IN SEARCH OF A SOUL
(CONTRIBUTED)
WHAT is the ultimate aim of Yoga? If the modern man has methods to look after his body and mind, what more can yoga do for him? Today we have evolved very scientific systems of body building; we have perfected vaccines, drugs, insecticides to live in excellent hygienic conditions; we have powerful medicines to combat most infectious diseases; surgery has made great advances; and with the help of modern psychotherapy, we are able to look after mental ill-health. What more remains for the modern man to discover in Yoga?
"The psychic life of civilized man" it is however said, "is full of problems; we cannot even think of it except in terms of problems. Statistical tables show a rise in frequency of cases of mental depression in men about forty. In women, the neurotic difficulties generally begin somewhat earlier". Jung illustrates the point this way: "The one hundred and eighty degrees of the arc of life are divisible into four parts. The first quarter, lying to the east, is childhood-that state in which we are problems for others, but are not yet conscious of any problems of our own. Conscious problems fill out the second and third quarters; while in the last-in extreme old age we descend again into that condition where, un-worried by our state of consciousness, we again become something of a problem for others."
When speaking of spiritual problems, we are dealing with matters not clearly understood. People are aware of physical diseases, and mental suffering but are, on the whole, confused about the wider psychic cravings of the inner self. That many physical problems like the whole range of psychosomatic diseases arise from emotional conflicts is just getting accepted. That the roots of many human problems lie in the psyche is yet to be realised. The depth psychology of Carl Jung is an attempt in this direction. As Cary Baynes in his introductory remarks to Jung says, "Between extreme of traditional faith and militant rationalism, every conceivable opinion about this great problem of humanity's next step in psychic evolution is to be found. It may be said that the middle position is held by those persons who know that they have outgrown the Church as exemplified in Christianity, but who have not, therefore, been brought to deny the fact that a religious attitude to life is as essential to them as a belief in the authenticity of science. These people have experienced the soul as vividly as the body and the body as vividly as the soul. But the soul has manifested to them in ways not to be explained in terms cither of traditional theology or of materialism. They do not wish to severe the real piety they feel within themselves from the body of scientific facts to which reason gives its sanction. They are convinced that if they can attain to more knowledge of the inner workings of their own minds, more information about the subtle but none the less perfectly definite laws that govern the psyche, they can achieve the new attitude that is demanded without having to regress to what is but a thinly veiled medieval theology, or on the other hand, to fall victim to the illusions of the nineteenth-century ideology."
Unfortunately, modern psychotherapy which is proposed to be the answer to the search of the modern man for a spiritual understanding of life is just scratching at the surface and has not been able to penetrate to deeper layers. The technique of the psychiatrist and psychotherapist is a third person's approach. "The mind is part of the body which could be dissected on the table". Such a mind is of course not a living mind, it is no mind at all as a professor of Indian Philosophy has said.
J. Jordens sees much similarity between Yoga and Jung. Speaking about the 'Unconscious' of Jung, he says, "With the collective unconscious, we enter into a psychic world of cosmic dimensions, which is direct continuity with the personal conscious and unconscious psyche. For the collective part of the unconscious no longer includes contents that are specific for our individual ego and result from personal acquisitions, but such as result from the inherited possibility of psychic functioning in general, namely from the inherited brain-structure. This inheritance is common to all humanity, perhaps even to all the animal world, and forms the basis of every individual psyche". Jordens believes that psychic life for Yoga goes down beneath the ego-function, and reaches back in time through evolution. When Jung speaks of "inherited possibility of psychic functioning in general" these words fit the cosmic Buddhi and Ahankara thus reaching down into the primal evolutes of Prakrti.
About this theory of unconscious, Hans Jacobs, another psychotherapist, has to say that in absence of philosophical background and spiritual instruction, one fantasy of unconscious is replaced by another here because this concept lacks a fundamental idea of all-pervadingness. Jordens who tries to find similarity between Jung and Yoga realizes that, in the system of Jung, spirit is reduced to a complex and put on the same footing with nature. Jung thus says, "We should, therefore be prepared to accept the view that spirit is not absolute but something relative that needs completing and perfecting through life." "The past masters in the art of self-control, the yogis, attain perfection in samādhi, a state of ecstasy, which so far as we know is equivalent to a state of unconsciousness. It makes no difference whether they call our unconscious a 'universal consciousness'; the fact remains that in their case the unconscious has swallowed up ego-consciousness." Hans Jacobs has found even references in Jung to the effect that samadhi is a meaningless dream state; that yoga is not useful for the Western mind.
Jacobs rightly says that "unconscious in Indian terms is the domain of the samskaras. The idea of rebirth without which everything in this life remains an enigma is not discernible by analytical methods. Jung has to by-pass it. Therefore, he explains the collective unconscious with the brain-grooves inherited from ancestors. It does not occur to him whether the impersonal is not the true substance and foundation of our being upon which the ego has only been superimposed so that the psyche would be ultimately as little 'personal' as the body."
The role of Jung as a soul-guide is ill-advised if he has no clear conception of how to gain the experience of the free, or freeing state of mind. This is impossible without cultivating a control of the mind and without a clear direction to spirituality. To quote Jacobs again, "Jung's researches are confined to certain districts of the 'unconscious' which are incomplete within themselves. In order to justify his own inability, Jung declares the true nature of things as inaccessible". In fact, how these theories have affected the technique of psychotherapy is borne out by a comparison of the two systems Yoga and psychotherapy. Geraldine Coaster had long back mentioned some of these weaknesses. "The weak point of analytical therapy at present is precisely its lack of an objective. The journey is apt to come to an inconclusive end because the traveller gets tired and thinks he has gone far enough". To the eightfold path of Yoga and especially the last five steps, psychotherapy has no parallel to offer.
About Jung's method of searching for a soul, Jordens quotes him, "Usually consciousness is characterised by an intensity and narrowness that have a cramping effect… everything must be done to help the unconscious to reach the conscious mind and to free it from its rigidity. For this purpose, I employ a method of active imagination which consists in a special training for switching off consciousness, at least to a relative extent, thus giving unconscious contents a chance to develop." He analyses the dreams, symbols, archetypes, thrown up by the unconsciousness when the conscious is switched off. The contact with the collective unconscious inflates the personality. This is believed to be similar to cosmicazation in Yoga.
Western authors with no direct experience of Yoga have recently interpreted yoga states following pratyähära in terms of concepts of modern psychotherapy. It is said that the yogin in meditation descends beyond the ego into a world of cosmic dimension, into the essence of the cosmos itself. And the world of the collective unconscious that wells up, according to Jung, when ego-function is dormant, has similar conscious dimensions, it is said. Unfortunately, this theory of cosmicazation repeated by Eliade like the theory of Shamanism propounded by him may appear to explain some aspects of yoga mysticism. In a scientific interpretation of classical yoga, possibly, there will be no place for cosmicazation, shamanism, or pan-plactal theory.
While modern analysts have begun to admit that 'analytical therapy' in the West is a new and young experiment they are not really in a position to be soul-guides as claimed by them without their taking aid of firmer metaphysical theories and practical techniques as available in the East. Jung is scared of Yoga and has his preconceived notions against adapting its ultimate principles. Very suggestively he says, "While we are turning upside down the material world of the East with our technical proficiency, the East with its psychic proficiency is throwing our spiritual world into confusion. We have never yet hit upon the thought that while we are over-powering the Orient from without, it may be fastening its hold upon us from within. Such an idea strikes us as almost insane because we have eyes only for gross material connections, and fail to see that we must lay the blame for the intellectual confusion of our middle class at the door of Max Muller, Oldenberg, Neumann, Deusen, Wilhelm and others like them."