Summary
Carl Gustav Jung: The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga
Notes from a Seminar Held in 1932
The seminar on Kundalini Yoga, which Jung held at the Psychological Club in Zurich in 1932, is considered a cornerstone in the psychological understanding of Eastern thought and the symbolic transformation of inner experience.
Kundalini Yoga was for Jung a model of the developmental stages of higher consciousness, and he interpreted its symbols in terms of the process of individuation. In this edition, Sonu Šamdasani collected the lectures and discussions from this seminar for the first time. It also includes material from Jung's seminars in German, the seminar of Indologist Wilhelm Hauer that was held as part of Jung's, and Sir John Woodroffe's classic translation of the tantric text Shat-Chakra-Nirupana.
Kundalini yoga, therefore, pointed Jung to a model of something that was almost completely lacking in Western psychology - it offered him an explanation of the developmental stages of man's higher consciousness. It is, in fact, an extraordinary introduction to several areas of consciousness, an introduction to spheres of analytical thought that are mostly outside classical and mainstream understandings. In these four famous lectures, Jung laid some very complex Indian concepts in the foundations of the Western psychological thought of his time and thus helped us to better understand both of these systems of thought and realization.
Jung's insistence on the psychogenic and symbolic meaning of higher states of consciousness is even more relevant today than in his time. Because, as R. D. Laing said: "Jung paved the way, but only a few followed him."
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