Spirituality in Politics — East or West?
I’m currently in the process of publishing four articles on the theme of spirituality in politics, based on a Zoom talk that I gave recently. I am trying to create a political system for the West based on the ideas of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, rather than follow eastern traditions, for example Buddhism.
I received a reply from Simon Heathcote to the second article, saying “Personally, I would draw on the best of both east and west”. This was what I was expecting him to say. I had told him in advance of my plan, and was requesting his feedback.
Simon has led an interesting life, and currently has a website called soulvision. On the homepage you read: “Drawing on Jungian concepts, mysticism and Archetypal Psychology to help return clients to their essence or deep soul, it provides a rare depth of understanding and support through a variety of methods, with proven results. We work with the journey of becoming and, unusually, the realisation of being, meeting people where they are in their life process (my italics).
“So many of us are lost, struggling to find ourselves in a world dominated by often misleading ideas and concepts.. The old paradigms don’t seem to be working, the futility of selfish ambition ever more obvious. We urgently need to uncover our real nature and inner peace. If we want the world to change, it must begin with us”.
Simon, as well as subscribing to Jungian ideas, is also deeply steeped in Eastern wisdom and philosophy, and writes a weekly article on those themes to which you can subscribe.
Here I’m going to seek to defend my position, not because I necessarily believe that I am correct — I am open to persuasion — but merely to stimulate further discussion.
Jung believed that Eastern religions are very profound, but that Westerners were not ready for them. These are some quotes from I talk I gave on Jung a couple of years ago:
“Jung was deeply knowledgeable and complimentary about both (Buddhism and Hinduism). Writing about his 1938 journey to India, he says: ‘By that time I had read a great deal about Indian philosophy and religious history, and was deeply convinced of the value of Oriental wisdom’. He wrote that yoga offers ‘not only the much-sought way, but also a philosophy of unrivalled profundity’. He says of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: for years it ‘has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights’; ‘it is of an unexampled sublimity’ ”.
“Jung also praises the East for believing in the reality of the psyche, ‘as the main and unique condition of existence’, a viewpoint with a close relationship to his own”.
“Since he was highly critical of traditional Christianity, and sought to establish a spirituality that would remedy its deficiencies, Jung was generally sympathetic to the Eastern attitude. He says: ‘The Christian West considers man to be wholly dependent upon the grace of God, or at least upon the Church as the exclusive and divinely sanctioned earthly instrument of man’s redemption. The East, however, insists that man is the sole cause of his higher development, for it believes in self-liberation’ ”. There is an obvious parallel here with the Individuation Process he advocated, since that is an inner search for personal illumination, without reliance on any external authority, although of course one may need the assistance of a guru or analyst.
Despite all this, Jung thought that Westerners were not yet ready for this wisdom. He said: “The philosophy of the East, although so vastly different from ours, could be an inestimable treasure for us too; but, in order to possess it, we must first earn it”.
“If I remain so critically averse to yoga, it does not mean that I do not regard this spiritual achievement of the East as one of the greatest things the human mind has ever created. I hope my exposition makes it sufficiently clear that my criticism is directed solely against the application of yoga to the peoples of the West. The spiritual development of the West has been along entirely different lines from that of the East and has therefore produced conditions which are the most unfavourable soil one can think of for the application of yoga”.
He attributes “the importation on a mass scale of exotic (Eastern) religious systems” to the “bankruptcy” of Protestantism, concluding correctly therefore that this is a late development in the West. Meditation and yoga are, on the contrary, traditions in the East going back many centuries. Jung believed that the West was not ready for such sophisticated practices, and has more pressing psychological needs, given its general unconsciousness and lack of self-awareness. The wisdom of the East was therefore “a warning message to a humanity which threatens to lose itself in unconsciousness and anarchy”. He also talks about Western civilization’s “barbarous one-sidedness”.
In simple terms, there is a lot of catching up to do. He says: “In the East, where these ideas and practices originated, and where an uninterrupted tradition extending over some four thousand years has created the necessary spiritual conditions, yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity that can hardly be doubted. They thus create a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness”.
However, “the split in the Western mind makes it impossible at the outset for the intentions of yoga to be realized in any adequate way. It becomes either a strictly religious matter, or else (a physical discipline) and not a trace is to be found of the unity and wholeness of nature which is characteristic of yoga. The Indian can forget neither the body nor the mind, while the European is always forgetting either the one or the other”. The Indian “not only knows his own nature, but he knows also how much he himself is nature. The European, on the other hand, has a science of nature and knows astonishingly little of his own nature, the nature within him”.
“The European has become so far removed from his roots that his mind was finally split into faith and knowledge… His task is to find the natural man again”.
Jung was writing down these thoughts nearly a hundred years. The important question therefore is whether anything significant has changed since he wrote. Has the Western psyche made significant progress since then to make it ready to steep itself in Eastern wisdom? I would suggest that on the whole it has not. The problems with Western consciousness that Jung described have hardly changed since he wrote. One could argue that things have actually become worse.
Since so many people in the West are turning away from Christianity, Buddhism has becoming increasingly popular for those seeking a spiritual life. Possible reasons for this may be the lack of a creator god and hard-to-believe ‘mythological’ stories.
What therefore is Jung’s alternative? What are the significant differences between his spiritual path of Individuation and the East, especially Buddhism. It’s possible to find some parallels. Here Robert E. Ryan outlines what he perceives these to be: “(Jung) is detailing the anatomy of modern despair and meaninglessness which he had encountered in his patients. Somewhat like the Buddha, he determines that there is suffering, that suffering has a cause and that the cause can be overcome. And like many schools of Eastern or more ancient thought, he finds that this cause is itself a structure of consciousness”. (In Shamanism and the Psychology of C. G. Jung, p64)
Thus, for both, the ego is perceived to be the problem and the goal is the transformation of consciousness. That only takes us so far, however, because differences then begin to emerge. In Buddhism the ego personality is considered non-existent, an illusion that we must rid ourselves of. For Jung, however, the ego is an outward, limited, ‘false’ personality (called the persona) which is an obstacle that prevents us from realising our true self, our wholeness, our deeper unique personality. This would seem to be an expansion of ego-consciousness.
The goal of Hinduism and Buddhism would seem to be the same for each individual. Everyone is seeking through spiritual practice the experience of Enlightenment, samadhi, moksha, a state of pure consciousness which has dissolved the ego, and is free of any trace of personality, one’s apparent separate identity. I assume therefore that this is an identical experience for anyone who achieves it. On the other hand, the goal of Jung’s spiritual path, which he calls the Individuation Process, is that each person expands their consciousness, in order to become the unique individual that they truly are. It’s possible that this is an important and necessary prelude to the practices of the Eastern traditions.
Jung encouraged his clients to choose to suffer consciously in order to lead to this higher level of existence — the confrontation with the unconscious, the journey into the underworld, involves suffering. This is accompanied by a discovery of one’s own purpose or mission in life. There is presumably less importance attached to this in Buddhism and Hinduism, which consider the material level to be the illusion of maya, or lila, divine play. According to Jung, however, we can find meaning and value by living in a way that is authentic to us, guided by the self. We find our own way, rather than living according to someone else’s values or ideas.
I’m therefore arguing here and in the Zoom talk mentioned above that, in seeking a political system grounded in spirituality, Jung’s ideas are more appropriate for the West at this point in the history of the evolution of consciousness on this planet. I would be interested in any meaningful contributions to the debate.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, and politics. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
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