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
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