Now, this is for me the main thing that Jung saw. To admit and truly accept and understand the evil within oneself, one had to be able to do it without being an enemy of it. As he said, you had to accept your own dark side. And he had this prominently in his own character. I had a long conversation with him back in 1958 and was enormously impressed by a man who was obviously very cool, but at the same time with whom everyone could be completely comfortable. There are so many great people, great in knowledge or great in what is called holiness, with whom the average individual feels quite ashamed. They feel inclined to sit on the edge of their chair and immediately feel judged by this person's wisdom or holiness. Jung managed to have wisdom and I believe also holiness in such a way that when other people came into his presence, they did not feel judged. They felt uplifted, encouraged, and invited to share a common life. And there was a sparkle in Jung's eyes. I got the impression that he knew himself to be as villainous as everyone else. There is a beautiful German word, Hintergedanke, which means a thought in a very, very distant place, behind your mind. Jung had a Hintergedanke at the back of his mind, which was evident, shown in the sparkle in his eyes, demonstrating that he knew and acknowledged what I sometimes call the element of irreducible mischief within himself.

And he knew it with such strength, so clearly, and in such a loving way that he wouldn't condemn the same in others and therefore wouldn't be led to those thoughts, feelings, and acts of violence towards others, which are always characteristic of people who project the evil within themselves onto the outside, onto someone else, onto a scapegoat. Now, this made Jung a very integrated character, in other words, here I have to present a somewhat complex idea, he was a man very conscious of himself, having seen and accepted his own nature deeply. He had a kind of unity and absence of conflict in his own nature, which was due to this complication that I find so fascinating, he was the kind of man who could feel anxious, scared, and guilty without being ashamed of feeling that way. In other words, he understood that an integrated person is not someone who simply eliminates the feeling of guilt or anxiety from their life, who is fearless and rigid and a kind of stone sage, it is a person who feels all these things but has no recriminations against themselves for feeling them. And this is, in my opinion, a type of profound humor. In humor, there is always a certain element of malice. A talk was given at the Pacific Stations just a while ago, which was an interview with Al Capp, and Al Capp pointed out that he felt that all humor was fundamentally malicious. Now, there is a very elevated type of humor, which is

True humor is not jokes at the expense of others, it is always jokes at one's own expense, and of course, it has an element of malice. It has malice towards oneself, the recognition that behind the social role you assume, behind all your pretensions of being a good citizen or a good scholar or a great scientist or an outstanding politician or doctor or whatever you are, behind this facade there is a certain element of the unreconstructed vagabond, not to be condemned and lamented, but to be recognized as contributing to one's own greatness and positive aspects in the same way that manure contributes to the perfume of the rose. Jung saw this and Jung accepted it, and I want to read a passage from one of his lectures, which I believe is one of the greatest things he ever wrote, and has been a wonderful thing for me. It was in a lecture given to a group of clergymen in Switzerland a considerable number of years ago, and he writes the following: It is forgotten that even doctors have moral scruples, and that the confessions of certain patients are hard to swallow even for a doctor, but the patient does not feel accepted unless his worst part is also accepted. No one can achieve this with mere words. It only comes through reflection and the doctor's attitude towards himself and his own dark side. If the doctor wants to guide another, or even accompany him a step of the way, he must feel with that person's

He never feels it when he judges. Whether he puts his judgments into words or keeps them to himself does not influence the slightest difference. Adopting the opposite position and suddenly agreeing with the patient is also useless. The feeling only arises through an unbiased objectivity. This almost sounds like a scientific precept and could be confused with a purely intellectual precept, an abstract mental attitude, but what I mean is something very different. It is a human quality, a kind of deep respect for facts, for the man who suffers them, and for the enigma of such a man's life. The truly religious person has this attitude. He knows that God has brought about all kinds of strange and inconceivable things and seeks in the most curious ways to enter into the heart of a man. Therefore, he feels in everything the invisible presence of the divine will. This is what I mean by unbiased objectivity. It is a moral achievement on the part of the physician, who should not be repelled by disease and corruption. We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not free, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not their friend and fellow sufferer. I do not mean at all that we should never judge when we want to help and improve, but if the physician wants to help a human being, he must be able to accept them as they are, and in reality, he can only do so when he has already seen and

In real life, the greatest art is required to be simple, and that is why self-acceptance is the essence of the moral problem and the litmus test of one's entire view of life. Giving food to the beggar, forgiving an insult, loving my enemy in the name of Christ, all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do to the least of my brothers, I do to Christ. But what if I were to discover that the least of all of them, the poorest of all beggars, the most shameless of all criminals, yes, the very devil, that these are within me, and that I myself need the arms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved. What then? Then, as a general rule, all the truth of Christianity is reversed. Then, no more is spoken of love and long-suffering. We tell the brother within us, Raka, and we condemn and get angry at ourselves. We hide it from the world. We deny having found in ourselves this last among the humble, and if it had been God Himself who approached us in this despicable form, we should have denied Him a thousand times before a single rooster had crowed. Well, perhaps you think the metaphors are quite strong, but I feel they are not unnecessarily so. This is a very, very powerful and memorable passage in all of Jung's works. Trying to cure this madness that our culture in particular has

that a human being can become robust, healthy, and holy while being divided against oneself in internal conflict, parallel to the conception of a cosmic conflict between an absolute good and an absolute evil, which cannot be reduced to any previous and underlying unity. In other words, our anger, and our own anger, against the bad things that happen in this world should not be exceeded. Because if we require as a justification for our anger a fundamental and metaphysical division between good and evil, we have a demented and, in a certain sense, schizophrenic universe, to which no sense can be found. Every conflict, Jung said, every opposition, has its resolution in an underlying unity. You cannot understand the meaning of being unless you understand the meaning of non-being. You cannot understand the meaning of good unless you understand the meaning of evil. Even Saint Thomas Aquinas saw this because he said, just as the silent pause that sweetens the song, so suffering is, and so is evil, what makes the recognition of virtue possible. This is not, as Jung tries to explain, a philosophy of condoning evil. Adopting the opposite position, he said, and agreeing with the patient suddenly, is also useless, but it distances him from the patient as much as condemnation. Let me continue reading this extraordinary passage. Healing can be considered, says Jung, a religious problem. In the sphere of social or national relationships, the state of suffering can be a civil war,

This condition must be healed through the Christian virtue of forgiveness and love for enemies. What we recommend, with the conviction of good Christians, is applicable to external situations. We must also apply it internally in the treatment of neurosis. That is why modern man has already heard enough about guilt and sin. He is deeply tormented by his own bad conscience and rather wants to know how to reconcile with

I must even help the patient to prevail in his selfishness. If he achieves it, he distances himself from others. He drives them away, and they come to their senses as they should because they were trying to steal his sacred selfishness. This must be left in his hands because it is his strongest and healthiest power. It is, as I have said, a true will of God, which sometimes leads him to complete isolation. As miserable as this state may be, it is also very useful because this way only he can know himself and learn how invaluable the love of his peers is. Furthermore, only in a state of complete abandonment and loneliness do we experience the useful powers of our own nature. This is a very striking example of Jung's power to understand and integrate viewpoints, as well as psychological attitudes that on the surface seem completely antithetical. For example, even in his own work, when he was dedicated to the study of Eastern philosophy, he had some difficulties in understanding, let's say, the Buddhist denial of the reality of the ego. But it can be seen that in practice, in what he was actually trying to achieve, he was moving towards the same position that is aimed at both in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy on the nature of the ego. Just as an example, as the Hindu would say, that the principle of I in man is not really a separate ego but an expression of the universal life of Brahman or Divinity. So Jung is saying

that only by following the ego and developing it to its full extent does the function, which has, so to speak, a temporary illusion in the psychic life of man, fulfill itself. Because it continues and says here, when one has seen this development in operation several times, one can no longer deny that what was bad has become good and that what seemed good has kept the forces of evil alive. The archdemon of selfishness leads us on the royal road to that meeting that the religious experience demands. What we observe here is the fundamental law of life, the enantiodromia or conversion into the opposite. And this is what makes possible the reunion of the warring halves of the personality and thus puts an end to the civil war. In other words, I was seeing that, as Blake said, a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. That the development of selfishness in man is not something to be overcome or integrated better by opposing it, but by following it. It is almost, isn't it?, the principle of judo: not overcoming what seems to be a hostile situation by opposing it, but by balancing with the punch or rolling with the punch. And so, by following the ego, the ego transcends itself. And at this moment of understanding, the great Westerner that emerges from a whole tradition of human personality centered on the ego, on individual separation, following the path consistently with this principle, reaches the same position as the Easterner.

It seemed absolute, as if resting on a primordial unity, thus reaching a deep and unbreakable peace of the heart, which, however, can contain conflicts. Not a peace that is simply static and lifeless, but a peace that brings understanding. I suppose some of you have read a very fascinating work that was written many years ago by C.G. Jung, a commentary he wrote on a translation of a classic Chinese text by Richard Wilhelm called The Secret of the Golden Flower. You may remember that in that commentary, he addresses the fascinating problem of the dangers inherent in Westerners adopting Eastern lifestyles, but more particularly the adoption of Eastern spiritual practices such as yoga. I recall learning a lot from that essay and appreciating it in many ways because even in my own fascination with Eastern philosophy, I have never felt tempted to forget that I am Western. However, as I think about this essay, I am not sure that Jung discouraged the practice of yoga by Westerners for very valid reasons. I often find that the difficulty in Jung's ideas lies in his theory of history, which, I feel, is a residue of 19th-century historical theories encouraged by Darwinism, namely, that there is a sort of orderly progression from the ape, through the primitive, to the civilized man. And, of course, at that time, all of that was linked to the theory of progress.

And it was very convenient for the cultures of Western Europe, which were then considered superior to all others, to see themselves as at the forefront of progress. And when they visited the natives of Borneo, Australia, and others, they could feel perfectly justified in appropriating their lands and dominating them because they believed they were bringing the benefits of the latest evolution. Therefore, under the influence of this type of theory of history, which is felt in the work of Freud and Jung, one has the feeling that there is a kind of development of human consciousness. Jung is charitable enough to assume that because the Chinese and Indian civilizations are immensely older than ours, they have had the opportunity to be much more sophisticated in psychic development, although he feels, probably rightly so, that there are things they can learn from us. However, the reason he discourages Westerners from practicing yoga is that he says it is a discipline for a culture much older than ours, which in certain aspects has progressed much further and has learned certain things that we still do not master at all. He points out that when someone in the West embraces Vedanta, Theosophy, or any yoga school and tries to master a discipline of concentration in which they have to banish all wandering thoughts from their consciousness, he says that this can be a very dangerous thing for a Westerner because exactly what a Westerner may need to do is unleash their wandering thoughts, their imagination, and their fantasy because

Only in this way can you get in touch with your unconscious, and your unconscious will not leave you alone until you get in touch with it. And it assumes that members of Eastern cultures have done this long before dedicating themselves to the practice of yoga. Now, I don't think this is entirely true, but I do believe there are other reasons why Westerners need to exercise a lot of discrimination and caution when adopting Eastern disciplines and ways of life. In other words, it's more like the problem of taking medicine. You know, if you don't feel well and go to a friend's medicine cabinet, you look at it and see medicine bottles in there and say, I'm sick. I need medicine, so I take a medicine, any medicine will do, but no. Depending on what's happening to you, then the medicine should be prescribed to you. And I don't think the things that some of the Eastern disciplines are designed to cure are exactly the same things we need. Now, it is essential for my vision of the nature of disciplines like Buddhism and Taoism that there are ways to free oneself from a specific type of confinement. That is, there are ways to free oneself from what I have sometimes called social hypnosis. In other words, every culture, every society, has a group of people communicating with each other, has certain rules of communication. And from one culture to another, these rules differ just as languages differ. And a culture can be held together

Types of rules, but very different types of rules, as long as the members agree on them, whether they are forced to accept them, whether they accept them tacitly, or whatever the reason may be. These rules are very similar to the rules of a game. In other words, let's take a game like chess. You can have the type of chess we play with an eight-square board, or you can have a type of chess that the Japanese play with a nine-square board. There is no difference as long as both play on the same board and by the same rules. But indeed, chess is a game, and in the same way, the development of human cultures is also a kind of game, that is, the elaboration of a way of life. And the fun part of this, in a way, is the fun of elaborating it in an interesting way. That is the same as the fun of a game, the fun of a game is that it has a certain interest. But it does not follow that the rules of the game correspond to the real structure of human nature, or to the laws of the universe. However, because in each culture it is necessary to impress especially its younger members, these rules must be followed, they are usually connected in one way or another to the laws of the universe and to some kind of divine sanction. In fact, there are cultures in which the older members of the group realize that this is a deception, that it

They themselves become high-ranking members of the culture, see through the thing, but they don't. They leave it, keep it silent, do not let out those who are supposed to be impressed. That this was really a deception for them to behave well. But anyway, after much careful study, I have come to the conclusion that the function of these forms of liberation is basically to enable those who have the determination, and we will see why in a while, to enable those who have the determination to free themselves from social hypnosis. In other words, if you were a member of Indian culture, at almost any time between maybe 900 BC and 1800 AD, it would be, for you, a matter of common sense about which everyone agreed that you were under the control of a process called karma. It's not exactly a law of cause and effect, but a process of cosmic justice, whereby every fortune that happened to you would be the result of some past action that was good, and every misfortune that happened to you would be the result of some past action that was bad. And furthermore, that this action in the past may not have been performed in the present life, but in a previous life. It was simply axiomatic for those people who were involved in a very, very long process of reincarnation, reaping rewards and punishments, and not only was there the possibility of reincarnating again in human form, but if you were extremely good,

You could be born in one of the heavens, the paradises, and if you were extremely bad, you could be born for an unbearable period of years, not forever, in a purgatory. And the purgatories of the Hindus and Buddhists are as ingeniously horrible as those of the Christians. Of course, everyone knows it, I mean, anyone seems to have the feeling that all this imagination of post-mortem courts is a way of telling people, well, if the secular police don't catch you, the celestial police will catch you, so you better behave. And it's a clever device to encourage ethical behavior. Now, but remember that for a person raised in that atmosphere of belief where everyone thinks this is true, it seems like a matter of pure common sense that it is so. And it is very difficult for a person so educated not to believe that this is the state of affairs. Let's consider an equivalent situation in our own culture. It still proves enormously difficult for most people to believe that space may not be Newtonian. Space, that is, a three-dimensional continuum that extends indefinitely forever. The idea of a curved four-dimensional space seems absolutely fantastic and cannot even be conceived by people not well-versed in the mathematics of modern physics. Or also, as I have often pointed out, we find it very difficult to believe that the forms of nature are not made of something called matter. It is a very unnecessary idea from a strictly scientific point of view

We find it hard to believe. In other words, to believe that there is no underlying substance. And not long ago, it was virtually impossible for people to conceive that planets do not revolve around the Earth enclosed in crystalline spheres. It took a very significant shake of the imagination when astronomers began to point out that it doesn't have to be that way. Alright, now let's go back to the issue of someone living in the culture of antiquity. India. Here, it's a matter of common sense, you see, that one will be reborn. Now, there might be someone, perhaps extremely intelligent, who for one reason or another discovers that this idea is not so. After all, when disciplines like Vedanta and Buddhism are learned, they say that the ultimate goal of discipline is to free oneself from the rounds of rebirth and, by the way, also, which is essential for this, free yourself from the illusion that you are a separate individual confined to this body. But regarding both things, they also say that the person who is freed from the cycle of rebirth, as well as from the illusion of being an ego, sees when liberated that the process of rebirth and all the cosmology of reincarnation and karma, as well as the individual ego, are in some way illusions. That is, they see that they are maya. And I would like to translate maya at this moment, not so much as an illusion, but as a constructed

It is only meant to be. And you will see, he stops believing in karma and reincarnation and all that exactly in the same way that a modern agnostic no longer believes in the resurrection of the body on the day of judgment. I know this is so because, although there will be many Hindus and Buddhists who say they believe in reincarnation and come here and teach it as part of Vedanta or Buddhism, the most sophisticated and deepest, perhaps deepest. Instead, the sophisticated Buddhists I have known have said that they do not believe in it literally at all. And so I could say that those who believe in it, believe in it simply because it is part of their culture and they have not yet been able to free themselves from it. And that is why it seems very amusing to me when Westerners who are interested in Vedanta or Buddhism, that is, in forms of discipline to liberate Hindus and Chinese from certain social institutions, adopt it and then also adopt the ideas of reincarnation and karma, from which these systems were designed to free them. And of course, they adopt them because they feel it is a comfort to be able to keep on living. And that was not the point at all, or that explains why one suffered in this life was not because the universe was unjust but because you committed some misdeed in the past. And so, Westerners who adopt Eastern doctrines with that regrettable spirit sadly take on the same illusions from which these doctrines were

Belief in reincarnation and in this whole process of karma cycles, etc. And after all, they are practicing it and should know it. When I look here, there is a good reason why they shouldn't do it. Of course, I make an exception with Indians or Chinese who have been educated in Western languages. style and stop believing maybe in the cosmologies of their own culture, but it is not liberated in the Buddhist sense because by receiving a Western education, they have become victims of our social institutions and simply exchange, so to speak, one problem for another. But when the situation is taken as it is or as it was in India isolated from It is evident that in Western culture no society can tolerate within its own borders the existence of a form of liberation, a way of seeing through its institutions without feeling that such somehow constitutes a threat to law and order. Anyone who sees through the institutions of society and sees them as creative fictions in the same way that a novel or a work of art is a creative fiction. Anyone who sees this, of course, could be considered by society as a potential threat. But then you can wonder if Buddhism and Vedanta, etc., were really forms of liberation. How could Indian, Chinese, or Burmese society have tolerated their presence? Well, the answer lies simply in the misunderstood esotericism of these disciplines. In other words, those who taught them, the masters of these disciplines, did it incredibly

It was difficult for uninitiated people to enter the interior, and their initiation method was, in a way, to put them in trap after trap after trap to see if they could find their way. In other words, a teacher like that wouldn't think to start by disillusioning the neophyte, saying, You know very well that all these things you heard from your father, mother, and other teachers were fairy tales. Oh no, indeed. He would do what in Buddhism is called an exercise, the use of upaya, a Sanskrit word that means skillful devices or skillful means, sometimes described as giving a child a yellow leaf to stop crying for gold. After all, when you approach one of these forms of liberation from the outside, it seems very fantastic. Here, you will literally be freed from a physical and literally true cycle of endless incarnations in heavens and hells and all kinds of states, and therefore naturally, to do that, what a task it must be, what a wonderful and extraordinary person you must become. And so, the neophyte is prepared for almost anything. And the teacher, because the fundamental problem in all this is to get rid of the illusion that he is a separate ego. If there is no separate ego or some kind of souls, then there is nothing to reincarnate. So the whole point of the teacher, in all kinds of complicated ways to do it, but all that he really tells you is that

What is a no-ego is that your self is the universal self how could you say if you were If you were a Vedantist or a Buddhist, you could say that if you seek your ego, you will not find it. Find it, so look for it, see and really delve into it. And this makes the person meditate and deal with their ego to get rid of it. Well, that's a beautiful trap that can last forever until one discovers it. In other words, this is like trying to sweep the darkness out of a room with a broom or it's worse than that, and Lao Tzu, Zhuang Tzu rather had a good imagine yourself drumming in search of a fugitive, that is, you know when The police leave because they have been called on the phone that there is a thief and they come running to the house with the siren blaring and the thief hears it and runs away. Because, of course, trying to get rid of the ego for one's own benefit is somehow a selfish endeavor and you can't do it and then, of course, the student gets to the point where he begins to realize that everything he does to get rid of his ego is selfish and this is the kind of trap that the teacher puts him in until, of course, he comes. to the point of seeing that his supposed division of himself into let's say I and I the controller that controls the part of me and the part

If you were changing in that way, finally, you discover this at the same time that you discover almost at the last moment, you could say the fallacy or rather the fantasy nature, the playful nature of the cosmology system that has existed to, so to speak, support or give the basic shape of the social institutions of its culture or particular society. In other words, you can express it in another way, one of the basic things that all social rules of convention hide is what I would call the fundamental communion with each other, not saying in the Chinese symbolism of the positive and the negative, the yang and the yin, you know, you have seen that symbol of them together as two intertwined fish, well, the big game, I mean. All the pretense of most societies that these two fish are involved in a battle is the fish up and the fish down, the good fish and the bad fish, and there is out to kill, and the white fish one of these days is going to kill the black fish, but when you see it clearly, you realize that the white fish and the black fish go together, they are actually twins, they do not fight each other, they are dancing with each other, although you see it is difficult. Something to achieve in a set of rules in which yes and no are the basic and formally opposite terms. When it is explicit in a set of rules that yes and no or positive and negative are the fundamental principles, it is

I mean, let's suppose that a certain social group discovers that its supposed enemy group is actually symbiotic with it, meaning the enemy group fosters the survival of the group by pruning its population. We would never admit to the enemy's advantage, as George Orwell pointed out in his futuristic fantasy in 1984 that a dictatorship government needs to have an enemy, and if there isn't one, it has to invent it in order to have something to fight against, you see, to have something to compete with to keep the society's energy going. To do its job is to stir up and what is fundamentally the type of person of Buddha or Bodhisattva? Someone who has seen through that and doesn't have to be stirred up by hatred, fear, and competition to continue with the game of life, you know.

Alan Watts - Understanding your dark side with Carl Jung

Alan Watts - Understanding your dark side with Carl Jung