snapshots from the void

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Snapshots from the VoidRichard H. Stein M.D. aa 2536 Clay St., San Francisco , CA , 94115Published online: 01 Feb 2013.

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Snapshots from the VoidRe�ections on Jung’s Relationship to Indian Yoga

richard stein

It was the hour before the Gods awake. Across the path of the divine Event �e huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge . . . A fathomless zero occupied the world . . . �en something in the inscrutable darkness stirred; An unshaped consciousness desired light . . . As if a childlike �nger laid on a cheek Reminded of the endless need in things �e heedless Mother of the universe, An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.

(Sri Aurobindo 1993, 1)

It is the time of nonbeing, when even the gods are asleep. Mythic time always exists in the eternal present, yet Hindu mythology is all about the cycles of time. �ese open-ing lines of Sri Aurobindo’s epic portray the state of nonbeing between the last cosmic

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 4, Number 2, pp. 62–84, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047. © 2010 Virginia Allan Detlo� Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/jung.2010.4.2.62.

As if a childlike �nger laid on a cheek . . .” (Photograph: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, http://www.palantir.net/ 2001/tma1/pics/in�nite11.jpg, accessed 2/7/2010.)

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Richard Stein, Jung’s Relationship to Indian Yoga 63

destruction and next phase of creation, when any hint of a new universe is still hidden in the body of the god. �e German Indologist, Heinrich Zimmer, also wrote of the Indian cycle of creation and destruction in his translation of the Upanishads. Unlike our modern notion of progress, the ancients imagined a decline through four stages of culture. �e holy order of the universe decays from the golden age of truth to the Kali yuga, which precedes the end of time, the pralaya, or great destruction:

�e seemingly holy brahmin is no better than the fool. Old people, destitute of the true wisdom of old age, try to behave like the young, and the young lack the candor of youth . . . �e will to rise to supreme heights has failed; the bonds of sympathy and love have dissolved; narrow egotism rules . . . and the universe is ripe for dissolution. (Zimmer 1972, 36)

�e period of cosmic manifestation has come full circle, and Vishnu, the supreme deity who gave birth to it, now feels growing in himself the urge to withdraw the out-worn creation back into his divine substance and sleep in the waters of nonexistence:

Vishnu sleeps. Like a spider that has climbed up the thread that once issued from its own organism, drawing it back into itself, the god has consumed again the web of the universe. Alone upon the immortal substance of the universe, a giant �gure, submerged partly, partly a�oat, he takes delight in slumber. �ere is no one to behold him, no one to com-prehend him; there is no knowledge of him except within himself. (Zimmer 1972, 37)

Vishnu reclines on his giant serpent, Ananta, whose name means “Endless,” sleep-ing in the in�nite waters of nonexistence. But within the god, like an unborn fetus in

Vishnu reclining on a bed of serpents, carved into a rock face in Mahabalipuram, Southern India. (Photograph: Dyane Sherwood, 1984, by permission.)

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64 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010

his mother’s womb, all is restored to its primal perfection. Without there is only dark-ness, but inside, a divine vision unfolds of what the new universe should be.

What makes these mythic stories so valuable to the depth psychologist is their par-allel to psychological events in the individual human life. In the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the mythic and the personal come together beautifully in Four Quartets:

O dark dark dark. �ey all go into the dark, �e vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant . . . I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, �e lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations . . . Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing— I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope . . . But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

(Eliot 1943, Quartet 2, East Coker, 27)

In the history of depth psychology, C. G. Jung explored most profoundly this inter-section of the mythic and the personal, and it is in the play of these two that I want to examine his relationship to India’s spiritual traditions. It is well known that Jung had a very lively interest in Indian yoga, but he also cautioned that Westerners were not suited to practice it ( Jung 1936/1958, CW 11 ¶868). He can be excused in part for this narrow view because of the limited translations available at that time and also because of the problems he saw in patients from the �eosophical movement, a West-ernized borrowing from yoga. Yet, I have always suspected that Jung’s own personal psychology played a signi�cant role in his prejudice, and that will be my focus here. Just as he ampli�ed personal complexes with mythic material, I will examine three important experiences in which he fell into the Void and amplify them with a story from Hindu mythology.

Jung’s childhood experiences of the Void may well have begun before he was born, as his mother lost another baby before he was conceived. Her depression and hospi-talization during his infancy was a terrible abandonment. His earliest remembered dream, which he dates to age three or four, involves going down into an underground chamber where he saw a giant phallus sitting on a throne. As it began to creep toward him like a worm, he was paralyzed with terror and heard his mother call out, “�at is the man-eater.” He awoke scared to death ( Jung 1963, 12).

Jung’s confusion about this God “not to be named” revolved around his fear that Lord Jesus might be the god of death as well as salvation, but it also brings to mind the great phallic god of South India, Shiva. �is association is not as far-fetched as it might seem, as Jung goes on to write that his mother read him Hindu stories about Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, which reminded him of this dream, his “original revelation” (1963,

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11–17). His ambivalence about God reemerged quite powerfully at age eleven when he struggled for three days with an unthinkable thought, one he knew would be blas-phemous. When he �nally surrendered to the fantasy, it was an image of God’s destruc-tion of the beautiful tiled roof of the Basel cathedral by dropping a huge turd on it. Aside from the personal interpretation of his unconscious rage at his father’s church, Jung is dealing once more with God’s destructive side, an issue that was to preoccupy him throughout his life. Might Jung’s early experience of God’s destructive side have shaped his mature religious attitudes toward both Christianity and yoga?

As a young man, Jung studied German philosophy, wrote his medical dissertation on occult phenomena, and later became interested in Gnosticism alongside his more main-stream scienti�c pursuits. Aer his break with Freud, he had his own frightening and numinous experience of the unconscious and set out on the path that he came to describe as individuation. His comparative interests turned to Eastern spirituality and yoga, but he �nally settled on the study of Western alchemy and its relation to Christianity.

Shiva Lingam (phallic symbol) at Jambukeswara Temple, Srirangam, Tamil Nadu, South India. (Photograph: Ilya Mauter, March 15, 2007, Wikpedia Commons.)

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Trying to make sense of the painful rup-ture with Freud, Jung began to formulate his theory of personality types and came upon a new idea that he called the transcendent func-tion, which “arises from the union of conscious and unconscious contents” (1916/1969, CW 8 ¶131). �ough he made occasional reference to Indian literature before the break with Freud, it was only aerward that he began to com-pare ancient Indian concepts with his evolving idea of the Self (1921/1971, CW 6 ¶326–357). Jung is not always precise in his use of terms like atman, brahman, and purusha, but his method was oen to use mythic and religious sources from other cultures to amplify his own ideas, rather than to study their inherent meaning. �is tendency has been most famously dis-cussed by Sonu Shamdasani in regard to �e Kundalini Seminars (1932/1999).

Between the First and Second World Wars, during an era of intellectual cross- fertilization in Europe, Jung came to know many scholars from other �elds. In 1932, he met the German Indologist, Heinrich Zimmer, who was a professor of Sanskrit at Heidelberg University. Along with Richard Wilhelm, Zimmer helped in opening Jung to Eastern spirituality, and he became one of Jung’s few close male friends. He was one of the �rst scholars to popularize South Asian art in the West, as well as to translate talks by the Indian sage, Sri Ramana Maharshi. It was through Zimmer that Jung became acquainted with Ramana’s life story and his non-dual spiritual teachings. Jung had a warm relationship with Zim-mer and positive view of the sage’s writings. So when Zimmer found out that Jung was going to India and would be in Madras, he urged him to make a personal visit to Ramana. Jung, however, did not make the visit, and Zimmer was greatly disappointed. In 1938, the same year that Jung was in India, Zimmer �ed Nazi Germany and took a post at Oxford, which he subsequently le to teach at Columbia University. He died of pneumonia at age �y-three, without ever having traveled to India.

I will shi to the story of Jung’s journey to the East, but for now, I want to return to mythic time, the time of Vishnu’s sleep in the cosmic Void, for which I paraphrase Zimmer’s account (1972, 38).

C. G. Jung on a visit to the United States, 1910. (Prints and Photographs Division, �e Library of Congress.)

Heinrich Zimmer, 1933. (Originally published in G. Wehr, Jung, Les Grands Suisses, 86, by Lazarus Zetzner. Copyright ex-pired.)

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During the immense interlude aer the destruction of the universe, when the potential for a new creation exists only within Vishnu’s dream, there is a remarkable event. A holy man by the name of Markendaya wanders around inside the body of the god, gazing over the peaceful earth. He is an immortal sage of Hindu myth, whose presence is a blessing to all who meet him. One day, in his aimless meander, an acci-dent occurs, and he inadvertently falls out of the mouth of the sleeping god. “Vishnu is sleeping with his lips open a little, breathing with a deep, sonorous, rhythmical sound, in the immense silence of the night . . . And the astonished saint, falling from the sleep-er’s giant lip, plunges headlong into the cosmic sea” (Zimmer 1972, 38).

Landing in the black waters of nonexistence, Markendaya sees only the utter dark-ness of an endless ocean. Fearing for his life, he splashes in the Void until he begins to question whether this experience is a dream, but then he wonders whether the com-fortable world of his normal existence is the real illusion. While pondering the true nature of reality, his eyes adjust to the darkness, and he sees the sleeping god, whose giant body resembles a mountain range. “�e saint swam nearer, to study the presence and . . . to ask who this was, when the giant seized him, summarily swallowed him, and he was again in the familiar landscape of the interior” (Zimmer 1972, 41).

Startled and puzzled by the experience, Markendaya gradually resumes his holy pilgrimage, enjoying the beauty of earthly life for another hundred years. But then again, he slips from the mouth of Vishnu and falls into the pitch black sea. �is time he sees the god as a small child, cheerfully at play in the vast dark ocean. Vishnu once again reveals his true nature as the Lord of the Universe, and the sage prays to him. “Let me know the secret of your Maya, the secret of your apparition now as child, lying and playing in the in�nite sea.”

In response, Vishnu teaches the identity of opposites:

�e secret of Maya is the identity of opposites. Maya is simultaneous and successive man-ifestation of energies that are at variance with each other, processes contradicting and annihilating each other: creation and destruction, evolution and dissolution, the dream-idyll of the inward vision of the god and the desolate nought, the terror of the void, the dreadful in�nite. �is “and,” uniting incompatibles, expresses the fundamental character of the Highest Being . . . Opposites are fundamentally of the one essence, two aspects of the one Vishnu. (Zimmer 1972, 41)

For a second time, the god swallows the holy sage who vanishes into his body. Rather than trying to judge which experience is true, Markendaya meditates on the teaching that his earthly existence and the Void are one. He leaves his wanderings to sit alone by a solitary stream, joyfully contemplating “�e Song of the Gander.” �is sound is the universal melody of God’s breath, �owing in, �owing out; it is the deep rhythmical sound of Vishnu’s breath. What does this song reveal?

Many forms do I assume. And when the sun and moon have disappeared, I �oat and swim with slow movements on the boundless expanse of the waters. I am the Gander.

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I am the Lord. I bring forth the universe from my essence and I abide in the cycle of time that dissolves it. (Zimmer 1972, 47)

�e breath of the gander is the Sanskrit mantra, Sa ham, meaning “�is I am.” �e gander swims on the surface of the water but is not bound by it. It can also �y in the pure, stainless air. Hindu saints of the highest order, freed from the bondage of the op-posites, are given the title hamsa, which means “gander,” or even paramahamsa, which means “highest gander.” �e gander song teaches,

I, the human individual, of limited consciousness, steeped in delusion, spellbound by Maya, actually and fundamentally am �is . . . the Highest Being, of unlimited con-sciousness and existence. I am not to be identi�ed with the perishable individual, who accepts as utterly real and fatal the processes and happenings of the psyche and the body. “I am He who is free and divine.” (Zimmer 1972, 50)

�e gander in �ight. (A Canada Goose, Burnaby Lake Regional Park, British Columbia. Photograph: Alan D. Wilson, modi�ed by Dili�. Wikpedia Commons, http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/File:Canada_goose_�ight_cropped_and_NR.jpg, accessed 2/14/2010. In the public domain.)

In this lovely Hindu story of release from the opposites, the sage overcomes his confusion between earthly existence and the Void through the song of the gander. �is union of the relative and the absolute is the basis of Advaita Vedanta and the teachings of Ramana Maharshi.

I want to use this myth as a metaphor to examine three experiences of the Void in Jung’s adult life—when he fell out of his preconceived ideas about himself, his belief systems, and his image of God. I think they are important in understanding his trip to India, his view of Eastern spirituality, and his late alchemical work to develop a West-ern version of yoga.

�e �rst is the well-known period following his break with Freud. Jung became unsta-ble and frightened by overpowering dreams of the destruction of Europe, which synchro-nistically anticipated the blood bath of the First World War. To cope with unbearable

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anxiety and the fear that he was going mad, he gave in to his own experience, much as he had done at age eleven when he decided to allow a blasphemous thought about God. About the 1913 experience, he wrote,

I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. �en I let myself drop. Sud-denly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into the dark depths. I could not fend o� the feeling of panic. But then, abruptly . . . I landed on my feet in a so, sticky mass. I felt great relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. (1963, 179)

�is was Jung’s personal initiation into the “collective unconscious,” as well as the beginning of his use of active imagination to explore it. Much has been written about this time in his life, and with the recent publication of �e Red Book ( Jung 2009), his amazing diary of this period, we have far greater access to his self exploration. What I want to emphasize here is the role of surrender in Jung’s process, as it is the antithesis of his criticism of yoga as an over use of the will. His ignorance of surrender in yoga led to an important misunderstanding.

Like the Hindu sage who falls from the mouth of Vishnu, Jung abruptly le his day-to-day reality and plunged into the Void. He �ailed in the dark, fearing for his life until he adjusted to his new surroundings. �en he became acquainted with arche-typal �gures, processes, and forces of the collective unconscious. �rough these di-cult years, he developed a new theory of the unconscious and of the human condition (for example, see the illustration on page 155 of �e Red Book (2009)).

Perhaps the most important inner relationship that emerged from �e Red Book years was Jung’s connection with the �gure of an inner guru whom he named Phile-mon. Philemon �rst emerged in a dream:

�ere was a blue sky, like the sea, covered not by clouds but by �at brown clods of earth. It looked as if the clods were breaking apart and the blue water of the sea were becoming visible between them . . . Suddenly there appeared from the right a winged being sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the wings of a king�sher with its characteristic colors. ( Jung 1963, 182)

Not understanding the dream, Jung began to paint the �gure of Philemon, and to his amazement, he found a dead king�sher by the shore of the lake where he walked. �is dream, along with this outer synchronicity, had a profound impact on him. He began to hold inner conversations with Philemon, who taught him many things he had not known before. Philemon said that Jung treated his thoughts as if he gener-ated them himself, but in reality they came like animals in the forest or people in a room or birds in the air. From this teaching, Jung came to understand that the psyche is an objective reality. (A painting of Philemon may be seen on page 154 of �e Red Book.)

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It is interesting to compare this insight to the teachings of Indian yoga. Here is a passage in one of Sri Aurobindo’s letters on the process of meditation:

�e substance of the mental being is still, so still that nothing dis-turbs it. If thoughts or activities come, they cross the mind as a �ight of birds crosses the sky in a windless air. It passes, disturbs nothing, leaving no trace. Even if a thousand images . . . pass across it, the calm stillness remains as if the very texture of the mind were a substance of eternal and indestructible peace. (Sri Aurobindo 1972, 637)

�e separation of this witness consciousness from the con-tents and activity of the thinking mind is basic to the path of jnana yoga, or the yoga of knowledge. �at aspect of the psyche that can stand back from mental processes is called the manomaya purusha, but it is only one step in yogic liberation. Jung’s focus is on the a�ect images of the psyche, whereas the goal of yoga is the ground of being that contains them.

Jung doesn’t say more about his dream of Philemon, but I have always thought it may have been pointing to another important insight, one which he seems to have missed. Transpersonal psychologists including Ken Wilber, whose spectrum of con-sciousness is based on Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, have criticized Jung for not making a distinction between higher consciousness and the lower realms of the unconscious (1980, 13). At the outset of the dream, the sea-like sky was obscured by clods of earth, which break apart to reveal a larger perspective; the old man suddenly appears, clutch-ing a key as if ready to open a lock. Could Philemon’s appearance be meant to show Jung a numinous reality behind the more mundane imagery of the psyche? Is this a key to the separation of two levels of the unconscious, the subconscious and the super- conscious, which is a discrimination he never really made?

I have one last comment about Philemon. Jung was startled, when �een years later, he met a well-educated Indian who con�ded that his guru was Shankaracharya. Startled, Jung asked if he meant the famous ninth-century Vedic commentator. �e man said, of course, and Jung was relieved to learn of a known tradition of spirit gurus ( Jung 1963, 184).

In the 1920s, Jung’s career �ourished again, but as I posited in my paper on his Mana Personality (1991), the combination of inner contact with the archetypal realm and his outer fame led to a psychic in�ation. In my view, this problem extended well into the next decade, fueling the social and political problems that plagued him for the remainder of his life. I think that the seeds of a crash, including a breakdown of his pre-viously robust physical health, began in the late 1930s, around his trip to India.

He was fascinated by the Oriental sources he read and had used yogic breath con-trol to calm himself during the dicult time in 1913, but he remained skeptical about

Sri Aurobindo. (�inkQuest, http://library.think quest.org/07aug/00137/philosophy_�les/aurobindo.gif. Photo g-rapher unknown.)

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the psychological e�ects of yoga on his patients. Commenting about one woman patient who was practicing �eosophy, he wrote,

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic feature of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining �gures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. (1945/1968, CW 13 ¶ 335)

His main concern was that yoga practice would result in a hypertrophy of the will and a further repression of the unconscious, which he considered to be the main source of neurosis in Westerners. His essays on yoga were written mostly in the mid-1930s, at the same time that Fascism was on the rise in Europe. I have written elsewhere that his ambivalence about Fascism may be traced to an unconscious need for the strong father who was missing in his childhood. I think this same yearning for a strong authority and his resistance to it e�ected his thoughts about yoga. In the 1936 essay, “Yoga and the West,” he wrote,

As a European, I cannot wish the European more “control” and more power over the nature in and around us . . . His task is to �nd the natural man again . . . He will infalli-bly make a wrong use of yoga because his psychic disposition is quite di�erent from the Oriental. I say to whomsoever I can: “Study yoga—you will learn an in�nite amount from it—but do not try to apply it, for we Europeans are not so constituted that we can apply these methods correctly, just like that. An Indian guru can explain everything and you can imitate everything. But do you know who is applying the yoga? In other words, do you know who you are?”(1936/1958, CW 11 ¶868)

And as if to make sure the reader gets the contemporary reference of his point, Jung says in the very next paragraph, “�e slogan one hears so oen in Germany, ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ has cost the lives of millions of human beings” (¶869).

Whatever one thinks of his clinical concerns, it is easy to see that Jung’s worries about the fate of Germany, and of Western culture in general, distorted his views about yoga. He concludes this essay by saying,

�e spiritual development of the West has been along entirely di�erent lines from that of the East and has produced conditions which are the most unfavourable soil one can think of for the application of yoga. Western civilization is scarcely one thousand years old and must �rst of all free itself from its barbarous one sided-ness. �is means, above all, deeper insight into the nature of man . . . In the course of the centuries the West will produce its own yoga, and it will be on the basis laid down by Christianity. (1936/1958, CW 11, ¶869)

It is against the background of the turmoil in Jung’s personal life, and his con�ict be-tween will and surrender, that I want to discuss his trip to India. He undertook it with-out much preparation, a little more than a year aer the publication of “Yoga and the West.” In the late 1930s, Jung was having a dicult time. Charges of anti-Semitism dogged him on his travels, and his marital problems simmered beneath the surface

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at home. His public lectures were well-received but contained little about his new and evolving passion, the study of alchemy. He traveled to England, Germany, and the United States, lecturing and meeting dignitaries, as well as receiving honorary degrees from important universities. His 1936 trip to Harvard proved to be “a grueling time,” in part due to questions about his politics. Back in Zürich, he tried to reduce his schedule to make time for writing his “long overdue book” on alchemy, but prestigious o�ers of honorary degrees from Yale and the University of Calcutta were hard for him to refuse. Returning home from Yale in 1937, he agreed to the spontaneous sugges-tion from his friend Fowler McCormick that they go to India together. Ignoring pleas by his wife and Toni Wol� that he get the recommended inoculations, he le in three weeks. �e circumstances leading up to the trip seem important to me, as Jung did not go to India primarily as a spiritual seeker (his deeper, No. 2 personality (1963, 24–83), but as a famous man receiving an academic honor and, perhaps more importantly, as a man facing a moral dilemma (Bair 2003, 426).

Frontispiece of Gerhard Dorn, �eatrum Chemicum, Vol. 1, 1602

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During the twelve-day ocean crossing, Jung immersed himself in a sixteenth- century alchemical treatise, �eatrum Chemicum (1602), by Gerhard Dorn. Jung tells the story, repeated by a number of biographers, that when the boat landed in Bombay he remained on board the ship, engrossed in his Latin manuscript rather than join the wel-coming party. What has not been emphasized, however, is the role that alchemical text later played in Jung’s ongoing thinking about the West creating its own yoga. Jung not only skipped the reception in Bombay, but also later passed up the opportunity to meet Sri Ramana Maharshi, as well as his nearby contemporary, Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo, a Cambridge University–educated intellectual as well as an accomplished yogi, would have been far more to Jung’s liking. �ough the two men never met, there are anecdotal stories of Jung hearing about Aurobindo and seeing excerpts from his books.1

Years later Jung wrote, “�e trip to India constituted a deci-sive point in my life. In India it was mostly the question of Evil that occupied me.” Jung was troubled by the poverty and crush of life as he traveled across the subcontinent to Calcutta, and he began to think that the moral problem, as known to the West, did not play a role in Eastern society. “Indian spirituality contains just as much evil as it does goodness, or lacks as much of evil as it lacks of goodness” (Bair 2003, 426). (One might well say the same thing about Western science and technology.) �e other concern he had was about the sensuality of the religious images and monuments, especially the “obscene stone carvings” on the Temple of Konarak.

�e two main thoughts that seemed to preoccupy him in his initial contact with India were questions of morality and sex, issues that he was wrestling with in himself, and both of which also relate to the great phallic god of the south, Shiva. Jung had repeated dreams of the color red and wondered if it had to do with

dark goddess Kali, with evidence of animal sacri�ce, or dried betel nut juice on the street that looked like blood. He appreciated the opportunity to speak with cultured and edu-cated people, which he had not done in Africa, but it was the question of morality and the Indian attitude toward evil that continued to plague and puzzle him. He even won-dered if the aim of yogic transcendence was an avoidance of moral con�ict.

Jung’s admiration of all things British in the face of the Indian independence movement led his German guide (Alfred Weifel) to wonder if he hadn’t been “seduced by Fascism.” As he spoke at Indian universities, he was troubled that none of the stu-dents seemed to have read his books and that they all asked about Freud. Newspapers ran cartoons of him as a big bu�oon or evil giant towering over a smaller image of Freud. Jung was furious, which may give a di�erent meaning to his “seeing red” in his dreams. By the time they arrived in Calcutta, he was more and more irritable and �nally

Couple from frieze at Konarak. (Photograph: Dyane Sherwood, 1984, by permission.)

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realized that he was ill. He had himself admitted to a British military hospital where he was diagnosed with amoebic dysentery (Bair 2003, 428). Jung glossed over this rather important illness in his autobiography, saying,

India honored me with three doctorates, from Allahabad, Benares, and Calcutta—representatives of Islam, of Hinduism, and of British-Indian medicine and science. It was a little too much of a good thing, and I needed a retreat. A ten-day spell in the hospital o�ered it to me, for in Calcutta I �nally came down with dysentery. ( Jung 1963, 280)

Being sick in India can be a very scary business, and this is the second time that Jung fell into the Void. Like the sage in the Hindu legend, he dropped out of the day-to-day reality of his outer journey and entered another world. He slipped into a drugged sleep with fragmentary dreams he could barely recall, let alone understand. In more lucid moments, he realized that they had one thing in common: the quest for the Grail. �e most cohesive of these is recounted in Memories, Dreams, Re�ections (1963, 280–281); in it, he �nds himself high above the Indian subcontinent, but looking down on an island shaped like England. Down below, he and various members of the Analytic Psychology Club are sight seeing (italics in original). �e dream is long and complex, but it ends with him leaving a group of men at the northern tip of the island, and going on alone to pur-sue the Grail. �ere is no boat or bridge, and he swims by himself in the cold dark waters, awakening with the knowledge: “I knew one thing for sure. I have to reach the Grail” (Bair 2003, 429). One wonders if these are the waters of nonexistence?

Jung missed the celebration at the University of Calcutta, and his honorary degree was granted in absentia. He gradually recovered from the dysentery, but his full health and vigor never returned. During this latter phase of his journey, he went to South India. From Madras, the ashrams of Sri Ramana Maharshi or Sri Aurobindo are only a few hours away, although travel would have been much slower and more dicult in those days. In light of the illness, it seems understandable that he did not make the e�ort, but he also missed a rare chance to encounter the higher consciousness that some part of him longed to know. On the trip home, he was too ill to write and spent much of his time in a deck chair going over the Grail dreams.

South India can have a mesmerizing e�ect. It is an old culture, where the gods are still alive. In his recent six-part PBS documentary, �e Story of India, Michael Wood says that Tamil Nadu is the only place le where an ancient civilization lives as it has for millennia yet is adapted to the modern world. It is the home of Shiva, Lord of the Dance, to whom T. S. Eliot referred in Four Quartets:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither �esh nor �eshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is . . . Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, �ere would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

(Eliot 1943, Quartet 1, “Burnt Norton, 15)

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Shiva Nataraja (detail), Madras Museum. (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

About a half day’s drive south of Madras is the ancient temple city of Chidamba-ram. It is the origin of Shiva Nataraja, the Dancing Shiva, in his Ananda Tandava pose, the Cosmic Dance of Bliss. Shiva is also worshipped there as “formless form.” He is a potent phallus yet also the Void, “neither �esh nor �eshless.” I was there with friends in 2006, and I thought of Jung and what he had missed. �e holy place and its story are at least two thousand years old. �e current structure, built one thousand years ago, is the only place in India where Shiva and Vishnu are worshipped in one temple, though the gods live in separate chambers.

Vishnu and Shiva as one. (Wikimedia Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Harihara.jpg. In public domain.)

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�e Shiva puja is performed six times daily, to gongs and bells, incense, and �re o�erings, as well as ritual ablutions of the crystal Shiva Lingam. I faced the god bare-foot and shirtless, ash smudged on my forehead. �e presiding priest from the one-thousand-year-old Dakshina clan, shaves the front of his head and wears the hair long in the back, like a woman, to honor the androgyny of the god. I imagined that Jung had dreamed of this place as a child, when he went down into the earth to see the under-ground phallus, the giant lingam that his mother told him was the “man eater.” Jung le India in 1938 without entering the realms of Shiva and Vishnu, but his psyche was not �nished with the questions he le unanswered.

Like Markendaya aer his sojourn in the Void, Jung resumed his life back in Zürich, seeing patients, studying alchemy, writing about his new insights, and living through the terrible years of the Second World War. Despite Zimmer’s disappointment that he had not visited Sri Ramana, Jung was unapologetic. Zimmer died in 1943, and Jung was asked to write a forward to a posthumous book of his translations of Sri Ramana’s talks. Jung describes the Hindu saint as a “holy man” and, as such, a typical embodi-ment of the highest spiritual ideal in India. Yet Jung had no regrets about missing the opportunity to meet him in person:

I do not know whether my friend found it an unforgivable or incomprehensible sin on my part that I had not sought out Shri Ramana. I had the feeling that he would certainly not have neglected to pay him a visit, so warm was his interest in the life and thought of the holy man.

Perhaps I should have visited Shri Ramana. Yet I fear that if I journeyed to India a sec-ond time to make up for my omission, it would fare with me just the same: I simply could not, despite the uniqueness of the occasion, bring myself to visit this undoubtedly distin-guished man personally. For the fact is, I doubt his uniqueness; he is of a type which always was and will be . . . He is a “phenomenon” which seen through European eyes, has claims to uniqueness. But in India he is merely the whitest spot on a white surface (whose whiteness is mentioned only because there are so many surfaces that are just as black). Altogether, one sees so much in India that in the end one only wishes one could see less: the enor-mous variety . . . creates a longing for simplicity. �is simplicity is there too; it pervades the spiritual life of India like a pleasant fragrance or a melody. . . . (1944/1958, CW 11 ¶950)

And he goes on,

. . . . there is no village or country road where that broad-branched tree cannot be found in whose shade the ego struggles for its own abolition, drowning the world of multiplic-ity in the . . . All-Oneness of Universal Being. �is note rang so insistently in my ears that soon I was not able to shake o� its spell. I was then absolutely certain that no one could ever get beyond this . . . should Shri Ramana say anything that did not chime in with this melody, or claim to know anything that transcended it, his illumination would surely be false. (CW 11 ¶952)

�ese poetic remarks about his reasons for not visiting Sri Ramana seem defensive and tinged with guilty feelings toward Zimmer. Equating the renowned saint with the

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commonly seen sadhus in rural village life is both naive and insulting to Indian spir-ituality, and Jung’s Eurocentric condescension is remembered in Indian academic circles even today.2 However, Jung goes on to a rather interesting discussion of the rela-tions of the ego with the self, which he compares to the Western dialectic between man and god. His two main points are these: �e �rst is that Western man has developed an empirical consciousness that has to remain objective and examine the facts psychologi-cally. His second point, less clearly stated, is a mistrust of transcendence, which is what he assumes to be the sole aim of Indian yoga. I think that this bias in Jung’s religious thinking can be seen throughout his writings and may have its origins in his upbring-ing as the son of a Swiss Protestant minister. What is lacking is an awareness of bhakti, or devotional yoga, as well as any real understanding of the nature of tantra, which holds that the universe we live in is the Shakti, or feminine manifestation of God. �e only reference Jung makes to the feminine deity in his India journey is to Kali, and he seems to ignore the enormous varieties of goddess worship, both in ordinary religious practice and in the re�ned spiritual doctrines of the Divine Mother. Yet his deep yearn-ing for the feminine appears in his dreams of the Grail quest, in sharp contrast to the purely masculine goal of transcendence that he attributes to all the Indian systems. As he had written, “Sri Ramana declares unmistakenly that the real purpose of spiritual practice is the dissolution of the ‘I’” ( Jung 1944/1958, CW 11, ¶953).

Jung then cites the more moderate view of Ramakrishna, who considers that with rare exceptions, the ego will keep reappearing. Ramakrishna writes, “When

Sri Ramana Maharshi with Monkey. (Guru’s Feet, http://www.gurus-feet.com/�les/gurus_gallery_pics/ramana2.jpg. Photographer unknown.)

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you ultimately �nd that this ‘I’ cannot be destroyed, let it remain as ‘I’ the servant.” Clearly, Jung would �nd this attitude of the ego as servant to the Self more acceptable to Western religious sensibilities, yet he seems to miss the Indian point of view—that allowing for this dualistic approach opens the door to bhakti, or devotional yoga. Ramakrishna was a tantric initiate and deeply devoted to the Divine Mother, but Jung fails to understand that this practice of surrender is quite di�erent from his �xed idea that all yoga aims solely at annihilation of the ego. As we shall see later, Jung remains committed to the idea that surrender comes only as a painful defeat for the ego, per-haps because of his very early experience of the Void, due to the absence of a depressed mother. Sadly, a joyous self-giving to the Divine remains beyond his imagination:

Toward the beginning of spring I set out on my homeward voyage, with such a pleth-ora of impressions that I did not have any desire to leave the ship to see Bombay. Instead, I buried myself in my Latin alchemical texts. But India did not pass me by without a trace; it le tracks which lead from one in�nity into another in�nity. ( Jung 1963, 284)

Zimmer died in 1943, and it was early in 1944 that Jung slipped on an icy walkway near his home in Zürich, fell, and broke his leg. With his leg in a cast, Jung was kept at bedrest. He developed blood clots in a deep vein, some of which broke lose and went to his heart and lungs. He was seriously ill, near death. For a third time, he fell into the Void. Lying in a hospital bed again, he was delirious, but this time he experienced a series of numinous visions that became a major source of his �nal book, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–1956/1970).

His description begins with a view of the earth not seen until the age of space exploration a generation later, a vision of the unus mundus. �e vision is reminiscent of the Grail dream he had in Calcutta, beginning high above India:

It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light . . . below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. ( Jung 1963, 289–292)

Looking north, he saw the Arabian peninsula and the Red Sea to his le, but he didn’t look to his right. He felt that he was about to die, but as he �oated in space, he turned to the south and saw something new:

A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone like a meteorite . . . I had seen similar stones on the coast of the Gulf of Bengal, . . . some of them were hollowed out into temples . . . To the right of the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench. He wore a white gown, and I knew he expected me. (Jung 1963, 289–292)

Anandamayi Ma (Namasmarana, http://www.namasmarana.org/Ma20.JPG, accessed 2/7/2010. Photo g-rapher unknown.)

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Southern India (Photo from space, NASA. Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: South_India_satellite.jpg, accessed 2/7/2010.)

Rock temple at Mahabalipurim. (Photograph courtesy of author.)

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Rereading this passage from Memories, Dreams, Re�ections, I had to wonder if this black Hindu is a re-creation in Jung’s imagination of Sri Ramana Maharshi, or perhaps even an inner communication with him. What follows is fascinating, given the com-ments he had written so recently in Zimmer’s book that Sri Ramana sees the real pur-pose of spiritual practice as the dissolution of the ‘I’. His vision continues:

As I approached the steps . . . A strange thing happened. I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me—an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. It was with me, and I was it. And I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. “I am this bundle of what has been, and what has been accomplished.” ( Jung 1963, 293)

Jung’s psyche spontaneously creates this stripping down of his ego. At the heart of Sri Ramana’s teaching is one question: “Who am I?” It begins with the process of neti-neti, “not this, not that”:

�e gross body, I am not that; the �ve sense organs, I am not that. �e organs of speech, movement, grasping, procreation, I am not that . . . even the mind which thinks, I am not . . . the nescience too, in which there are no objects and no functions, I am not that. �en there comes the question, “If I am none of these, then who am I?” �e answer is Aware-ness, and the nature of this awareness is Satchitananda, the three terms of Divine being: existence, consciousness, and bliss. (Maharshi 1988, 3)

Along with the painful process of annihilation, Jung felt a great sense of fullness, that he had everything that he truly was. He felt certain that once inside the temple, he was going to enter an illuminated room full of those people with whom he really belonged and understand at last the historical nexus of his life. But something kept him from going in, and it was the appearance of his doctor’s soul. He told Jung that there was a protest against his going away. It was a painful choice, but he decided to live. Disappointed by the fact that he would not enter the illuminated room, he thought, “Now I must return to the ‘box system’ again,” meaning a painful imprisonment in the ordinary world of the ego. He worried, however, for the health of his doctor, who had appeared during the vision in his primal form, an indication that he, too, was at the far edge of life (Jung 1963, 293).

Jung’s repulsion at entering “the box system” is a well-known phenomenon in yogic practice. �e term for it, vairagya, refers to the sense of disgust one feels aer an experience of liberation from the mind and senses when faced with returning to ordinary reality. It is interesting to contrast Jung’s experience with Sri Aurobindo’s description of an early spiritual awakening, which he called “the vacant in�nite.” Like Markendaya in the Upanishads, his experience of the Void opens into a state that transcends the opposites of being and nonbeing:

I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all . . . In the end it began to disappear into a Super-conscious from above.

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. . . �e aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that seemed at �rst only a cinematic shape of shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from the supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth . . . (Sri Aurobindo 1972, 101)

Jung took three weeks to get up from his sick bed, and as he did, his doctor became ill with septicemia and died shortly thereaer. Jung was his last patient. During those three weeks, Jung felt depressed during the day but slept in evening and would awaken around midnight in “an utterly transformed state.” He felt as if he were �oating in space, safe in the womb of the universe and �lled with happiness. “‘�is is eternal bliss,’ I thought. ‘�is cannot be described; it is far too wonderful’” ( Jung 1963, 293).

Here it seems he �nally reached the Divine Mother, the goal of his Grail quest. In this state, Jung experienced the visions of the holy marriage, which became the basis of his last great work, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–1956/1974). Recovering from his illness, he realized that there had been something wrong with his attitude, and he now felt “an unconditional ‘yes’” to that which is, to the circumstances of his life. His approach to surrender, however, remained fundamentally Western, based on the ego’s su�ering as portrayed in the Christian myth. Perhaps the fact that these experi-ences came in the wake of a life-threatening illness, rather than as a result of a spiritual attitude of self-giving, con�rmed his earlier views. As he later wrote in Mysterium Coniunctionis,

�e self, in its e�orts at self-realization, reaches out beyond the ego personality on all sides; because of its all-encompassing nature, it is brighter and darker than the ego, and accordingly confronts it with problems which it would like to avoid . . . (T)he numinous power of the self . . . can hardly be experienced in any other way. For this reason the expe-rience of the self is always experienced as a defeat for the ego. (1955–1956/1974 CW 14, ¶778. Italics in original.)

�e �rst part of Jung’s near-death experience, the stripping down of the ego, bears a striking resemblance to the teaching of Sri Ramana, and in his moments of eternity, he touched the essence of Satchitananda. But the process of the soul’s ascent and its return to the body also brings to mind to the work of Gerhard Dorn, the sixteenth-century alchemist whose manuscript Jung was reading on his trip to India. Dorn describes three stages of a spiritual process, which become in Jung’s elaboration the foundation of a Western yoga based on Christianity. �e �rst step is a separation of the soul from the body and its going up to join the spirit, which leads to what Dorn calls the “unio mentalis,” the practice of wisdom. �e return of this spiritualized soul to the body creates the wise man. Finally, the union of that wise man with the soul of the world (the unus mundus) represents a kind of universal salvation. In the last chapter

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of Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung elaborates this alchemical formula as a metaphor for the psychological and spiritual process of individuation, and it is here that he �nds his own answer to the challenge he had posed twenty years earlier in his essay, “Yoga and the West.” “In the course of the centuries the West will produce its own yoga, and it will be on the basis laid down by Christianity”(1936/1958, CW 11 ¶869).

Jung entered the Void in the wake of trauma and illness, yet he held himself to the task le for him by his ancestors, to �nd the links in Western culture that would ground the Christian religion in a practical psychology for modern life. He may have set self-imposed limits on his exploration of yoga, but he drew deeply from it in �nd-ing his own answers. In the end, his journeys into the Void led to a personal illumina-tion, and perhaps the �nal comment of his psyche on Indian yoga came in the form of a dream that occurred shortly aer his illness:

I was walking along a little road through a hilly landscape; the sun was shining and I had a wide view in all directions. �en I came to a small wayside chapel. �e door was ajar and I went in. To my surprise there was no image of the Virgin on the altar, and no cruci�x either, but only a wonderful �ower arrangement. But then I saw that on the �oor in front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi—in lotus posture, in deep meditation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and I awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be. (1963, 323)

In discussing the importance of this “reversal of consciousness,” he concludes,

�e decisive question for man is: Is he related to something in�nite or not? �is is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the in�nite can we avoid �xing our interest upon futilities. . . . �e feeling for the in�nite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. �e greatest limitation for man is the ‘self ’; it is manifested in the experience: ‘I am only that!’. . . . In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination . . . we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the in�nite. But only then! (1963, 325)

Is this not reminiscent of Vishnu’s teaching to Markendaya aer his return from the cosmic Void?

I, the human individual, of limited consciousness, steeped in delusion, spellbound by Maya, actually and fundamentally am �is . . . the Highest Being, of unlimited con-sciousness and existence. I am not to be identi�ed with the perishable individual, who accepts as utterly real and fatal the processes and happenings of the psyche and the body. “I am He who is free and divine” (Zimmer 1972, 50).

endnotes1. Apparently, Jung met a disciple of Sri Aurobindo’s in India. One account (personal

communication) claims that Jayantilal Parekh, who founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press and later the Archives, met Jung in Madras in 1938 and gave him Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts to read. In another version, A. B. Purani, a personal attendant and biographer of

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Sri Aurobindo said to Aurobindo, “Jayantilal met Jung in Ceylon. He gave him your books to read, but he couldn’t �nd much in them. Maybe because he considers himself too great.” Purani quotes Sri Aurobindo’s rather cryptic reply: “Jung has said that India has plenty of psychology.” �e other story, which I heard personally from Dr. Frederick Spielgelberg, is that years later he sent a copy of �e Life Divine (1914–20/1972) to Jung with Rhoda LeCocq, a graduate student from the California Institute of Asian Studies. Jung �ipped through it, pu�ed on his pipe, and said, “�is is a whole world. I am too old for it.”

2. In 2001, I was invited to speak at a conference of Indian psychologists at the University of Kerala in Trivandrum, the site of one of Jung’s 1938 lectures. �e host asked me not to praise Jung too much as he was still mistrusted by Indians for disrespectful comments he had made during his visit. I canceled the trip aer the attacks of September 11.

noteReferences to �e Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and

paragraph number. �e Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

bibliography2001: A space odyssey. 1968. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and

Arthur C. Clarke.Aurobindo, Sri. 1914–20/1972. �e life divine. Vols. 21–22. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo

Ashram Press.———. 1972a. Centenary edition, Vol 26. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.———. 1972b. Centenary edition, Vol. 23. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.———. 1993. Savitri. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.Bair, Deidre. 2003. Jung, a biography. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.Dorn, Gerhard. 1602. �eatrum chemicum. Oberusi, Germany: Lazarus Zetzner.Eliot, T. S. 1943. Four quartets. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.Jung, C. G. 1916/1969. �e transcendent function. �e structure and dynamics of the psyche.

CW 8.———. 1921/1971. Psychological types. CW 6.———. 1936/1958. Yoga and the West. Psychology and religion: West and East. CW 11.———. 1945/1968. �e philosophical tree. Alchemical studies. CW 13.———. 1944/1958. �e holy men of India: Introduction to Zimmer’s “Der Weg zum Selbst.”

Psychology and religion: West and East. CW 11.———. 1955–1956/1970. Mysterium coniunctionis. CW 14.———. 1963. Memories, dreams, re�ections. New York: Random House.———. 1999. �e psychology of kundalini yoga: Notes on the seminar given in 1932. Ed. Sonu

Shamdasani. Princeton: Princeton University Press.———. 2009. �e red book: Liber novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani: New York: W. W. Norton &

Co. in the Philemon Series of the Philemon Foundation.Maharshi, Ramana. 1988. �e teaching of Sri Ramana Maharshi. Boston: Shambala Press.Stein, Richard. 1991. Jung’s mana personality in the Nazi era. In Lingering shadows, eds. A.

Maidenbaum and S. Martin. Boston: Shambala Press.�e story of India. 2008. Directed by Michael Wood. Screenplay by Michael Wood.Wilber, Ken. 1980, �e pre/trans fallacy. Revision 3.2: 13.Zimmer, Heinrich. 1972. Myths and symbols of Indian art and civilization. Ed. Joseph Camp-

bell. Bolligen Series VI. New York: Princeton University Press.

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richard h. stein, m.d., is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst who has been practicing in San Francisco for over thirty years. He is a member and senior analyst of the San Francisco Jung Institute, teaching in the analytic training program as well as in the Public Programs. His primary interests include the spiritual dimension of the psyche as it emerges in analytical work, the relational �eld in analysis, the intersection of Jung’s psychology with Eastern and other spiritual systems, and the role of the initiation archetype in maturation. He has written about Sri Aurobindo’s yoga of transformation, Jung’s Mana Personality in the Nazi Era, and the initiatory meaning of a series of dreams about the Cruci�xion. Correspondence: 2536 Clay St., San Francisco, CA 94115. E-mail: [email protected].

abstract“Snapshots from the Void” is an exploration of the episodes in Jung’s life where he fell from his normal ego consciousness into experiences of a deep unknown. �e author ampli�es these experiences with an ancient Hindu myth of Vishnu, who dwells in the sea of nonexistence during the intervals between destruction of the cosmos and the next creation. A Hindu sage, Markendaya, wanders in the dreamscape of Vishnu’s inner life and then falls from his mouth into the Void and has to come to terms with the paradox of being and nonbeing. �e author shows how Jung’s childhood and adult experiences of nonbeing in�uenced his ideas and prejudices about the yoga systems, colored his 1938 trip to India, and led him to the path he describes as individuation.

key wordsabsolute, alchemy, Aurobindo, bhakti, dreams, Christianity, collective unconscious, T. S. Eliot, India, C. G. Jung, Ramana Maharshi, Philemon, Savitri, transcendence, Vishnu, Void, yoga, Heinrich Zimmer

�e author next to a bronze Shiva Nataraja, Madras Museum, 2006. (Photograph courtesy of author.)

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snapshots from the void

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