Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, and those disciples who practise his system of psychoanalysis, have shown some interest in certain Chinese and Indian yoga systems. I, myself, once discussed the subject with him in his own home. But, despite his sympathetic interest, he advises Westerners in various publications to avoid any practical attempts to master yoga.
Such attempts, he says, would be false and sometimes dangerous. The proper approach should be by way of strictly scientific and non-religious observation. Moreover, he condemns the personal asceticism and social withdrawals which are usually associated with yoga.
Now, such a view comes quite close at points to the Philosophic one, but it does not coincide with it completely. For the question must be asked how, by following the Western path of turning his eyes outward and his mind towards analysis, can man arrive at the same goal as by following the Eastern path of turning them inward and his mind toward self-quiescence? It is impossible for the result to be the same. Hence, Philosophy says, bring the two paths together; learn how to unite and keep a balance between them. This is modern man's need and duty.
Why does Jung reject yoga, despite the high praise he gives to Eastern wisdom in both his lectures and writings? He decries meditation, which is the heart of yoga, as being unsuitable to Western man, just as Martinus, the Danish mystic, denounces it as dangerous to Western man. Now, both these authorities have a solid basis for their criticism, but not for their conclusions. As regards the unsuitability of meditation, since it is simply the deepening of the intuitive faculty in man, we can reject it only by saying that intuition is unsuitable to man. As regards its dangers, it must be asked why we do not disdain to use automobiles even though their use has proved dangerous to quite a number of people? It is true that there are perils in the practice of meditation, but they exist only for those who are unqualified to enter it and who should therefore leave it alone, or for those who through ignorance or faulty character abuse it. In the category of the unqualified, we may place those who are seeking occult powers, strange phenomena, mysterious visions, sensational and dramatic experiences, or the satisfaction of mere curiosity. Whatever pathological results have emerged from their meditation have done so because the people who practised it had no business to be doing so. Among the unqualified we may further place those who are dominated by undesirable complexes, by negative feelings, by hidden fears; those who are wildly unbalanced and neurotically unstable. For the qualities they bring into meditation become even magnified by the stimulation in which it results. The gravest possible danger of meditation, and the one to which my friend Martinus usually alludes, is that if the meditator passes out of his body temporarily, there is a danger of the body becoming possessed by another entity. Let it be stated at once that such a danger could arise only during the trance state, and that few persons ever penetrate deeply enough to gain that condition. But, if a person is intelligent, sensible, fairly balanced, and of good character, he need have no fear whatsoever of meditation. And if his motive of coming to the practice is simply to find his True Self, his Best Self, and if he will reject everything else as likely to lead him aside from this path, and if he devotes part of his meditative time to constructive work in self-improvement as an essential accompaniment and preface to the work in mind-stilling, he is quite unlikely to come to any grief.
Since the means used by all religion, mysticism, and philosophy is the denial of self while the end they propose is the realization of the Overself, and since meditation in its most complete stage is such a denial and such a realization, it would be folly to abandon meditation because of its possible dangers and delusions or because Martinus says it is an out-dated primitive technique for backward peoples of the pre-Christian era or because Jung says it is not suited to Western man. For consider that meditation's stillness is corpse-like, that its utter freedom from all emotional agitations virtually begins the ego's death, and that the mental silence which ends thinking completes that death. Is not all this a dying unto self which allows the Overself to replace it in consciousness?
-- Notebooks Category 4: Elementary Meditation > Chapter 1 : Preparatory > # 507
