Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
Volume 1
Peter Kingsley
Chapter 6
Jung visited India just once, in his early sixties.
The visit was filled with thrills and insights and excitements. But, as usual, when Jung needed to get sick he got sick—and was forced back inside himself.
Just after being released from hospital in the wildly bewildering city of Kolkata he had a dream that at first bewildered him too, and would end up leaving an enormous impression on him: as much as any other dream he would ever have.
“Jung found himself confronted at last with the mystery of western civilization—and the secret of his role.”
For him, the geographical realities had a dramatically paradoxical effect. It was precisely through being so far away from Europe, so distant in Asia from the hearth and home of western culture, that Jung found himself confronted at last with the mystery of western civilization—and the secret of his role.
Instead of getting lost in the sights and smells and sounds of the East, he was simply using the whole experience as a chance to plunge into the depths of himself: exactly what the ancient Greek philosophers recommended. –
(footnote – The repeated image of Jung during his journey to India as someone constantly withdrawing in search of the inner truth unique to him along is an obvious reminiscence of the famous words spoken by the ancient Greek philosopher he was most familiar with, Heraclitus: the saying “I searched inside myself” was especially annotated by Jung in his own copy of Heraclitus’ collected Greek fragments. On the paradoxical effects of being so far removed from Europe. The immensity of the impression made on Jung by his Kolkata dream, although understated in Memories, Dreams, Reflections; is duly noted in Jaffe’ Protocols; it’s also no accident that he compares the special significance of his time in India during 1938, including the sickness and dream, to the crucial importance of his famous illness during 1944.
And this very same dream of his happens to be what, appropriately enough, would prompt him in his old age to start speaking out about the secret of individuation as well as about the archetype of the knight—because this was his dream of the Grail.
Physically in his Kolkata hotel room, he found himself on an island just off the coast of southern England. Together with a group of Swiss friends and colleagues he had come to a medieval castle at the southernmost tip of the island: the castle of the Grail. But Jung felt almost overwhelmingly alone in his awareness that the Grail and the home of the Grail and all the traditions about the Grail aren’t only a matter of history or literature.
On the contrary, they are vitally meaningful; absolutely alive.
Then comes the main part of the dream—long, slow, brutally arduous. The Grail is missing and has to be found: needs to be brought back from such a small, nondescript house that no one would ever guess it had been hidden there. And it has to be brought back today, straight away.
Jung sets off, towards the north, still accompanied by people from his group. They march for hours. The land becomes more and more desolate; the sunsets and the darkness sets in instead. Finally, they come to the sea and realize the island is split into two but there is not a single bridge, or boat, or road. Frozen, exhausted, everyone falls asleep one by one until only Jung is left awake.
And then he realizes that he, alone, is going to have to strip off his clothes and swim across the channel to fetch the Grail.
As a dream this has all the presence, and atmosphere, of something numinous. But just as striking as the dream itself is the way Jung chose to explain it.
If a psychologist was to want to help point the way towards an interpretation, it would be easy enough to suggest taking every single detail as simply an expression or reflection of the dreamer’s internal state: as a comment from the unconscious on one person’s private search for an inner meaning. But that’s not at all how Jung read or saw it.
To him it wasn’t just about some individual quest for psychological integration. It was about his work in—and for the sake of—the whole world. As his biography, with a sense of fatefulness, starts describing: “Myths that day has forgotten continue to be told by night, and powerful figures which consciousness turns into mere banalities and has reduced to ridiculous trivialities are resurrected by poets and prophetically revived.”
And then it only takes a moment before we are hearing Jung begin to explain how, “imperiously, the dream wiped away all the intense daytime impressions of India and swept me back to the far too long neglected concerns of the West which had once expressed themselves in the quest for the Holy Grail as well as in the search for the philosophers’ stone. I was taken out of the world of India and reminded, in the process, that India was not my task but only a part of the path—admittedly a significant one—which would bring me closer to my goal. It was as if the dream was asking me, What are you doing in India? It would be far better if you were to seek for yourself and for the sake of your fellow humans the healing vessel, the servator mundi, which you urgently need. For your state is perilous; you are all in imminent danger of destroying all that centuries have built up.’”29
I really wonder how many of the thousands of people who have read these words ever registered, on a conscious level, what they mean. In fact they are saying something extremely specific. To get to the place of understanding that specific something, though, almost inevitably involves the same kind of ordeal Jung himself was forced to go through in his dream.
Visiting India is all very nice and fine. Experiencing other cultures, getting a taste of the delicious East, being touched and even transformed by its spiritual traditions, can be very helpful in a certain round-about sort of way.
But none of this would have any value for Jung except in bringing him back to what truly matters and helping him remember what, on the deepest level, his entire life was about. Its only point was to return him to the realization of his real task and work, of his one duty and obligation and responsibility— to play the long-forgotten role of healer to the West.
For him, nothing could possibly be more important. The need is urgent: urgent beyond any words. The peril is all around us. The danger of total destruction is imminent.
But it’s precisely when the need is most pressing and the peril is most immediate that people are least able to recognize the nature of the danger—let alone to explain to themselves, or others, the sense of urgency they feel.
“Jung’s task was cultural rather than individual.”
To be sure, there are those who have struggled to convey the fact that Jung’s task was cultural rather than individual. To earth these intuitions, though, to ground and locate them in space and time: that’s a rather different matter.
And the trouble is that our culture has grown so sick there is not even a context or framework left for understanding what any of this actually means—because the awareness of what a culture is has just become a thing of the past.
This is why so many Jungians have flown off into grandiose fantasies about Jung as some culture hero personally inaugurating a glorious new age by leaving all the trash of Christianity and western materialism behind. But this insanely inflated nonsense has nothing whatsoever to do with the way Jung perceived his own task.
“His task was to rediscover the essential mystery of the West”
For him nothing new is possible without plunging back into the past—behind all of the dirt and materialism, the misunderstandings and corruptions, murders and perversions and distortions—in search of the secret at the heart of one’s own culture. The core of his task was to rediscover the essential mystery of the West that so urgently needs to be treasured and guarded, protected and preserved because only this can provide salvation: not some fantasies about an imaginary future.
And here is where we find ourselves staring straight into the face of the major problem which has dogged students of Jung, as well as his critics, for years. That’s the problem of his attitude to eastern religions and spiritual practices.
Certainly the seriousness of the problem is obvious enough. On the one hand, he praises to the heavens the insights offered by eastern traditions into the study of psychology and into the infinite intricacies of the human soul. On the other hand he felt an intense disgust for westerners taking up exotic practices of self-cultivation, or surrendering themselves to eastern forms of spirituality, which erupted into almost desperate bouts of impatience and irritability. And, only too predictably, scholars have reacted by picking at his arguments or trying to tear his reasoning apart with even more anger and irritation.
If we take a look underneath the surface, though, it’s so easy to see what Jung was really trying to say below all the things he did say.
Thanks to the utter bankruptcy of rampant materialism and modern Christianity, many sensitive westerners even as youngsters instinctively turn to the East—turn anywhere—to fill the terrible emptiness of meaning they have been brought up in. And the kind of nourishment they find in eastern spiritual teachings or teachers can help to a significant extent to provide what they, as individuals, need.
But we are not just the individuals we seem to be. And now, whether we know it or not, we have a collective obligation to rediscover western culture’s original purpose: have an inescapable duty, as westerners, to face up to the full reality of what we lost.
Jung lays this out with a clarity, almost a savagery, that perfectly describes the situation we find ourselves in today. At the same time he effortlessly manages to undermine all our modern pretensions; our treasured assumptions and political correctnesses.
This is why in his memorial lecture for Richard Wilhelm, the Chinese scholar he had come to love and respect so much, he outlined a scenario that would have been more or less unimaginable when he was speaking almost a century ago—and with a darkly, almost perversely prophetic humour explained what others were far too pious to see.
Times were changing, he noted. Instead of western missionaries pouring out everywhere across the East to convert people with their gospel as energetically and methodically as they could, Christianity had become so exhausted that Buddhists were getting ready to seize their own opportunities because they realized now was the perfect moment for positioning themselves to start becoming missionaries to the West.
And in case some sincere listeners or readers were to wonder just where Carl Jung stood on such a delicate matter, he goes straight on to throw any doubt aside. For him, those westerners who would unhesitatingly open the gates of their own culture to the Buddhists weren’t open-minded multiculturalists.
They were “spiritual beggars” who would blindly accept whatever handouts the East in its apparent generosity decided to offer—and in spite of all the talk about mindfulness, would practise the mindlessness of imitating other people’s nobly spiritual truths.
“That is the danger about which it is impossible to give too many warnings”, he added: as if, once again, anyone would have the slightest interest in heeding Jung’s warnings.
Then he continues following the thread of his logic, so unfamiliar but so precise at the same time. “What the East has to give us should be merely a help in a work which we still have to do. Of what use to us is the wisdom of the Upanishads or the insights of Chinese yoga if we abandon the foundations of our own culture as though they were outlived errors and, like homeless pirates, settle with thievish intent on foreign shores?”
“(It’s) hard enough to confront…the darkness of a whole corrupted (western) culture and civilization.”
And for him it all points back to darkness, back to that darkness every westerner so desperately wants to escape from—not just our personal darkness, which is hard enough to confront, but the darkness of a whole corrupted culture and civilization.
This is where everything has to come back to, because the light of real wisdom “only shines in the dark”: in the darkness of our own hell. If we want to experience the benefits of eastern wisdom, any wisdom, first we have to do the impossible work of coming to terms with the western truth about ourselves.
That’s where the path really begins—with the realization that the only light which is going to be of any genuine use or value to us is the light we manage to bring, like a new sun, out from the darkness inside ourselves.
Without such an awareness, which still belongs shovelled away into some forgotten footnote, all the most potent meditation or yoga practices in the world are nothing but a recipe for even greater forgetfulness; are only going to delude us by leading us further and further astray.32
And these weren’t just the thoughts of a man who was sad at the death of a friend.
Almost ten years earlier he had written what seems to have been a mysteriously poetic letter to an Englishwoman. As for the essence of what he evidently told her, it’s summed up in the one direct statement that “Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but the vegetable gods you have raised in your own garden are nourishing. They are perhaps less beautiful, but they have stronger medicine.”
There is an underlying principle here—just as there is in the warning at the start of the Red Book, “Don’t be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields.” This is that real spirituality is not about gawking at exotic scenery: that’s far too easy. It’s about finding a way back to the sacred landscape, however horrifically desolate or abandoned it might feel, which somehow got lost and forgotten inside ourselves.
It’s about learning to find one’s own nourishment and medicine, however modest at first, as opposed to begging; starving; being made to swallow poison. And, above all, it’s about rediscovering the ancient art of healing instead of joining the collective steady downward spiral into sickness and illusion and death.
Otherwise even one’s best possible efforts to create, or try to enlighten, or be of help, simply hurry along the destruction.
But as to what that healing could be, what the healing vessel is which Jung had to labour so hard in his dream to search for, what the particular nutrition is which he struggled throughout his life just to make available: this is something utterly impossible to understand on the level of the rational mind.
Our rational mind is what hid it away in the first place. And reasoning will gladly either keep on trampling it underfoot in its ruthless march towards some global ideal of fulfillment, or go on twisting and distorting it beyond any recognition.
There is only one possible way to make any sense of this at all, and that’s with what Jung referred to as the “plant-like naivete” which intuitively realizes a culture is not just some theoretical abstraction. On the contrary, it’s an organism that lives and dies; a plant; a tree.
Our only real duty and purpose is to return far enough to the root of our civilization that we can remember—then help it remember—its sacred purpose and task.
And, naturally, the only question is how.
See Beezone’s study on “Why didn’t Jung visit Ramana Maharshi when strongly asked to do by his friends, Paul Brunton and Henrick Zimmer.”