Lecture
I 28th April, 1939
Last Semester we were concerned with a
very difficult question, that of active imagination.
I
gave you some historical examples to enable you to gain some
understanding of this process.
This problem of active
imagination is a question which is not exactly popular today, in a
world where we hear of nothing but war and rumours of war, and where
our very culture is threatened.
Endeavour, however, to
show you another aspect of the soul and to support
introversion.
In so doing, I am aware that I am dealing
with a problem which is far removed from the present day
"Weltanschauung".
But it is a matter of
indifference to me whether it is popular or not, so I shall follow
this path undisturbed by the different pacts which are being made;
they will only be broken in any case.
Active imagination is
the intentional activating of a function which otherwise remains
passive.
We are accustomed to look upon phantasy as
something useless, for we in the West make no use of it, we do not
know its value; or we regard it as pathological and a step towards
the mental hospital.
We do not stop to think that
nothing would exist, there would be no culture in the world, if it
were not for active imagination; it is always the forerunner,
everything springs from it.
It is a kind of game, it is true,
but a creative game, a game of the gods.
In India the
gods dance the world into being, they play it into existence - and
on a small scale men can practise the same activity.
As
Faust says: "Formation, transformation, The eternal play of the
eternal mind."
But every good thing is sometimes put to
a bad use, and as phantasying is not a part of our western
education, we have let it run wild and it usually brings up
weeds.
Nevertheless it also leads to new ideas and even
to those technical discoveries which are so highly valued today.
In
the East active imagination still plays a considerable role, as it
did with us in the Middle Ages: phantasy is trained and is
considered to be an important appendage of religious and
philosophical education.
We have lost this side of
culture and have no such process, but there was a time when it
existed.
In the last semester I read you two texts:
the
Amitavur-Dhyana-Sutra the title means introversion, meditation on
Buddha Amitayus, undertaken in order to reach the land of Amitabha
(or Amitayus) - and the Shri:-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra, which can be
translated as the holy-wheel-collected-text.
The
wheel is a symbol, a mandala, in which the totality of man is
expressed.
The Amitavur-Dhviin a-Sutra is an older text than
the Shri-Chakra – Sambhara Tantra.
The Chinese
translation of the Sanskrit original, which no longer exists, dates
from the 5th century A.D.
This Sutra teaches, in the
form of a story, how to concentrate and how to develop the
phantasy.
The Yogin must start his meditation on a
fixed point: in this case it is the image of the setting sun.
The
meditation or imagination of the water follows, then the ice and the
lapis lazuli which is the firm ground.
Under this the
Yogin comes to the things which are not visible, the first of these
to be meditated upon is the so-called dhvaja, the golden
banner.
The ordinary meaning of dhvaja is banner or
standard, but it would be more correct here to translate it as
symbol, for the text says that it is stretched to the eight points
of the compass and is held there by golden ropes.
This
is all thought of as contained in a circle.
The text
continues with the meditation on the eight lakes, these are covered
in lotus flowers which are round.
The lotus (padma) has
a double meaning, for it is identified with the yoni which means the
feminine, especially in the sense of sex.
I must remind
you here that such things have rather a different character in the
East.
The Easterner does not suffer from our unnatural
sexuality, he is absolutely normal in this respect.
With the
appearance of the lotus the round element is stressed.
The
eight lakes with innumerable lotus flowers have the meaning of
worlds or groups of people, each lotus flower stands for an
individual person and supports a potential Buddha figure, as the
highest expression of perfect enlightenment.
Later the
single lotus is imagined on the firm ground of seven jewels, which
is reality; so it is on the foundation of reality that the lotus is
induced through imagination.
It is very difficult for
us to understand that a psychic reality can be brought into being
through imagination, this is a thoroughly Eastern concept.
The
Easterner is not hampered by our prejudice that reality is only that
which appears in space, in three dimensions.
He thinks
that his thought can take on concrete form, but this is not a
necessity and when it does not it is equally a reality.
We
constantly hear of Mahatmas and Rishis living away in the mountains
of Tibet who are capable of all kinds of magical practices and in
India this is also taken for granted; but when Shri Rama Krishna
became interested in the question and tried to discover if such
people existed, he did not find a single one.
Usually
it is the invisible or psychic reality which is meant.
Psychic
reality is a thing which exists in and for itself in the East, it
can be perceived and even induced to appear but it cannot be
invented.
The West sees such things very differently
and assumes that anyone who perceives a psychic reality is suffering
from an idee fixe.
Mme David-Neel in the last chapter
of her book "Mystiques et Magiciens du Thibet", tells us
how she created a figure by meditation, through following the
teaching of her Lama.
It
possessed her and it was months before she could free herself from
it, she had created a psychic split and she was burdened with the
split off part.
We cannot doubt her sincerity.
I
know her personally, she is a very intelligent and clear minded
French woman whom one would certainly not connect with phantastic
experiences, but peculiar surroundings and great solitudes have
a
curious effect and strange things are produced there which could not
happen in Piccadilly.
In India I met a sportsman, a
geologist, who was a member of the first Everest expedition, who
told me with the greatest seriousness that he had been bewitched in
a Tibetan monastery and that the mountains were full of devils.
I
made my own experience in Africa, so I can always take such things
seriously, knowing that our consciousness remains European only so
long as it is surrounded by European Culture.
But under
certain conditions we see what strange things can happen.
When
I was in Africa, an old Englishman asked me if I had come to study
the natives.
When I answered in the affirmative, he
said: "Why study the primitives? They are not interesting,
study the Europeans out here and then you will learn
something."
There is some truth in this, amazing things
happen to them.
We must not nurse the illusion that our
psyche is not touched by strange influences.
We could hardly
have guessed that our Europe would have developed so charmingly -
and the devils are not all on the other side of the mountain!
When
the Lama imagines something real, he has created something with his
phantasy and it may possess him.
It is wiser to study
this phenomenon than simply to dismiss it.
I do not say
that I can actually see this second figure, but I can recognise the
existence of such figures in people by their peculiar
psychology.
It is in this sense that the lotus of our text is
a reality.
Then the tower is imagined with its four
posts.
Here the quaternity comes in (it plays a still
more significant role in the Shri-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra) and the
process re aches its culmination with the highest being,
Buddha,
sitting on his flowered throne on the tower.
When this
realisation succeeds, the Yogin who is meditating is Buddha, the
spirit which spreads over the whole world, the universal
Buddha.
This figure is identical with "mind"
in English and "Bewusstsein" (consciousness) in German,
Buddha-consciousness, whatever that is.
This Buddha is
a parallel to the medieval "inner Christ".
In
those days identity with Christ was attained through
meditation.
Stigmatisation is an expression of this
medieval idea.
The Shri-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra is exceedingly
rich in material, it is impossible to give you a resume of it, so I
shall only speak of the Tantrik sequence of symbols which forms its
skeleton.
It expresses the successive stages of the
whole exercise and extends from avidya, not-knowing, the normal
condition, to the highest enlightenment.
The first
condition is the Void; in the text it is called Shunyata, which
means Void in the dogmatic Buddhist sense.
This is not
the Void, however, which is reached through the Buddha-mind, but
avidya, the Void of the world in which people live who do not know
that the world exists – and then it does not.
The
conception that the world only exists because we see it, that it is
a phenomenon of human consciousness, is the very foundation of the
eastern attitude.
Schopenhauer's philosophy was deeply
influenced by the gleams of eastern philosophy which reached Europe
with the first collection of the Upanishads.
We, in the
West, are all in the deep darkness of avidya and badly in need of
redemption.
We need to achieve psychic understanding, not
just to be, but to know what you are.
This
understanding begins with the "separatio", for the
contents of the Void must be discriminated in order that we may know
they exist, the Void, therefore, is divided into the four
elements.
This quartering is the very foundation of
enlightenment, translated into modern terms it is the analysis of
the four functions.
This "separatio" is a
system of orientation, like the cross threads in a telescope.
The
four elements are identical with the four points of the horizon end
the four seasons, it is a perfect system of ordering.
The
circle can be divided into sixteen or more parts, but the quartering
is the simplest, and is the archetypal concept of the human
psyche.
The next symbol is Mount Meru.
This is
the first sign of something which is heaping up , it has been
produced through concentration.
So the central point is
emphasised as the mountain.
The city is the next
symbol, it is built on the mountain and expresses the human
community.
We come next to the four-headed
Vajra.
This is a symbol for accumulated energy which
can be sent forth and used for creation.
It has the
qualities of lightning, or the thunderbolt, and of the diamond,
hard, indestructible, eternal.
So this psychic image,
which has been induced through active imagination, becomes eternal,
freed from the limitations of space and time and from all decay, a
symbol of psychic reality.
The next symbol in the sequence is
the lotus out of which the moon emerges.
The moon is the
feminine principle and the sun which follows is the corresponding
masculine principle, so we have a feminine and a masculine
principle, a division into two.
The yoni then emerges
from the lotus, it is the symbol for the feminine organ, and in the
following symbol the moon, the feminine principle, is with the
lingam, the masculine.
The lingam is usually translated
by the phallus.
There are whole series of phallic
symbols in some Shiva sanctuaries, and in Shiva temples the lingam
is placed in the holy of holies, where our high altar would
stand.
But whereas our altar is to be found high up,
the cross up on it seeming to raise it still higher, in the eastern
temple a deep shaft is sunk and the lingam, the phallic symbol, is
placed several metres below the surface of the earth, resting on the
yoni, the lotus.
In the West, we associate the
spiritual with something high above, but the East finds it in
Muladhara, the lower part of the pelvis, that which supports the
roots, the lowest foundation of life.
We, on the
contrary, would symbolise the holy of holies with the head.
If
we make a ground plan of a Christian Church, (Diagram A) which is in
the shape of a cross, and resembles a man with outstretched arms, we
see that we place the altar where the head would be.
The
eastern Temple is based on the idea that Buddha or the lingam (they
are often equivalent) is to be found in the darkest and deepest
place.
In diagram B, the gate of the Temple (1) goes
through the gopuram or cow-house. You then enter the mandapam or
pillared hall (2) which is still light.
There are a few
low windows by the door (3) into the Vimana (4) but the shaft (5)
where the lingam is kept is further back in the darkest place of
all.
The crypts in our old Cathedrals and Churches are
remnants of the mystery cults which contained something of the same
idea.
Many Indians assume that the interior of their
Temples represents the interior of the body.
In Samkhya
philosophy the lingam means the subtle body, the fine breath body,
which covers the old conception of the anima, the psyche, the half
material body.
Lingam also means an appendage, a sign,
a sexual sign, the male genital on the ordinary masculine body.
So
the most important part of the body is an appendage and the lingam
is a symbol for the psyche.
I had an interesting
experience with a Tantrik philosopher in Puri.
In the
course of our conversation he said that he would share his deepest
secret with me, as I had been so understanding.
Then he
whispered: "The lingam is a masculine organ".
That
is India.
I found it very difficult to orientate
myself, it was bewildering, for it seemed to me that every child
must know this.
Yet for these people it is the greatest
secret.
To return to the sequence of symbols, the union
between the masculine and the feminine is an extremely important
moment.
The Vihara (the monastery) is the next
symbol.
The last symbol for the community was the city,
but the Vihara represents the spiritual community.
In
it we find the great magic circle, in the centre of which is
Mahasukha (highest bliss), the Lord of the Mandala.
We
see that this sequence ends in the same way as the
Amitayur-Dhyana-Sutra the Lama has become Mahasukha, Buddha
himself.
Through the union of the moon, which is
mirroring knowledge, consciousness or the psyche, with the lingam,
which is the breath body, the highest summit is reached: the reality
of Buddha.
The exercise is carried through to the point
where the Lama goes entirely into the divine figure, a second figure
of himself which he has imagined.
It is just as if Mme
David-Neel had become her shadow, or whatever it was she created,
and then it would have been as if she had never existed, the other
figure would have become the reality.
This can happen
in pathological cases and there are historical records of such a
split in the personality.
There is a case of a young
woman which illustrates this somewhat unusual phenomenon: she was
generally of a nervous, morose disposition, but her character would
suddenly change altogether and she would become happy and agreeable
in every way; at those times she would speak of expecting a baby but
had no knowledge of this fact during the morose periods.
Finally
she went over entirely into this second, positive personality and
her expectations proved to be true.
I have seen such
cases where a second personality brings about an absolute change in
character.
It is this phenomenon which is made
conscious here through active imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages
102-106
