DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED BY A WESTERNER IN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND EASTERN YOGA

Treating the paradoxes of ancient people’s mindsets in terms of “ethnology”, or in terms of “comparative history of religions” is the Western way of hiding one’s heart under the cloak of so-called scientific understanding.  We do this in part because a sympathetic understanding might permit contact with an alien attitude to become a serious experience. 

Science is not a perfect instrument, but it is an indispensable one that works harm only when taken as an end in and of itself.  Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands alone.  It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only valid kind there is.  The East has taught us another means, just as effective in its own way (if not more so): understanding through life experience.  As Westerners we know this way only vaguely, as mere shadowy sentiment culled from religious terminology, and therefore we gladly tend to dispose of Eastern “wisdom” (in quotation marks) and relegate it to the obscure territory of faith or superstition.  But by doing that we entirely misunderstand the “realism” of the East.   Perhaps we’ll be tempted to dismiss this other way as exaggerated sentiment or overwrought mystical intuitions that border on the pathological and emanate from cranks and recluses, when it is actually based on the practical insights of evolved minds that we undervalue at our own peril.  

The strangeness of the Chinese yoga texts is so arresting that our embarrassment as to how and where the Eastern world of thought might be joined to ours is quite understandable.  When faced with the problem of trying to grasp this strangeness a common mistake Westerners make is to contemptuously turn their backs on science; and, carried away by Eastern occultism, take the yoga practices too literally, becoming pitiable imitators.  This Westerner abandons the one safe foundation of his mind and loses himself in a mist of words and ideas which never would have originated in Western brains and which are unlikely to be profitably grafted upon them.

An ancient Chinese adept once said: “if the wrong person uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.”  This saying, unfortunately all too true, stands in sharp contrast to the Western belief in the “right” method irrespective of the person who uses it.  In reality, in such matters everything depends on the person and little or nothing on the method.  For the method is merely the path, the direction taken by the person.  The way she acts is the true expression of her nature.  If it ceases to be this, then the method is nothing more than a pretense, something artificially added, serving only the illegitimate goal of self-deception.  This is far removed from the earth-born quality and sincerity of the Chinese thought that originally lay behind these methods.  Instead it becomes the denial of one’s being, self-betrayal to strange and unwholesome images of devotion, a cowardly trick for the purpose of usurping  psychological superiority, everything in fact which is profoundly contrary to the actual meaning of this yogic method.  For Asian yoga’s insights result from a way of life that is complete and genuine, that has grown consistently and coherently from the deepest instincts of humankind; instincts that have become painfully remote to Westerners and impossible to imitate.

Western imitation of Eastern yoga methods is doubly tragic in that it comes from a unpsychological misunderstanding as sterile as modern escapades in other “native” places where “primitivity” is played at while “civilized” Westerners evade more pressing issues at home.  It is not a question of imitating, or worse still, becoming missionaries for what is organically foreign, but rather a question of building up a pathological Western culture.  The denizen of Western culture needs to address his own problems at home and not attempt to escape them by dodging into exotic foreign landscapes; with his marriage problems, his neuroses, his social and political delusions, and his whole philosophical disorientation.

If Westerners wish to genuinely experience the world as ancient Asian yogis experienced it then they will need to completely accept the instinctive needs of their natures that enabled those yogis to perceive life’s invisible essence.  Can it be, perhaps, that the premise of such a way of seeing life is liberation from those ambitions and obsessions which have people’s awareness bound almost exclusively to the visible world; and does not this liberation result from the sensible fulfillment of instinctive needs, rather than from the premature or fear-born repression of them?  Anyone who has seriously studied classic Taoist philosophy or its seminal work The I Ching will not dismiss such questions lightly.  Moreover, such students will learn that such issues are ultimately psychologically inescapable.

In Western culture, under Judeo-Christian influence, matters of the spirit were for a long time represented to be of paramount importance.  Later, in the course of the 19th century, when “matters of spirit” began to be subsumed into “matters of intellect”, a reaction set in against the unbearable dominance of intellectualism.  This movement at first committed the pardonable mistake of confusing intellect with spirit, blaming the latter for the misdeeds of the former.  Spirit is something that includes not only the intellect, but the feelings as well.  One cannot very well dispense with feelings, instinctive needs and intuition when trying to understand the essential nature of the human psyche.  Until recent times, the Chinese culture had never gone so far from these central psychological facts as to lose itself in a one-sided over-development and over-valuation of a single psychic function such as the intellect.  Therefore they recognized the paradoxes inherent in being alive.  Whereas balancing these paradoxes can be viewed as a sign of a mature cultural mindset, one-sidedness, though it does lend momentum, is a sign of cultural immaturity.  The reaction in the West against tyrannical intellectual dominance, in favor of restoring some value to feeling or intuition, seems to be sign of genuine cultural maturation– the widening of consciousness beyond limits that are too narrow for people’s psychological wellbeing.

This is not to under-value the mature achievements of the Western intellect.  It is sad indeed when Westerners depart from their own achievements to only then be able to poorly imitate those of the East.  The possibilities open to Westerners are so much greater if they embrace their own culture’s psychological achievements while also considering those that the East has brought forth from its inner being over the course of so many centuries.  However, intellect alone cannot fathom the practical importance of the ideas offered by Eastern yogic philosophy, or what benefit it might have for the Western mind, and that is why Westerners are often tempted to classify these ideas as superstitious or ethnological curiosities and nothing more.  The lack of comprehension goes so far that even Western scholars specializing in China’s cultural heritage and history have not understood the practical application of the I Ching but have rather often dismissed it as a collection of abstruse magic spells.

NEXT: Modern psychology offers a possibiliy of understanding Eastern yoga.

[ For a more complete version of the original text refer to The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm, with a commentary by C.G. Jung, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN #0-15-679980. ]