Carl Jung: Why New Age Thinking is Poison

i've seen many criticisms of new age thought over the years of buddhist hindu and all these different strains that kind of converge in new age thought i've seen a lot of criticisms of them as as anti-rational or as naive innocent just that kind of school of a rationalist critique of them but in his book the psychology of kundalini yoga carl jung gives us a completely different type of critique of of new age thinking and it's it's novelty which has the power and that's what we're going to be exploring on today's episode of the living philosophy

[Music] in these matters one needs a great deal of psychology in order to make it palatable to the western mind if we do not try hard and dare to commit many errors in assimilating it to our western mentality we simply get poisoned for these symbols have a terrible clinging tendency they catch the unconscious somehow and cling to us but they are a foreign body in our system corpus alienum and they inhibit the natural growth and development of our psychology it is like a secondary growth or a poison therefore one has to make almost heroic attempts

to master these things to do something against those symbols in order to deprive them of their influence perhaps you cannot fully realize what i say but take it as a hypothesis it is more than a hypothesis it is even a truth i've seen too often how dangerous their influence may be for anyone who spent any amount of time in the in the spiritual community these words might sound at first a little bit foreign but you'll be able to connect it to something you'll be able to realize oh okay yeah maybe there's there's something going on

here and i guess that the main thing you think of is the guru the kind of guru complexes you get these these spiritual leaders and because of the the kind of new age ideas because of the the hierarchy of the spiritual who has the the least ego who is the most spiritually evolved who's had the most thrilling experiences on a spiritual level well these things create a sort of hierarchy within a spiritual community and you get egos that become inflated because not only are they inflated in the way that we might say a spiral dynamics

orange someone who's who's got a lot of status who's worldly but in this this green sphere of spiral dynamics in this spiritual domain the hierarchy it's subtler in some sense because it's psychologically based rather than based on material things rather than based on superficial things it's based on where is your psychology at what experiences have you had so it's a fascinating beginning to to peel back those layers and to see the sort of hypocritical kind of that lies within there and so there's a lot of people in the spiritual community with very inflated kind of

egos and you might say that they're they're they're on a power trip or that they're kind of uh psychopaths who've just come in and manipulated the whole thing but i think it's there's something that young is saying here but actually it's it's tapping into it much more accurately i feel when i first got into spirituality and when basically anyone i know that got into spirituality initial had this this fascination with the idea of enlightenment the idea of becoming enlightened the idea of becoming fully realized and experiencing these mystical unions with the oneness or experiencing that

that total liberation and these are the ideas decide these ideas of samathi of nirvana these things get into your mind they get into your your way of looking at things and and all of a sudden that's the assumption that's the that's the central premise that's the thing that we're all trying to reach and so whoever is closer to that whoever seems to be higher on that hierarchy can help you get there is it takes on a more esteemed quality and and have more status within that community and it's it's that idea of enlightenment it's the

idea of these mystical experiences it's the idea of potentially magical synchronicities happening to you it's all these little things that people can play on that people embrace that people get lost in these are the poisonous ideas this is the danger of intoxicating the western mindset and in an early video of the living philosophy we looked at the parallels between the situation of modern religious making modern religious seeking and the roman situation and it's it's that we look to the to the east we look to these exotic flowers because in the case of the romans their

old pagan religion had grown dull to them and had lost the grip on their psyche and the same thing has started to happen with christianity in the west it's become mundane it's become the religion we grew up with and it's lost that hold on us and that it would have had in in earlier years and at lower levels of development and so when we look to fulfill that kind of a religious meaning that that psychical psychological higher meaning we look to something exotic and then you the romans looked at the they got sick of their

paganism they looked at this exotic christian religion to the isis cult from egypt to the mithras cult in the middle east and we've done the same thing just slightly further afield we've looked to the indian religions the the hinduism and the buddhism and the buddhism i guess more are probably coming from further in east asia looking at the zen tradition is more popular but you've also got the the vipassana groups the old theravada groups and then you've got the the the vedas the bhagavad-gita the harry all these things they develop a certain gravity and modernity

and there's also the taoists coming from china so we've we've taken in these eastern things and what young is saying is that you're you're taking a foreign flower you're taking an exotic flower and you're trying to graft it onto a root system which it did not evolve with which it's a completely unrelated root system and while i'm not sure that young's sentiment holds up i'm not i'm not convinced by it necessarily certainly with the indians you could look at a common indo-aryan heritage or indo-european heritage but i so i'm not sure but there's there's something

in what he's saying it's the it's the exotic thing polluting our minds or if not polluting then uh it's dangerous and and we have not treated it as dangerous we've treated it as something exciting and something novel is as something true and so we're all seeking this thing that very few of us have had any experience of and and so it's the we get drunk on this because it's the it's like discovering a whole new world and everything is fresh and beautiful and and all of a sudden the old rules of life have completely changed

and you're playing a whole new game and so you're you're ungrounded you begin to develop this this this new idea of reality and all of a sudden you're cut off from the from the the foundation of which your your entire life was built up on to that point all your all your assumptions all your perceptions can be slightly altered and it's at that place that people become very vulnerable that people can get taken advantage of within the spiritual community and it's really uh for me it's quite frustrating and infuriating sometimes when you when you see

people doing that and even the the people taking advantage can be doing it unconsciously it's it's the whole thing just reeks of a sort of intoxication of a sort of uh a poison and ungroundedness i think that's that the idea of spiritual bypassing is one of the most important ideas to understand in spirituality today because it's you see it everywhere you see the the nature of these ideas is it this disconnects us from our roots and brings in these exotic flowers which fascinate the mind but does it reach down to the depth level of the

mind does it reach to the depth of what you are and transform you there and there's another great jungian quote that kind of taps into this same vein and it's it's that one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious and i guess that's what we're looking at in terms of the the work of of psychology of deaf psychology of dream psychology of getting into your own mind getting into your own roots getting into your own reality going home for christmas and experiencing those conflicts experiencing what it's like

what does that trigger in you and so that's the the path to like gritty grounded growth and this other path is very tempting because it's got bright lights it's got mystical visions it's got a lot of exciting things but is it just an intoxication is it just a new type of buzz is it just the same pattern repeated in a new more exotic looking way so you can't recognize it and i think that all of this is what young means by the the potential for these ideas to poison us and he's talking about the field

sophist movement at this point and they're the ones who imported these these eastern texts into the west and the that's what evolved into the new age in the 60s and and onwards to to where we are today so that's just something that i wanted to explore in today's episode of the living philosophy if you've enjoyed it please subscribe if you haven't already and uh yeah i'd love to hear from you down in the comments you've any thoughts insights or feedback on this video around the channel in general and yeah otherwise i shall see you next

time thank you for watching