earth in honour of a myriad of gods and goddesses, as
well as the land of the purest whitest rose ever hewn by human hands, the Taj
Mahal, as a monument to human love. By the year 2001 it has also become the
country with the world’s largest middle class consumer culture, existing cheek
and jowl with extreme material poverty and corruption in all walks of life.
India gave birth to the Buddha, yet Buddhism, as a religion, is almost nonexistent there.
It is the land of Vishnu slumbering for thousands of years,
dreaming the life of a sea of teeming millions who are actively engaged in the
busyness of life. One of Vishnu’s historical incarnations is the playful god of love,
Krishna, enamoured by a sea of female cow-herders, especially his beloved and
spouse Radha, the human soul in loving surrender to the Divine. India is the
land of many gods and goddesses yet one, the Absolute and unknowable,
transcends them all.
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In contemporary India one finds the most primal people living side by side in a
seemingly unbroken chain with people living in a mediaeval-like way right up to
those living in a contemporary consumer society along with international
jetsetters. Always behind the scene, in the forests, in the mountains, in the
villages and cities, lurks the yogi or wanders the monk, the sanyasin. One has
the uncanny feeling that behind the many faces and moods of contemporary
India one finds eternity.
Indeed, Indian culture has always been in its essence spiritual, dating back some
five thousand [5000] or more years and, it seems, beyond to another cycle of
human evolution altogether (M. P. Pandit, 1967). Moreover the feminine
principle, represented by the goddess, is everywhere in India and equal to the
masculine principle, which is represented by the gods. The original revealed
scriptures are known as the Vedas.
The Upanishads, which revived the
knowledge aspect of the Vedas and the Brahmanas, which developed the ritual
aspect, followed. Later there was Tantra, a democratizing religious and spiritual
tradition, which also declared its foundation to be the Vedas. The Gita, another
important spiritual tradition that has claims links to the Vedas and Upanishads,
developed and refined the devotional aspect of spiritual life.
It is the spiritual emphasis, then, that makes Indian culture so different, indeed
apparently diametrically opposite to the culture of the West. Although at the
outset, during the time of the Vedas, spirit and matter were considered to partake
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of the same reality, since the time of the Buddha, born some six hundred [600]
years before Christ, the principal overriding influence on the Indian mind has
been that the world, nature in the most all-embracing sense of the word, is māyā
meaning illusion or, at best, a kind of relative reality. With some ambiguity, this
view was later reinforced by the teachings of Áchārya Śankara sometime around
eight hundred [800] C. E. (R. Otto, 1960).
By nature I mean not only the physical world and the sensations but also the
mental and vital or life worlds along with the attending emotions, the intuitions,
and the ego.
For many traditional Hindus, all this is ultimately illusion.
Yet
individuals are still expected to responsibly live out the different stages of life in
the natural way of things as a child, a student, a householder and worker and
finally as an older person detaching from life. Indeed, the highest ideal placed
before the race eventually became to withdraw from the world and worldly affairs
into the forest or mountains to seek liberation from the clutches of this unreal
world in search of the true reality beyond. The goal became detachment from
the wheel of karma, which is to say the interacting cause and effect play of life.
From reports of spiritual adepts in both the East and the West there is an egoless
self-absorbed state of trance completely divorced from the senses and objects,
where one becomes immersed in a sea of Bliss, Consciousness and Being or
Non-Being. Thus, in the Vishnupurana 2, 16 verse 23, one reads:
All, whatsoever is here, that is the one, Acutya.
From Him, there is no other, nothing different.
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He is I, He is also thou, He is all this.
Therefore let go the mirage of multiplicity. (R. Otto, 1960 p.75)
The final goal of spiritual attainment for Āchārya Śankara is to attain identity with
the transcendent One above the many, where the many becomes the obscuring
veil of illusory māyā (ibid).
Hindu India’s attitude is highly introverted. Its great art and sculpture are gifts
from the gods, the images seeming to appear out of some distant interior
soulscape.
Its major lines of philosophy-psychology and most works of art,
painting, sculpture, architecture and literature refer back to the Godhead. One
finds there a unity unlike in the contemporary West where, at best, disciplines are
only now struggling towards finding a kind of intellectual synthesis. Of particular
interest to this paper is the fact that, although the West has produced a credible
line of philosophers, at least since the Age of Reason, their thinking has seldom if
ever provided a practical psychology to go along with their philosophic
speculations. One rather has to turn to mystics such as St John of the Cross or
Thomas à Kempis for something more practical, at least in terms of discipline. In
India, in contrast, philosophy is normally dependent on knowledge gained by
yogic experience and it is inevitably psychological and practical.
In comparison to people from the West, the majority of Indians live in harmony
with nature and live out their lives in a natural way taking their duties and
obligations to their god, their family and their community, seriously, which is to
say taking their dharma seriously. Yet the idea that this sensory world is nothing
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but an illusion has had a profound debilitating effect on all levels of society,
including the social, political and economic life of the people. Until relatively
recently, and for a long time now, the extraverted world has been neglected. So
there is India today, despite advances in consumerism, poverty stricken, rigidly
caste ridden, highly corrupt and conservative. There is India with an unbroken
line of spirituality dating back to the Vedas some five thousand [5,000] years ago
and beyond, yet still unsure of how to deal with the cultural effect of its Muslim
invaders during the Middle Ages and its large Muslim population, or the
advances presently being made by an alien Christianity. Indeed, essential India
is also fractured in three different countries today as India, Bangala Desh and
Pakistan.
There is also India commercially seized by the British; one dares to suggest, in
order to assimilate values from the West, for she is slowly but surely digesting its
truth that this sensory extraverted world is real. Meanwhile, Sri Aurobindo has
discovered that the Vedas, which are generally respected as the original
revealed scriptures, sruti, of India, does not reject this idea. In fact some of the
verses in the Vedas and Upanishads suggest that even matter was considered to
be divine by the ancient rishis or seers. Thus, in the Taittiriya Upanishad (Sri
Aurobindo, 1970, p.6) one reads:
He energised conscious force [in the austerity of thought]
And came to the knowledge that matter is Brahman. For from
matter all existences are born; born by matter they increase and
enter into matter in their passing hence. Then he went to
Varuna, his father, and said, “Lord, teach me of the Brahman.”
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But he said to him: “Energise [again] the conscious energy in
thee for the energy is Brahman.”
It is evident from these and other lines in the Vedas and Upanishads that both
matter and also energy at all levels of being were considered to partake of
divinity.
The West
I will now turn my gaze to the West where, in comparison to India, the
predominant conscious attitude has been extraverted as far back as Palaeolithic
times.
Even in ancient Egypt, with its strong occult bias and essentially
introverted attitude, there was felt to be a need to “immortalize” the pharaoh’s
gross physical body.
Prior to contemporary art, Western artistic tradition is
generally concerned with depicting external nature, even if amongst its greatest
artists it essentially comes from within. In ancient Greece and Rome the gods
and heroes, however idealized and pure, are easily imaginable to the outer eye.
They don’t look much different than some contemporary athletes.
The West is gifted with a sense of history, perhaps even trapped but it is a sense
that is not found in India. Indeed its historical perspective and sense of progress
goes back to biblical teachings found in the Old Testament.
The general
teaching is that there is a past a present and a future and, as long as humankind
walks with God, there will be human progress into the future. The West has
history and progress.
doubt.
For most Westerners, however, his eternity lingers in
In contrast to the predominant view held in the West, in India, and
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amongst the West’s first nation’s people as well, life is traditionally viewed to be
of a cyclic nature (Geoffrey Parrinder, 1962).
Rather than a straight line of
progress life is considered to unfold in a circular fashion, “a constant rise and fall,
creation and destruction, birth, death and rebirth, of the universe and of men
(ibid, p. 29).” Needless to say the view one holds on the nature of life has a
profound effect on both individual lives and the life of the community and nation.
In mainline Christianity, the belief is that God has incarnated once in his son
Jesus Christ. Western Christendom has raged in battle to promote its beliefs and
defend Christ’s historicity ever since, either in actual crusades or through
preaching to convert. Meanwhile, God, for the Hindu, incarnates not just once in
a single historically given moment but the eternal incarnates in time at the
assigned moment as one of the many incarnations of Vishnu.
According to
Hindu Mythology of the Puranas there have to date been nine [9] such
incarnations with a tenth [10th], Kalki, forecast to come in order to bring in a new
age of truth. This view is still very much alive in contemporary India. With a
similar view, many Western Gnostics believed that the Messiah not only
incarnated in Jesus Christ but in several others preceding him, and will incarnate
again for God’s victory. Today, in the West, this view is moribund.
Amongst traditional Hindus, we are all God.
Although Paul (Galations 1:20)
could say “I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in
me,” there is here a differentiation made between the inner Christ and the sense
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of “I”-ness. This defines the essential difference between the Western worldview
and that of the Hindu, where there is ultimately no such separation. Today the
difference in fundamental value is exacerbated, however, as in the present age
of materialism the separation between the “I” or ego and God is virtually
complete.
Philosophically, the Hindu lives with nature and according to a cyclic view of
nature and life. There are only vast cycles of time, the interplay of cause and
effect known as karma and essentially no human progress, at best only the
illusion of progress.
For the contemporary Westerner there is only human
progress but no connection to eternity.
Westerners don’t live with nature, they
harness and dominate her, an idea that goes back to Genesis where humankind
was instructed by God to have dominion over the animals and nature, even,
according to The Jerusalem Bible, to “Be the terror and the dread of all the wild
beasts and all the birds of heaven, of everything that crawls on the ground and all
the fish of the sea; they are handed over to you (Genesis 9: 2, 3).”
One would
have to acknowledge today that terrorizing nature is precisely what has
transpired.
The Western mind is extraverted even in its religious beliefs. In Mark 6:7, 12, 13
one reads: “Then he summoned the Twelve [disciples] and began to send them
out in pairs giving them authority over the unclean spirits. ---. So they set off to
preach repentance. ---.” Many Christians continue to believe that they need to
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save people’s souls by converting them to Christ. This is an extraverted point of
view that fails to understand that, from a more profound and introverted
perspective, the meaning behind the image of Christ crucified on the cross is that
of the spiritualised ego in complete surrender to the Self or God.
It is just
beginning to dawn on Westerners, especially thanks to the psychology of C. G.
Jung, that not only did Jesus take up the cross of his life but that each of us must
do likewise and seek the realization that came to Christ.
Western Civilisation, as we know it today, is the result of two main influences,
science and Christianity (E. Edinger, 1999). Christianity is based on a religious
influence from the Judaic culture and interpretations of the teachings of Jesus
Christ especially through Paul, modified by Greek philosophy, first through Plato
then through Aristotle. Judaism itself had earlier repudiated pagan influences
and put emphasis on the mind and the development of the moral nature and
subservience to a somewhat ambivalent male God.
Although early Greek
thought involved belief in the divinity of physis or nature, it eventually
emphasised the spiritual aspect of life and experience of the numinosity of nature
became lost.
As a result of these two influences Christianity, too, laid emphasis on the spiritual
aspect of life and the gods of nature, Dionysus and Pan, became the Devil.
Greek philosophy resurfaced during the Renaissance as humanism and
continues to have a major influence on the Western mind to this day. Another
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influence has been Gnosticism that maintained the belief in a light hidden in
nature and then alchemy that eventually developed into science.
There has been some acceptance of the feminine principle through Mariology, a
movement that grew throughout the Middle Ages by popular demand. During
that time there was also the flowering of the Grail tradition and courtly love that
encouraged Eros and honouring of the feminine. Despite this, the pagan gods
and goddesses became largely repressed in the Western psyche since the
spiritualization of Greek thought, the moral stress in Judaism and then the moral
and spiritual emphasis of Christianity.
The Western ego developed along with Greek thought around 1500 AD, with the
Renaissance. The God-image fell solidly into the unconscious of the Western
psyche, as the hubristic ego took on a sense of autonomy in gigantic proportions.
At the same time, however, human creative enterprise expanded greatly through
art, invention, exploration and the development of a scientific attitude. With the
Reformation, Christianity took on a decidedly male orientation and the individual
ego greater autonomy and sense of personal responsibility in religious matters.
Until the 17th century or so alchemy, Hermeticism and the Grail tradition were
attempts to compensate for an overly rational and intellectual Western psyche
with pagan influences. Today, mainline society has essentially lost conscious
connection to these archaic influences and even the Christian religion and its
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God is dead for many, as science and its offspring industrialism or commerce
and trade have become the principal influences on the contemporary Western
Mind.
These primal influences still exist, however, and come in the back door
through commercial interests.
One needs only study the nature of advertising
and other marketing practices, contemporary movies, television etc. to see a
perverse return of these repressed instincts and patterns, along with the resulting
fragmentation of the psyche. The development of the pornographic industry and
the release of appetites, thanks to an unlicensed internet, reinforce this pattern
significantly.
The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, grounded his philosophy on the
observation that all is in flux, that there is “a constant and unceasing change” and
a “sort of substantial Will-to become (Sri Aurobindo, 1971, p.344).” This seems
to cut to the heart of Western sensibilities. The Western mind is riveted on this
world of becoming. After a decidedly introverted turn during the Middle Ages,
during the Renaissance and later, the Western psyche turned its attention
towards science and social, political and economic organisation and the study of
positivistic psychology, that is to say the extroverted study of nature. As a result
one does witness apparent progress in the modern West. At the same time one
is baffled by restlessness, violence, the liberal use of recreational drugs, high
rates of drug and alcohol addictions and exceptionally high divorce rates.
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For the dispassionate observer of both India and the West, one is brought
abruptly up against the obvious fact that the latter lives in spiritual destitution
equal to if not surpassing the formers material and organisational poverty. Yet
there are signs today that the West is beginning to turn inwards, however
hesitatingly towards the East and the truths of India. C. G. Jung has done the
Herculean task of bringing to light the West’s spiritual heritage that has
slumbered too long in the depths of the unconscious.
It is to Jung and to Sri Aurobindo, along with his spiritual colleague, the Mother,
to whom I now turn. They are, in my estimation, the most complete, the most
perfect examples of people whose life’s work, indeed whose very lives, have
embraced both the attitudes and values of the East and those of the West. I now
turn to the thought of Jung the scientist and psychologist, hidden poet and yogi
and Sri Aurobindo, poet and supreme yogi, hidden scientist and psychologist.
The Thought of Jung and Sri Aurobindo
The spirit of the times has a phenomenal grip on the way people think, act and
generally relate to the world. I am interested here in practical psychology and not
cultural history and yet we are all affected to the roots of our being by the culture
we live in. The reason I have briefly gone into this cultural history of both India
and the West, then, is to open up the possibility of other ways of thinking and
relating to life. Contemporary Westerners are implicated in Western culture with
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all its material benefits and spiritual poverty, whether they like it or not. However,
if one can accept the truth of India and the East that, I believe, is of paramount
importance today, one’s life can be duly enriched.
Contemporary India also
needs to integrate the truth of the West, which, in fact, seems to be well
underway.
Once accepting the reality of a spiritual both beyond and within the physical
universe, accepting that the universe itself is real, indeed a reality infused with
divinity; and if we can also accept the fact that the two realms, physical and
spiritual, interpenetrate, and that the human soul links these two aspects of one
reality, then a foundation has been laid to accept the fact that human nature can
be transformed spiritually at all levels of being. Jung (1975a, p.234), in fact,
hypothesises a psychoid realm of the archetype, the primal pattern and dynamic
agency of life, where “psyche touches matter at some point, and, conversely, a
matter with a latent psyche.” If these reflections are accurate the psyche “as an
objective fact” would then, argues Jung, be intimately connected not only to
physiological and biological phenomenon but with external physical events as
well (ibid).
In other words the physical world, for Jung, can be consciously
connected to the Self, or one’s spiritually centred wholeness. Likewise, a major
thrust of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga involves the spiritual transformation of one’s
physical nature.
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Many people today are conscious of having experienced synchronicity, that is to
say experiences where inner and outer events coincide in a meaningful way.
According to Jung it is, in effect, a conscious experience of the general acausal
orderdness of life and the unus mundus or one world where spirit and matter
interpenetrate. Similarly, Sri Aurobindo refers to what he calls the Supermind, an
integrating reality that includes unity and multiplicity, spirit and matter. As with
Jung, for Sri Aurobindo, there are ultimately no coincidences.
Sri Aurobindo delved back into India’s spiritual heritage including the Gita, Tantra
the Upanishads and the Vedas, to shed light on his experiences. One discovery
of Sri Aurobindo’s is that Prakriti or nature, the feminine principle, is not dumb
and mechanical like the illusionists have contended. Nature is not a blind swirl of
energy but intelligent: she is consciousness-force. Spirit is ultimately involved in
Nature, including matter. In the Upanishads, for instance, matter is considered to
be form of Sat or pure being. Likewise, Jung returned to the Western spiritual
heritage, for instance Gnosticism and, particularly, alchemy and found many
illuminating parallels to his experiences.
From alchemy Jung learned about the light of nature, that is to say
consciousness in nature.
From a psychological point of view, Jung once
observed that his interest is not just in consciousness but consciousness-life. He
writes: “Spirit gives meaning to life, and the possibility of its greatest
development. But life is essential to spirit, since its truth is nothing if it can’t live
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
(C. G. Jung, 1975b, p. 337).”
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There is a profound wisdom in nature itself,
whether it be outside in the external ecology or inside in one’s psycho-physical
being. Not only can one find intelligent guidance from one’s own nature, for
example through the study of dreams, but one’s very nature at all levels of being
can potentially go through a process of psycho-spiritual transformation.
This is a key point, and it is precisely here where one can begin to appreciate the
genius of both Jung and Sri Aurobindo. One the one hand, If one takes the
predominate Hindu spiritual attitude today or that of the mediaeval Western
mystic, for example Meister Eckhart, there is no transformation of one’s nature: it
cannot be transformed, because of its recalcitrant nature it has to be subjected
and controlled, at best ignored (R. Otto, 1961). Indeed the transformation of
nature wasn’t even considered important. The all-important was the flight to the
beyond and ultimately identification with the One.
On the other hand, if one
takes the predominant contemporary positivistic Western attitude, there is the
naive belief that one can transform human nature by external manipulation
without any negative repercussions, for example, psychologically through the use
of cognitive and behavioural modifications. In the long run this can only lead to
repression. There can be a type of superficial change but the soul or spirit is not
acknowledged let alone encouraged. For both Sri Aurobindo and Jung, in sharp
contrast, any authentic transformation involves the direct influence of the Self, an
inner or transcendent spiritual reality.
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Sri Aurobindo, Jung and the Feminine Principle
Samadhi as the Goal of Spiritual Life?
Before going into more detail into the works of Sri Aurobindo and Jung, I believe
it is worthwhile to discuss the relevance of the often highly touted state of
samadhi, sunyata or some equivalent state that is often given as the goal of a
spiritual life. Although one enters a seemingly blissful state, on emerging from a
profound trance one remembers virtually nothing. In neither the case of Sri
Aurobindo or Jung is there an aspiration for such a trance-like state, but rather
the increase in consciousness is the goal.
In this regard, the Mother (1956, pp. 313,314) indicates that in a conversation
with Sri Aurobindo on their first meeting, and after many years of profound
spiritual experiences, she told him that she never had such experiences.
Sri
Aurobindo replied that neither had he and that “it is unconsciousness (ibid,
p.314).” He went on to say with such experiences “you go beyond the field of
your consciousness (ibid, p.314).”
Likewise, Jung argues that such experiences are unconscious and that there is
no human ego, that is to say the cognizing subject, there to register the
experience. In a letter to W. Y. Evans-Wentz he observes: “We know of no
consciousness that is not the relation between images and an ego (G. Adler,
Editor 1973, p.248).” Further on in the same letter he writes: “To call [Sunyata or
the Void] consciousness cannot be substantiated---It cannot be consciousness,
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because consciousness is by definition the relationship between the subject and
a representation (ibid, p.248).”
In a later letter to Evans-Wentz, like Sri
Aurobindo, Jung explains his position by noting: “it is ---impossible to experience
consciousness in a field of which I know nothing (ibid, p.263).” The goal for both
Sri Aurobindo and Jung is not attaining such unconscious states of being, which
in fact devalues the manifestation and the feminine, but the development of
consciousness along with the ethical responsibility for the spiritual transformation
of life.
The goal is not to attain a state of unconscious bliss but rather to consciously
realise the unity of the Self in the multiplicity of this space- time world. According
to Sri Aurobindo, this process culminates in the realisation of the Supermind, the
link-mind and Truth-consciousness that connects spiritual unity with the
multiplicity of life, mind and matter.
According to Jung the unus mundus,
likewise, presumes unity and multiplicity, conceptually linking the highest spiritual
worlds with all aspects of the multiplicity, including matter.
Sri Aurobindo and Tantra
In keeping with India’s manifold spiritual diversity, there are to be found there
many schools of yoga. In principle, each of the main paths of yoga harness or
emphasise different aspects of human psychology, whether it be the mind, the
emotional nature, the physical, the active nature and so on. The two paths that
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
23
Sri Aurobindo identifies as particularly worthy of note are [1] Tantric yoga and [2]
Karma yoga of the Bhagavad Gita.
The Tantric yogin, writes Sri Aurobindo (1969, p. 70), “instead of drawing back
from manifested nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and
conquered.” In Tantra, the feminine principle in her conceptual status as māyā
and creative energy as Shakti is worshipped, and wisdom recognised in nature.
Tantra is not an essentially ascetic path but one where one’s total nature is
accepted and harnessed for transformation (Sri Aurobindo, as recorded in M. P.
Pandit, 1972). Ritual includes eating meat, which is taboo in most of Hindu
religion, drinking wine, again considered taboo by most Hindus, and ritualized
sex, which, in contrast, is suppressed in the more ascetic yogas. Although the
goal of Tantra includes a transformation of human nature, its final goal is
liberation from the dualities of life. It therefore stops short of the integrality and
completeness of the transformative process envisioned by Sri Aurobindo (1969).
Moreover, Sri Aurobindo asserts that this system of yoga can easily degenerate
due to the very nature of the approach taken. Something is missing and that
something is, as I will attempt to demonstrate, an equal valuation of the
masculine principle, in India referred to as the Purusha.
Jung and Alchemy
Tantra made its way to Europe under the guise of alchemy, a study that Jung
took up in earnest (M.P. Pandit, 1967). He discovered that his dreams and those
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
24
of his clients contain symbols that are similar to those depicted by the old
alchemists and that he could interpret them in the light of their reflections. As
with the Indian Tantrics, light and intelligence is regarded to be an inherent
quality of nature. In the case of the alchemists, Jung contends that, with some
exception, they projected their psyches into matter and, although they saw
visions and transformation taking place in their visions, they never realised that
the prima materia or stuff to be transformed was the ego and human nature itself.
Jung (1974, p.109) writes: “although the alchemist came very close to realising
that the ego was the mysteriously elusive arcane substance and the longed for
lapis they were not aware that with their sun symbol they were establishing an
intimate connection between God and the ego.” Had they done so alchemy
would have advanced as far as Tantra, where the purusha is considered a
delegate of the Godhead.
He does concede, however, that at least one man, Gerhard Dorn, did have some
inkling that it was man’s nature that should be morally and spiritually
transformed, but he says, the alchemist’s solution ” was a compromise to the
disadvantage of physis [nature][,]” indicating that Dorn was not conscious of the
full range of his undertaking (ibid, p.543). At this point, the important point in our
consideration of alchemy is that like Tantra, despite Dorm’s shortcomings, there
is recognition of the divinity in nature and the feminine principle, what Jung refers
to as Eros, predominates. What is less developed is the masculine principle of
Logos, which many of the alchemists, in fact, found in Christianity.
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
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Sri Aurobindo, Jung and the Masculine Principle
Sri Aurobindo and the Karma Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita
Karma yoga is the yoga of works. This is the basis of the Bhagavad Gita, one of
India’s most important scriptures. The path of works, writes Sri Aurobindo (1969,
p.32), “aims at the dedication of every human activity to the Supreme Will.” In
contrast to Tantra, with its worship of the Divine feminine principle, in the Gita the
disciple is enjoined to worship the Purushottama, the Divine Will.
The path
involves knowledge gained by discernment of both the heart and the intellect in
relationship to the active will. All activities of life are accepted as a field for yoga,
all works in the world. There is never a morbid renunciation of life, never a
retreat from life into a world negating monastery or ashram.
The aim is self-knowledge and the experience of oneself increasingly as an
instrument of the Divine Will, the real doer of the works. Although the final aim is
to seek liberation from this phenomenal existence, this path of yoga can lead to
much transformation of one’s nature. According to Sri Aurobindo (ibid, p.33), “It
[can] lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the Divine level, its
spiritualization and the justification of the cosmic labour to towards freedom,
power and perfection in the human being.” Still it is incomplete because of the
undervaluation of the feminine principle and its potential for in-depth
transformation of human nature.
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C. G. Jung and the Masculine Principle of Logos
There is a distinct parallel to Karma yoga in Jung’ psychology of individuation.
To begin with, it goes without saying that a psychology formulated in the West,
with its active and extraverted bias must by definition deal with the dynamic side
of life. More than that, not only is the feminine principle of Eros or relatedness
important for Jung, as it is in Tantra but so is the masculine principle of Logos, as
in the Gita.
Logos, according to Jung (1970, p.41), can be defined as
“differentiating knowledge, clarifying light, --- discrimination and detachment.”
Like with the Gita all the active side of life, including developmental potentials,
are embraced and progressively brought to consciousness in what Jung refers to
as the individuation process. Likewise, discernment, not only of the intellect but
also of the heart and the active will are encouraged. This is reflected in the need
to differentiate each of the two attitudes, extraversion and introversion, and each
of the four functions of consciousness, thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation.
Without Eros, they are not related to the depths of one’s being and intelligence,
without Logos, they are not conscious.
In the Gita the field of action is a war that actually took place historically at
Kurukshetra. This war, however, is symbolically taking place between divine and
anti-divine forces in the psyche at all times. In Jung’s approach to psychology
there is recognition of these very dynamics. Indeed he writes approvingly of
Heraclitus, the ancient Greek Philosopher who wrote: “war is the father of all and
the king of all (as recorded in Sri Aurobindo, 1971, p.356).” In practical terms this
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
27
translates into the need to stay with life conflicts and not to escape them. With
Jung (1975c) there is also a need to appeal to what he calls the transcendent
function, a third position that reconciles the contending opposites. Not only is
there strife and conflict in life, there is the binding quality of love and
reconciliation with a higher Will beyond the opposites. In the Gita the ethical
attitude is eventually replaced with love for the Divine and an aspiration to follow
the Divine Will.
This process naturally leads to detachment, so that once there is a reasonable
degree of integration of all of the four functions of consciousness the Self takes
over more directly in guiding one’s life to the point that one becomes an
instrument of the Self. Similarly, in the Gita the disciple, represented by Arjuna,
is enjoined to detach himself from the fruits of his labour and to realize himself as
an instrument of God. In his own personal life, Jung (as recorded in G. Adler,
1975, p. 450) gives expression to this eventuality when he writes in a letter to
Father Victor White regarding “some powerful thoughts that are still flickering like
lightings in a summer night”---that “they are not mine, they belong to God, as
everything else which bears mentioning.” The goal of Jungian psychology is
submission to a higher will and the masculine principle of Logos, but it also
involves in-depth transformation of being through full acceptance of the feminine
principle of Eros.
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
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The Ego
At this point it might be profitable to explore what Jung and Sri Aurobindo mean
by the ego.
It is not an easy concept to understand and I believe people’s
understanding of its nature gives rise to a considerable amount of
misunderstanding, particularly when comparing Eastern and Western thought. In
popular speech the word egotistical is used to describe people who are selfish or
narcissistically self-centred and full of themselves, while people who are selfless
and apparently without ego are looked upon as particularly noble. To be centred
on the ego then has a malefic connotation and to be without ego is considered
beneficent. To support these popular notions, as I have shown, the goal of many
mystics, in both the East and in the West, has been to dissolve the ego into a
self-absorbed sea of bliss, nirvana or the state of samadhi.
Moreover,
traditionally in Hindu India, the ego ahamkāra has been considered to be an
aspect of the general illusion or māyā of nature and is automatically experienced
as such with the dissolution of the ego Individuality in nirvana or samadhi.
Sri Aurobindo, the Ego and the Psychic Being
Sri Aurobindo takes a spiritually pragmatic view regarding the ego that can be
characterized as that it can be of assistance for psychological development but
that, for those on a spiritual path, it eventually needs to be discarded.”
He
believes that, for one thing, the ego formation is a protection against the play of
cosmic forces, an understanding that corresponds with that of Jungian
psychology, in that some experiences of the collective unconscious can draw a
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
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weak ego into a psychosis, whereas a similar experience for a stronger ego can
enhance consciousness (E. Edinger, 1999).
Regarding the need of an ego for
developing self-awareness, Sri Aurobindo (1971, p.519) writes: “The ego-sense
is another device of mental ignorance by which the mental being becomes aware
of himself, ---.” Thus, according to Sri Aurobindo, one needs an ego, even a
well-consolidated ego, in order to persist in our quest for self-knowledge, but that
it eventually becomes a barrier to be absorbed by the Self.
Having noted this, there is an important difference between his view and the
predominant Hindu view, at least since the time of the Buddha and Sankara. To
begin with, he defines māyā not as illusion but as God’s conceptual act of
creative self-limitation and self-definition. The world, and one’s experience of the
world, is not essentially illusory, although our understanding of it may have an
illusory aspect. For Sri Aurobindo, the illusory ego or sense of “I”-ness may be
dissolved, but individuality is not dissolved, as the ego is gradually replaced by
what he refers to as the incarnated soul and psychic being, the true Person (ibid).
The incarnated soul, he contends, fills itself out over a succession of lifetimes as
the psychic being, which is the integrating centre of being. It is the caitanya
purusha and, says Sri Aurobindo, centred behind the heart in the subtle body and
knows through feeling.
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
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Jung, the Ego, Its Field of Awareness and Esse in Anima
In my estimation, Jung takes essentially the same view as Sri Aurobindo,
although it comes across more circumspectly and with a different nuance. First
of all he defines the ego as the centre of conscious awareness, which is like
saying it is equivalent to the purusha in Hindu India. He writes, for instance, that
“in India, --- [the] identity [between God and the ego] was taken as self-evident,
and “the Indian mind [became] aware of the world creating significance of the
consciousness manifested in man (Jung.1974, p.109).” In contrast, he notes,
“the [Christian] West has always emphasised the littleness, weakness, and
sinfulness of the ego (ibid).” In other words, whereas for the Hindu, the ego, in
Jung’s definition, has the dignity of being a partial incarnation of the Divine, for
the Westerner it has become contaminated with self-loathing and self-doubt or,
as one sees today, it is grandiose and inflated.
The ego, according to Jung, is also one of many complexes, with the peculiar
distinction that it is directly descended from the supreme Self, the centre of the
psyche itself. As a complex, with the Self at the centre, it consists of an energy
field that acts as a magnet to attract other complexes around it. These other
complexes include the shadow, or un-integrated dark energy and the
anima/animus or contra-sexual complexes, as well as other complexes centred
on an archetype, where archetypes represent the different ways the individual
both apprehends the world and patterns of behaviour. So when someone acts in
an inappropriate, infantile or egotistic and inflated way, for instance, it is because
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
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a complex or an unconscious undifferentiated shadow or animus/anima
possesses and contaminates the ego.
However, Jung doesn’t define the ego in terms of being simply the centre of
conscious awareness. He also includes its field of awareness, in other words all
aspects of one’s nature of which the ego is conscious. Thus, in reflecting on the
ego, Jung, 1974, p.108) poetically writes that it is “that minimal concentration of
the psychic factor that could say: that is the world, and this is ‘I.’ That was the
first morning of the world, the first sunrise after the primal darkness, when the
inchoately conscious complex, the ego, the son of the darkness knowingly
sundered subject and object, and there precipitated the world and itself into
definite existence, giving itself a voice and a name. The refulgent body of the
sun is the ego and its field of consciousness.” With this Jung is, in fact, making a
statement similar to what Sri Aurobindo makes regarding the psychic being as
the integrating centre of being.
In this light, Jung also emphasises both esse in anima, which translates as
“being in soul,” and evaluating through Eros-based feeling, a function Sri
Aurobindo attributes to the psychic being. As Jung (1975b, p.328) writes, “I
would only like to unite these extreme opposites by an esse in anima, which is
the psychological standpoint. We live immediately only in the world of images.”
When individuals live immediately, capable of uniting extreme opposites in
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
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consciousness, an integrative phenomenon, they are without doubt living under
influences from the psychic being.
As with Sri Aurobindo, one is initially enjoined to strengthen the ego, to make it
more flexible and conscious, particularly of the personal shadow or unlived life
that can be relatively easily integrated into consciousness. There is then a need
to integrate the contra-sexual side or anima/animus that deepens one’s
connection to the psyche and initiates a transformation of the ego itself. Again,
as with Sri Aurobindo, there is a shifting of the axis from the ego to the Self.
Jung (1965), for instance, writes that life counts for something and is meaningful
only when there is a link to the infinite.
With growing consciousness the ego, for Jung, then becomes increasingly
detached from the different parts of the psyche as they become more conscious
and projections withdrawn.
In other words, as the unconscious complexes
become more conscious, the ego becomes less contaminated and the sense of
“I”-ness detaches from the workings of one’s nature. The ego becomes what, in
Hindu yoga, is referred to as the purusha and witness consciousness.
In
particular, it becomes the caitanya purusha or purusha behind the subtle heart,
what Sri Aurobindo calls the psychic being, as I discussed above. Individuality,
for Jung, is retained even more completely differentiated, as with Sri Aurobindo.
There is only a subtle difference in terminology between the two. Sri Aurobindo
differentiates between the ego and the purusha, with the ego and its illusions
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
33
being dissolved and replaced whereas, for Jung, the ego becomes transformed
into the purusha.
The individuation process then involves, at least in part, a shift from focus on the
ego to the Self.
At the same time, although the ego becomes increasingly
purusha, it is essential that the anima, the shadow and other parts of the psyche,
now transformed, live. As Jung (1965, p.355) writes in his autobiography,
Memories, Dreams and Reflections, “I am not the stream [of life]. I am at the
stream but I do nothing. Other people are at the same stream, but most of them
find they have to do something with it. I do nothing. I must never think that I am
the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks. I stand and behold,
admiring what nature can do.” Nature must live and is not to be coerced, cajoled,
repressed or neglected.
This is a viewpoint that runs counter to the prevalent Western view of life,
including that held by most contemporary forms of psychology. People need life,
although not blind life but consciousness-life.
Nature is, according to Sri
Aurobindo, consciousness-force. The empirical findings of both Sri Aurobindo
and Jung are that by accepting and becoming conscious of one’s nature, a
spiritual transformation of nature potentially ensues. By transformation of one’s
nature, I mean the mental, the vital or life nature, including the aesthetic and
ethical being, as well as the emotions and dynamic aspect and, even, potentially,
physical nature itself.
For both Sri Aurobindo (1970) and Jung (1975d) the
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
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physical nature, at least the subtle physical, can be dissociated or consciously
assimilated to the Self, just like any other parts of the psyche.
The Self and the Transformation of Human Nature
Perhaps, at this point, it is worthwhile emphasising that, by consciousness I do
not simply mean intellectual consciousness. Mental consciousness is only one
form of consciousness. But to think that a highly educated intellect really brings
self-knowledge is an error that one, in the Logos-oriented and mentally ambitious
Occident, can so easily make.
One can get lost in a world of books and
intellectual musings that, at best, can represent only the beginnings of one’s
search for self-knowledge and a tool to help one along. Of course, like other
parts of one’s nature it, too, can undergo a transformation process due to
influences from the Self. At worst, however, the intellect can be an instrument of
suppression and manipulation of one’s own and other’s nature.
In fact,
intellectuals or so-called intellectuals can be the most difficult people to work with
psychologically, and the intellect terribly arrogant, an ape of God. Any abiding
and true transformation of being can never be accomplished by the intellect. It
needs something superior to yet intimately related to nature, that something
ultimately being inherent, if concealed, in nature itself. That something is the
Self.
Sri Aurobindo’s yoga and Jung’ process of individuation are more than anything
meant for the average person, and not necessarily for somebody with special
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
35
accomplishments. In the words of the Gita, it is for the rajo-sattwic person, that is
to say average passionate individuals who are trying to lead as a good and
responsible life as they can. In the Hindu way of speaking, it is for the people
who are trying to follow their dharma, to do their duties and live their ethical and
religious responsibilities according to their station in life.
It is not for the
mysterious crank or necessarily only for the exceptional person or for the
specially gifted; it is for all of us.
Arjuna, the hero of the Gita, was a warrior by upbringing and education. Today
he or she would perhaps be a businessperson or a public servant, a teacher, a
nurse, a Doctor, a house-person or secretary. Indeed the following sentiments
attributed to Arjuna [Urjoona] in the Gita would, I dare say, strike a responsive
cord in many of us today: “Thus spake Urjoona, and in the very battle’s heart sat
down upon his chariot seat, and let fall his bow when the arrow was on the string,
for his soul was perplexed in grief (Sri Aurobindo, 1972, p. 79).” In the heart of
the battle of life, in other words, when individuals look deep into their soul, many
of them, too, would have to admit that they don’t know what is right or what
wrong, nor what to do in order for their lives to unfold judiciously, what direction
their lives should take.
Jung and Other Schools of Western Psychology: A Brief Comparison
As the reader can appreciate my contention is that, at one level, Jung has given
us nothing less than a spiritual discipline, yoga for the West. To give one a more
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
36
complete picture of the unique nature of his school of psychology, it may,
however, be worthwhile to briefly compare the fundamentals of his approach to
other major schools of Western psychology, while acknowledging that they
themselves are evolving. To Freud one must give the credit of discovering the
unconscious and alerting us to the fact that we are not masters in our own house.
His unconscious, mainly consisting of the id, is of a personal nature as far as the
individual is concerned, and bereft of any spirituality. It rather consists of an
inchoate sea of instincts and impulses, with emphasis on Eros and Thanatos, by
which he means sex and death, to which can be added the aggressive instinct.
His ego is a mere appendage to the id although at the same time the executive
faculty mediating between the id and the superego, the moral nature.
Healing, for Freud, comes through the judicious use of reason balancing the
forces of the id and moral pressures from the superego. From one point of view
Freud’s ego, as an instrument of mental reason, is given too much value as the
final arbiter of how to live life. For Jung, the final arbiter is not the ego but the
Self. From another point of view, inasmuch as Freud’s ego is an appendage to
the id it is, in essence, devalued. In the case of Jung, the ego is potentially
purified and transformed into a purusha that is both surrendered to the Self and a
witness consciousness and focal point of awareness.
According to Freud, outside of reason itself, the noblest part of humankind’s
nature is represented by the partly unconscious superego, the repository of one’s
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
37
moral nature, religious tendencies, altruism and social values. Such qualities are
not to be disparaged at all, although they can prove to be too severe a master.
Thus, individuals can be constantly engaged in an internal struggle between their
moralistic and instinctive natures, with no lasting resolution except through the
tenuous use of reason. There is no recognition of the Self or, for that matter, any
other supra-personal and archetypal aspects of the psyche.
It is, in fact,
noteworthy that Freud’s view, which reduces human behaviour to historically
determined relationship to one’s personal parents, is mechanistic and ultimately
nihilistic.
In contrast to Freud, according to Jung, the unconscious is collective as well as
personal and contains not only darkness but also profound wisdom of nature and
access to a transpersonal spiritual light.
The psyche, according to Jung, does
not simply consist of forces at war with each other, as it does for Freud but it is,
in essence, purposive based on a teleology directed from the Self. Life, for Jung,
can be very much of a conflict between different aspects of one’s nature, and one
is enjoined to stay with the conflict and not escape it. But there can also be a
resolution of the conflict that comes through assessing the transcendent function
of the Self, consisting of and transforming both conscious and unconscious
factors.
The other major schools of Western psychology I will, for the sake of brevity,
lump together as those psychologies that undervalue the unconscious and
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overvalue the ego. In this regard it may be worthwhile to recall that, for Freud, as
an appendage of the id, the ego is essentially devalued. Overvaluing the ego
can lead to hubris of the conscious ego, with the decided danger of repressing
one’s own nature as well as that of other people. Amongst others, one can
include the psychology of Alfred Adler, which has the goal of helping people to
adapt to their will-to-power that is to say their life ambitions like raising a family
and advancing in a career, modified by social interest. According to Adler, one’s
mental health depends on being well adjusted in these terms. Any message
from the unconscious, when it is acknowledged at all, is interpreted in this light.
Thus the unconscious in its totality is undervalued as well as in its power of
autonomous action and influence.
A more contemporary approach that ignores the unconscious altogether, while
inflating the ego, is Cognitive-Behavioural psychology where therapeutic
attention is given to adjusting conscious beliefs, attitudes and values in the
direction of what is believed, by the therapist, to be more adaptive.
Finally,
Behavioural psychology works on the basis of externalized behavioural
intervention, which does not consider the unconscious at all. In this case, the
ego of the client is also undervalued, although the inflated ego of the intervening
therapist plays a major role.
As Jung appreciated Freud’s contribution to psychology, he also valued Adler’s.
However, Jung did not devalue the conscious ego, although his approach to
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
39
psychology does discourage inflation. In fact, an increase in ego consciousness
and the ego’s field of awareness is an all-important goal for Jungian psychology.
But this is quite different from limiting consciousness to the will-to-power and
social interest or that the conscious ego change its core beliefs or manipulates
and shapes behavioural change, paying little or no heed to the unconscious.
For Jung, one must take conscious decisions; indeed individuals alone are
responsible for their decisions. But, according to his way of understanding the
psyche, one always needs to keep a close eye on the unconscious and its
compensatory reactions. There is, in other words, a need for a dialogue between
the conscious ego and the unconscious.
Finally it is not the ego or ego
interventions that heal but ultimately it is the Self that heals. Indeed, deeper
transformations take place through the Self by way of the transcendent function,
which synthesises and transcends both conscious deliberations and unconscious
factors. The final goal of Jungian psychology involves a gradual shifting of the
axis from the ego to the Self, with a concomitant increase in consciousness.
Recapitulation
To summarise, both Sri Aurobindo and Jung argue for an integral path, an
approach that embraces both the masculine principle and the feminine principle,
Purushottama and Shakti, Logos and Eros.
Both paths involve a potential
transformation of human nature, one that is essentially spiritual. In either case
the introverted world, what one might refer to as the Hindu attitude, is highly
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valued. Likewise, both men highly value consciousness, the extraverted world
and action in the world, what can be referred to as the Western attitude. Both
paths involve the goal of increasing consciousness, individuation and a human
nature increasingly ruled by the Self, increasingly transformed.
For both Sri Aurobindo and Jung, even the transformation of society and social
institutions depends in a deep way on individual transformation, an approach
quite in contrast to the one taken by extraverted positivistic social psychology.
What this means is that the psyche is as much outside the individual as inside, a
reality that becomes apparent in synchronistic experiences, that is to say
meaningful coincidences. In this regard, it should be noted that Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother indicate that, thanks to their yoga and the immense supramental
transformation of being that they both experienced, conditions are now ripe on
earth for a major worldwide social transformation.
Both Sri Aurobindo and Jung have independently developed a unique
understanding on the nature of the psyche and the psycho-spiritual demands of
the evolutionary time spirit today. Each of their approaches to yoga/psychology,
at least for the general population, has never been attempted before in such an
all-embracing way. Western mystics of the Middle Ages and earlier, for example
Plotinus and Meister Eckhart, were not capable of fully resolving the spirit-matter
split and emphasised the flight to the one. The Gnostics, by and large, viewed
matter as evil although, in some cases, they allowed for the fact that a divine
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
spark was entrapped there.
41
With some exception, according to Jung, the
alchemists, who projected the Self in matter, did not recognise the possibility of
their own nature and ego undergoing transformation. In India, Sri Aurobindo had
to return to the revealed truths of the Vedas and the commentaries of the
Upanishads to find full acceptance of the fact that nature and God were two
aspects of the same reality. Yet the Vedas refer to a period some 2,500 to 5,000
BCE and beyond, when spiritual truths were limited to an esoteric group of
initiates and were not open to the general population.
Differences
Before I close I would like to briefly touch on what I would consider to be the
practical differences between the path of Jung and that of Sri Aurobindo. To
begin with it is important to recognise that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother took the
process further than Jung. This is no doubt by virtue of the fact they themselves
incarnate the Divine masculine and feminine poles of being, something which
Jung was required to seek for and, according to his autobiography, experience
later in life. In particular, I am referring to the wonderful series of visions he had
in 1944 involving the mystic marriage, about which he writes, “at bottom I myself
was the marriage (Jung, 1965, p.294).” He goes on to say that “the hierosgamos
was being celebrated---upon a flower-decked couch All-Father Zeus and Hera
consummated the mystic marriage (ibid).” One might say, Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother consummated the mystic marriage on earth itself, whereas Jung
experienced it in a series of visions on another plane of being.
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42
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s extraordinary intimacy with the spiritual power of
Shakti, what in the West is referred to as the Holy Ghost, allows for a direct
transformative relationship between them and those who open to their influence
that is unheard of in Jungian psychology. Thus, disciples of Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother are enjoined to open to the Force or the Mother, an effect that can be
felt descending through the crown chakra or felt at the level of the psychic being,
the purusha behind the heart.
Although one doesn’t read about such a
phenomenon in Jung’s writings, in a personal letter Marie-Louise von Franz,
Jung’s most important disciple, has indicated to me that such experiences were
not foreign to her and by implication Jung. But there is no indication at all of the
kind of direct intimacy with the Force that can be attributed to Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother. After all, the Mother, as Shakti, is the incarnation of the Force itself.
Outside of this important phenomenon, it seems to me that the difference in
approach between these two paths essentially stems from the fact that Jung, with
some exception, was a European working with Westerners and their psychology,
while the disciples of Sri Aurobindo, himself an Indian, and the Mother, French by
birth, who felt that India was her “true-mother country, (The Mother, 1981, p. 38)”
the country of [her] soul and spirit (ibid, p. 43),” were mainly Hindu Indians.
The conscious psychology of Westerners today, especially those from northern
countries, tends to be very masculine and Logos oriented, by which I mean
motivated by the will to power and consciously directed to attain it. Today it is
particularly organised around science and technology and the stimulation of
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
43
desire through consumerism. The feminine principle of Eros or relatedness is
repressed, which means that Westerners are dangerously sundered from the
fullness of their instinctual nature. For one thing this is very evident in popular
culture in various media, through music, movies, television programming and art
and now the internet.
Family disharmony, exceptionally high divorce rates,
excessive drug and alcohol abuse, increasing street level violence and generally
unassimilated rage, high rates of depression and anxiety disorders, are the
result.
Given this one-sided conscious psychology, Jung discovered that it is important
for Westerners to re-discover their Eros and become consciously related to their
instincts. He also recognizes that, in keeping with the West’s Logos orientation
and need for discernment, the Western scientific orientation has to be
incorporated into his approach to psychology. Scientifically studying the nature
of one’s dreams, their meaning and significance to one’s life, both internal and
external, satisfies this yearning. This is possible because, as Jung’s researches
reveal, the psyche is essentially objective and not subjective. What is subjective
is our individual relationship to an objective phenomenon.
A scientific approach to the psyche also satisfies the Westerner’s individualistic
nature. Through the study of one’s dreams and other fantasy material one finds
out for oneself the truth of one’s being. Such an approach is quite unlike the
traditional Hindu Indian way where disciples are simply enjoined to follow in the
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
44
path of their Guru, surrendering to them and their counsel. Jung strenuously
warns against such a practice for Westerners. He also cautions Westerners
about traditional Indian meditation practices, believing that they could add to the
repression of an already instinctually repressed nature. Instead he developed
and championed a form of meditation he calls active imagination, where the
meditator is enjoined to sink into a kind of alert-relaxed fantasy world to partake
in a dialogue between the ego and the unconscious. This method of meditation
leads to insights and self-knowledge that, Jung insists, makes ethical demands
requiring fulfillment in life.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother work in an entirely different psychological
environment. Both the feminine principle and the masculine Logos are alive in
India. Hindu Indians worship the Goddess as Shakti [Eros] in many different
forms as well as different manifestations of the male God [Logos]. There is not
the split there between Eros and Logos as one finds in the West.
Indians generally live closer to their psychic being centred behind the heart and
are more open to influences from the soul.
They are typically introverted
intuitive-feeling types with ready access to the inner imagination and fantasy
worlds and feeling evaluations unlike the more extraverted Westerner. With Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother there is, accordingly, emphasis on living consciously
from the psychic being, which knows through feeling, and then the Self above the
mind.
Disciples, in other words, are encouraged to bring the psychic being
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
45
forward and assessing the Person within, which is to say their true individuality,
while suppressing other
shadow, which is to say vital [life-desire] and mental,
influences. They are also enjoined to open themselves to a transpersonal
influence from what is referred to as the Force or the Mother, a phenomenon that
can have a powerful transformative effect.
There is, in the process, little tolerance for any of the excesses of egoistic
individualism. Doing their yoga involves a certain prescribed discipline to which
the disciples submit.
Indeed, to the outsider, especially the Westerner, the
discipline may be described as somewhat ascetic, even though the yoga is not
strictly speaking otherworldly. Disciples are called sadhaks and described as
doing sadhana or tapasya. For Indians, who are more immersed in their natural
instincts and living closer to the psychic being, such austerity can lead to
detachment and spiritual transformation.
This same type of discipline can easily lead to repression for the unprepared
more individualistic and egocentric Westerner, if taken up too naively. Jungian
psychology shows more tolerance for ego individuality and its shadow, vital and
mental, influences at least initially, although it is required to submit to the Self
over and over again. In this light, Jung also encourages becoming conscious of
Eros-based feeling and a feeling relationship to the archetype, in other words
knowing through feeling. In Jungian psychology, there is no explicit emphasis
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
46
put on opening to the Force as such, although Jung often refers to a descent of
the Holy Spirit as an integral aspect of the individuation process.
Westerners can eventually come to the same discipline as the Hindu disciples of
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, although they have to become more conscious of
their nature first. A complicating factor for Westerners pertains to the fact that
they have been so extensively sundered from the primal psyche, which has to
be, first, assimilated and then transformed. In a Grail legend, the fisher king has
been wounded in the groin or sexual area by an iron spear from a pagan knight
who is, himself, mortally wounded. The fact that the wounding spear is made of
iron, a metal associated with the war god Mars, suggests the need to assimilate
Mars-like qualities, which is to say instinctive assertiveness of being and the
active and potentially creative will in relationship to Eros.
The spearhead has the words Grail written on it indicating that healing that
wound, the Amfortas wound, leads to truth. The legend refers to the fact that, in
the West, spirit and nature have thus far only come together destructively. The
pagan knight represents the natural man while the fisher King represents the
spirit. In the contemporary world this plays itself out in over-identification with the
intellect, a confused vital or life area dominated by the power complex and
divorce from the primal instincts. This is a collective Western wound that goes
well beyond one’s personal history and, yet, needs to be accounted for in the
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
47
individuation process. In the final analysis, healing of the natural person and
reconciling spirit and nature comes by being centred in the psychic being.
There is another important difference in approach between Sri Aurobindo’s yoga
and Jung’s path.
True Gurus in the Hindu-Indian tradition are considered to be
realised beings in the sense that they have a high degree of God-realisation.
Disciples are able to accept this fact, and submit themselves to the will and
advice of outer Gurus, even worship them as God realised beings.
Hindu
tradition also recognizes the phenomenon of periodic incarnations of the Divine
[Being] and the Divine Mother [Consciousness-Force] as Avatars. The role of the
Avatar, according to Sri Aurobindo, is to lead the earth’s consciousness forward
in the evolutionary process, which now involves incarnation of the Supermind
(The Mother, 1981, p.p. 1-35). Sri Aurobindo and the Mother acknowledge that
they are evolutionary Avatars and their disciples accept them as such with a
marvellous natural devotion. The traditional Guru-chela relationship and devoted
disciples submitting to their will is qualitatively greatly enhanced in these
circumstances.
In this regard, Jung always discourages any projections of the Self onto himself.
He always insists that his disciples find their own inner connection to the Self
instead and, in the process, withdraw any such projections. Despite this, many
of Jung’s most accomplished disciples, for example von Franz and Edinger,
recognise Jung as being a remarkable human being and a true contemporary
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
48
prophet. There is also no question but that they have a devotional attitude to
Jung and his works. Seeing Jung as a prophet means that they recognise him
as a seer, compelled by the Self to pronounce the word of God for our time, the
nature of evolutionary consciousness as he understands it. Although prophets
are not Avatars, they are messengers of the same avataric time-spirit and
devoted disciples of prophets are aspiring, perhaps a little less clearly, for the
same consciousness as are the disciples of the Avatars.
Indeed, as Sri Aurobindo is involved in incarnating the Supermind or Truthconsciousness, the supreme principle of diversity in unity (the Mother, 1981, p.
116), Jung’s (as recorded in G. Adler, 1975) new God-image is a complexio
oppositorum, a union of all opposites, grounded in a unitary transcendent reality.
Thus, in terms of practical yoga or the individuation process there remains the
difference in approach that I have indicated although, over time, the differences
seem to dissolve somewhat.
There is one other area of difference that is worthwhile exploring. Jung’s writings
seem to me to provide the reader with material and ways that can be used to
understand the unconscious and its psychological relevance. This goes along
with the emphasis he puts in relating to and understanding dreams. The same
can be said for some of his disciples, especially von Franz and Edinger, both of
whom clarify and bring down to earth some of Jung’s more difficult thinking. In
addition, Jung’s tower at Bollingen, a house he built that reflects his
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
49
psychological status as a highly integrated being has considerable inspirational
value to the individual. Finally, his writings and artwork both inspire and move
one at an unconscious level. Jung writes, and I would add, does art, with a
double bottom, as von Franz, in her writing, also seems to have done.
From my perspective, in comparison to Jung, Sri Aurobindo’s writings are more
directly aimed at guiding readers in their conscious attitudes while inspiring them
spiritually. Thanks to their remarkable mantric quality they also affect one at an
unconscious level. The Mother brings a more down to earth quality to the
teachings, while still affecting readers by the mantric quality of her words. In
addition, the Mother’s esoteric understanding of the nature of flowers and her
vision of an international city reflecting the new consciousness, especially the
central temple, the Matrimandir, are of unparalled visionary value to the seeker.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have left the world with an extraordinary legacy to
guide people in their conscious psycho-spiritual development. Taken together,
all their work gives a rich symbolic understanding of the nature of the
unconscious for the conscientious seeker. Finally, like Jung, they encourage
relationship to dreams and inner planes of being, although their writing in this
regard is not as extensive as Jung’s and his disciples.
When all is said and done, I wouldn’t personally do without either the guidance of
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother or the works of Jung and his main disciples.
Although at times it may seem that I have relegated Jung to the West and Sri
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
50
Aurobindo and the Mother to India and the East, in practice there need be no
such division.
Jung has students from the Orient, including India, and Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother have a large following of disciples in the West.
Neither Jung nor Sri Aurobindo and the Mother want to start a new religion or
quasi religion but rather to encourage people to undertake their own process of
an evolutionary transformation of consciousness.
In this light, Jung, and his school of psychology, has personally given me the
inestimable gift of a profound way of individual self-scrutiny and in-depth insight
on the evolutionary thrust of Western Civilisation and its complications and how I,
as a Westerner, have been affected. To Sri Aurobindo and the Mother I am
primarily indebted for being taken up by the mystery of their being, along with
their impeccable guidance for living, as well as their in-depth knowledge of Indian
culture, as well as that of the West, and the evolutionary impetus of world
consciousness. One can profit from study and living involvement in both paths,
which, in my experience, are in many ways similar and in other ways
complementary, as I have tried to show.
In Closing
In closing, I would like to relate Jung’s last recorded dream that he had shortly
before his death and then finish with several lines from Sri Aurobindo’s epic
poem, Savitri. If nothing else, this should give one an idea of the distant goal
they have each pioneered for humankind, and perhaps inspire one in the same
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
direction.
51
They are both, in my estimation, creative expressions of the new
consciousness that is seeking incarnation.
First, here is Jung’s (as recorded in M. L. von Franz, 1975, p. 287) remarkable
dream:
I saw a great round stone in a high place, a barren square, and
on it were engraved the words: “And this shall be a sign unto you
of wholeness and oneness.” Then I saw many vessels to the
right in an open square and a quadrangle of trees whose roots
reached around the earth and enveloped me and among the
roots golden threads were glittering.
This dream shows an exceptional degree of embodied wholeness and oneness,
and of a personal life consciously surrendered to both the full incarnation of the
universal life force, with global roots, and a supreme Will. This requires a
remarkable amount of unity of being, cosmic knowledge and depth of life
experience, along with reconciliation of world opposites in a coniunctio. Such a
dream indicates the relevance of Jung’s life and accomplishments not just to
Europe and the West but also for the world.
Now, I would like to quote some marvellous lines from Sri Aurobindo’s (1970 a,
p.p. 698, 699) epic poem Savitri. Savitri, the heroine, has conquered death, the
ultimate darkness, and has just rejected the tempting offer of the Supreme to
leave the world and become absorbed in the ultimate light of Eternal Day.
She
has chosen to stay on earth and share its burden, a symbolic reality reflected in
the life of the Mother. On hearing this, the Supreme replies to Savitri as follows:
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
52
Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will
I lay my hands upon thy soul of flame,
I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,
I yoke thee to my works in time.
Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,
Because thou hast chosen to share earth’s struggle and fate
And leaned in pity over earth-bound men
And turned aside to help and yearned to save,
I bind by thy heart’s passion thy heart to mine
And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul.
Now I will do with thee my marvellous work,
I will fasten thy nature with my cords of strength,
Subdue to my delight thy spirit’s limbs,
And make thee a vivid knot of all my bliss,
And build in thee my proud and crystal home.
Thy days shall be my shafts of power and light,
Thy nights my starry mysteries of joy
And all my springtides marry in thy mouth.
O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to light
And bring down God into the lives of men;
Earth shall be my work chamber and my house,
My garden of life to plant a seed divine.
When all thy work in human time is done,
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
The body of earth a tabernacle of God. Book 11, Canto 1
Here, Sri Aurobindo beautifully describes the conscious surrender of the heroine,
Savitri, symbolizing the Word or Divine Grace, to the Supreme Will, along with
the wonderful consequences for life on earth. This remarkable poem is, as Sri
Aurobindo writes, both a legend and a symbol. As a legend, the poet picks up
and transforms a story from an earlier time recorded in the Mahabharata. As a
symbol, it promises a new spiritually transformed earth consciousness, thanks to
the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, which is still in the early stages of
realization. The last word belongs to the Avatars.
Jung and Sri Aurobindo
53
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