READER: "Out come is not the point' - Geraldine Brooks in Pulitzer Prize winning book "March"

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“I think we are rare creatures in that we can observe and marvel at the universe and ask questions about our purpose.  That is enough for me.” - Geraldine Brooks

I remember, when I met Geraldine Brooks at Hindu Literary Festival in Chennai for the first time, we discussed another author’s comment that the written words are not cathartic. And I was happy to note that she disagreed to it as well. I sincerely believe that what we write or read, at a very deeper level affect us and our thought process, emotions and feelings. And that’s exactly what I found while reading Geraldine’s book ‘March’ as well. 

It changed the way I thought about people I have been reading about in her book ‘March’ like Emerson, Thoreau as well as about the American Slave History. I could also relate to the storyline, as the way she structured the plot, weaving her way into past and present, is the kind of style I wrote in my book “Songs of the Mist”.

There are so many things from her book I learned, like the way she describes nature or the way she wrote about physicality of the characters, specially her characteristic style of writing about feelings, specially the erotic feelings without being sexual…

"... yet I could not let go of her. I felt like Peleus on the beach, clinging to Thetis, only to find that, suddenly, it was she who held me; that same furnace in her nature that had flared up in anger blazed again, in passion." - Geraldine Brooks in ‘March’

At the Hindu Lit festival in Chennai

But what I could relate to the most was the conclusion…

“You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point.” - Geraldine Brooks in ‘March’

Bhagavad Gita’s most famous shloka talks about that too. We are to perform our duties, act as per our nature and not worry about the fruits of our actions. And the reason, I relate to it deeply, is that in my book the Monk says the same thing to the young boy, who is running away from pain and heartbreak.

Meeting Geraldine Brooks in Chennai...

“Can you give any action more than hundred percent of your striving? If not, then why worry? You just could not give two hundred percent. So once you are done a task with your hundred percent efforts, dedication and sincerity do not worry about the result. Move on. Instead of worrying, you should focus on other actions required of you. It is in the nature of nature to provide you with the result as no action goes waste.” - The Monk in “Songs of the Mist” (Pg 154)

And as I come to the end of Geraldine Brooks book 'March', she shared an important thought and a solution, which is universal in nature as well. The following lines from her book gives me hope and happiness...

“… there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try to do the good of which our hands are capable for the people who come in our way.” says the character 'Grace' in the Book ‘March’

I enjoyed meeting her and reading her book. Here is part of my interaction and some of the wonderful thoughts from her Pulitzer prize winner book ‘March’. Hope you will also enjoy reading it…

BRIEF NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In her library

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, attending Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues.

In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 1990, with her husband Tony Horwitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War. The following year they received a citation for excellence for their series, “War and Peace.”  In 2006 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her novels, Caleb’s Crossing and People of the Book, were New York Times best sellers. Her first novel, Year of Wonders is an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages and currently optioned for a TV series produced by Andrew Lincoln. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence and The Idea of Home.

Brooks married fellow journalist and author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup, France, in 1984. They have two sons– Nathaniel and Bizuayehu–two dogs, three alpacas and a mare named Valentine. They live by an old millpond on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and spend as much time as possible in Australia.

- Text curtsy Author's Website

HER INSPIRATIONS

I love literature; I always have.  I write first for myself--a book I would like to read.  It seems to take me about three years to write a novel, but it’s hard to say because there is a long period of thinking about a book, even while working on other projects, before one sits down to write. 

HER CHALLENGES

For me the challenge is to decide who tells the story, and to clearly hear that narrative voice.

SOME INTERESTING THINGS ABOUT HER

With Alpacas

Animals are a very important part of enriching life for me, so we have dogs, alpacas and a horse.  I also love to cook, and adore nature, so I’m lucky to live by the sea and woods.

QUOTES FROM THE BOOK

“I had been there, one a spring morning, wherein the fog stood so thick on the river that it looked as though the bowl of the sky has spilled all its milky clouds into the valley.”

“It is a mountebank, this river. It feigns a gentle lassitude, yet coiled beneath are the currents that have crushed the trunks of mighty trees, and swept men to swift drowning.”

“Swiftest hint of a smile I believe a human face can make - like a tic, almost -before her countenance returned its accustomed gravity.”

“Though his was the soft hand of a man unacquainted with physical labor, his grip was almost painfully firm, as if he wished to leave in no doubt of his power. It was, I thought, the overzealous handshake of a boy playing at being a man.”

View of her garden

“To me, the divine is that immanence which is apparent in the great glories of Nature and in the small kindness of the human heart.”

“But it is a hard thing when a man is ruined by the very idea that most animates him.“

“If there is one class of a person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.”

“The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.”

“I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man’s duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming.”

“I was overcome with a rush of confused emotion: delight at the sensation of my first kiss, mortification at my lack of restraint, desire to touch her again, to touch her all over, to lose myself in her. Alarm at the potency of my lust. And guilty awareness that I had an obscene power here. That if lust mastered me, this woman would be in no position to gainsay my desire.

“But this, also, true: I wanted her. The thought of her -arched, shuddering, abandoned - thrilled me to the core.”

“To believe, to act, and to have events confound you - I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong - how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible.” And even as I said this, I knew that if I stood again in the cattle show ground, and heard him promise to go to war, I would hold my peace again, even knowing what terrible days were to follow.”

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As I read her book, I realised that she has certain real life characters from the period like Emerson and Thoreau merged with fictional characters. She did explain the characterization in an endnote, but I was wondering, where one draws the line between reality and fiction. 

“I think one should probably stay within the known facts of their lives, but in a novel one has some liberty to play within these boundaries--to concoct additional dialogue true to the kinds of things they are known to have said or set down.  If one goes beyond that, I think one should change the names and then in an endnote say the character is “based on” the real person.  March is actually my second novel.  My first, Year of Wonders, has a character based on a real person, but I changed the name because I changed some facts and because we don’t have enough writings from the real man to know his mind sufficiently.  Same for my novel Caleb’s Crossing.  I kept Caleb’s real name but changed others where I changed known facts about them.” - Geraldine Brooks

She usually works at home. She moves around depending on the seasons. Mostly she works in her study but sometimes in winter, she sits in the kitchen at the table near the fireplace, and in summer in the garden under a shady apple tree.  When not working on her novels she said, tries to help her younger son, navigate the world of adolescence. 

She has just started a new historical novel set in three time periods: 1860s, 1940s and present time.

HER FAVORITE BOOKS

GENRE: I love all kinds of genres, including science fiction/speculative fiction. 

1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which is a deeply felt, gorgeously written meditation on love, family, spirituality and history.

2. Jane Austen’s Emma because it is so perfect in its portrait of a single individual in her society.

TO BUY HER BOOK ‘MARCH’ CLICK HERE

– Shashi 

CEO & Partner ICUBE Projects

Speaker | Author of “Songs of the Mist” & "Kuhase Ke Geet "
Haiku Poet | Writes India’s #1 Spiritual Blog “Shadow Dancing With Mind”
(Global Ranking #36)

List of SPOTLIGHT authors of Jan and Feb '17

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Shashi

ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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"The Days of Abandonment' by Elena Ferrante

READER: 'Tao Te Ching' by Lao Tzu

After many years, I started reading Tao Te Ching (the translation by R B Blakney) again and realize again that the real great books always gives deeper insight, every time you read it. The book “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu is the most translated book in the world after Bible and reading these books, actually can transport one to the ancient times and align with the thought processes that started thousands of years back and still survive the test of living mankind’s journey across time. To understand the early history of human lives and its meaning, the old books are far better than the archeological remains. Just like the Veda’s for Hindus, perhaps to know more about those ancient civilization, books like “Tao Te Ching” gives a better perspective and insight.

Book at Amazon

It’s not known who composed the chapters of Tao Te Ching, because though authorship of many other kind of writing is lost by accident, but mysticism is often given anonymously, by principle. All that can be guessed about the authorship of these poems is that the main threads of their argument originated among recluse in remote valleys before Confucius time and that the result too form late in the 3^rd Century B.C. Where there is no author, however, it is necessary to invent one; and by the time the Tao Te Ching had been put in form, legend had supplied Lao Tzu and Ssu-ma Ch’ien incorporated the legend in his notable Historical Records (Chap 63).

It presents Lao Tzu correctly enough as one who has given up civilized living and is impatient with Confucian ideas. Lao Tzu practiced the Way and its virtue. He learned to do his work in self effacement and anonymity. For a long time he lived in Chou, and then he saw that it was breaking up, he left. At the frontier, the official Yin His said: ‘Since, sir, you are retiring, I urge you to write me a book.’ “So Lao Tzu wrote a book in two parts, explaining the Way and its virtue in something over 5000 words. Then he went away. No one knows where he died.

From 3^rd century A.D. on, the subsequent story of Taoism is mainly concerned with the rivalry of Buddhism. The two religions were much alike, except that Buddhism barred sexual practices, and its priests, for the most part were celibate. Buddhism was, possibly more popular among the” hundred Clans,” that is, the people; Taoism succeeded somewhat better among the ruling classes. It suffered at least a partial eclipse under the Mongols, who favored Buddhism.

The Tao Te Ching through the centuries has never been without admiring readers among the Chinese, although  its reading public has been small compared to Confucian books.

Now before I share some interesting thoughts from the book Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, let me give you the meaning of the key word “Tao” here, as translated by R B Blakney.

TAO: A Road, A Path, the way by which people travel, the way of nature and finally the ultimate Reality. To the Chinese mystics, it came not only to refer to the way the whole world of nature operates but to signify the riginal undifferentiated Reality from which the universe is evolved.

From Wikipedia:

"The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way;

The names that can be named are not unvarying names.

It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;

The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind."

These famous first lines of the Tao Te Ching state that the Tao is ineffable, i.e., the Tao is nameless, goes beyond distinctions, and transcends language. However this first verse does not occur in the earliest known version from the Guodian Chu Slips and there is speculation that it may have been added by later commentators. In Laozi's Qingjing Jing (verse 1-8) he clarified the term Tao was nominated as he was trying to describe a state of existence before it happened and before time or space. Way or path happened to be the side meaning of Tao, ineffability would be just poetic. This is the Chinese creation myth from the primordial Tao.

Now here are some of the thoughts from the book that made a deep impression ….

Image Curtsy Wikipedia

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Those who are bound by desire / See only the outward container.

The Way is a void / Used but never filled:

Wealth, power and pride / Bequeath their own doom.

I suffer most because / Of me and selfishness.

If you trust people less than enough / Some of them never trust you.

Your boasting will mean you have failed;

A good knot is tied without rope and can not be loosed.

For the world is a sacred vessel / Not made to be altered by man.

A block of wood untooled, though small, / May still excel the world.

It is wisdom to know others; / It is enlightenment to know one’s self.

The Way is always still, at rest, / And yet does everything that’s done.

“When going looks like coming back, / The clearest road is mighty dark.

So a loss sometimes benefits one / Or a benefit proves to be loss.

The softest of stuff in the world / Penetrates quickly the hardest;

No calamity is worse / Than to be discontented.

The further you go, / The less you will know

By letting go, it all gets done; / The world is won by those who let it go!

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Shashi

ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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Psychology of Kundalini Yoga by C G Jung                      Devotion of Suspect X

THE READER: The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga by C G Jung

WELL KUNDALINI IS NOT ABOUT SEX...

When ever some one talks about Kundalini, Tantric or Cakra’s, an image appears of wild and lurid psycho spiritual rituals and sexual forms that even most imaginative sex industry will find hard to replicate. But in our scriptures, this is not fiction but a science that was developed from the beginning. Starting from Laya yoga, transforming into a defined practice, that is aimed at attaining higher state of living, through inner search and meditation. Kundalini meditation, in my opinion, is what westerners call now as ‘Psycho-analysis’ with steps to really know ‘Who Am I”. 

In search for something that shares my views about Kundalini, I came across C GJung’s lecture of 1930 on the subject which I think is quite an interesting way to look at it from a Western point of view. So here you are, with some of the thoughts that I liked from the book. Hope you will enjoy it. If you would like to know more about my own thoughts on the subject, leave me a comment, or connect with me at various places like Google+ or Twitter @VerseEveryDay.

As early as 1912, in Transformation and Symbols of the Libido, Jung provided psychological interpretations of passages in the Upanishads and the Rig Veda.  Jung claimed that “important parallels with yoga [and analytical psychology] have come to light, especially with Kundalini yoga and the symbolism of tantric yoga, Lamaism, and Taoistic yoga in China. These forms of yoga with their rich symbolism afford me invaluable comparative material for the interpretation of the collective unconscious.” His definition of yoga was a psychological one: “Yoga was originally a natural process of introversion. . . . Such introversions lead to characteristic inner processes of personality changes.

Jung specified his psychological understanding of tantric yoga as follows: Indian philosophy is namely the interpretation given to the precise condition of the non-ego, which affects our personal psychology, however independent from us it remains. It sees the aim of human development as bringing about an approach to and connection between the specific nature of the non-ego and the conscious ego.

Jung’s aim was to elucidate the psychological meaning of spontaneous symbolism that resembled that of Kundalini yoga.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF KUNDALINI YOGA By C G Jung.

Cakras symbolize highly complex psychic facts which at the present moment we could not possibly express except in images. The cakras are therefore of great value to us because they represent a real effort to give a symbolic theory of the psyche. The psyche is something so highly complicated, so vast in extent, and so rich in elements unknown to us, and its aspects overlap and interweave with one another in such an amazing degree, that we always turn to symbols in order to try to represent what we know about it.

Any theory about it would be premature because it would become entangled in particularities and would lose sight of the totality we set out to envisage.

You have seen from my attempt at an analysis of the cakras how difficult it is to reach their content, and with what complex conditions we have to deal when we are studying not just consciousness but the totality of the psyche. The cakras, then, become a valuable guide for us in this obscure field because the East, and India especially, has always tried to understand the psyche as a whole. It has an intuition of the self, and therefore it sees the ego and consciousness as only more or less unessential parts of the self.

The spiritual point of view of India in general is a standpoint of this sort. Hindus do not begin as we do to explain the world by taking the hydrogen atom as the starting point, nor do they describe the evolution of mankind or of the individual from lower to higher, from deep unconsciousness to the highest consciousness. They do not see humanity under the Sthula aspect. They speak only of the sukshma aspect and therefore say:

“In the beginning was the one brahman without a second. It is the one indubitable reality, being and not-being.”4 They begin in sahasrara; they speak the language of the gods and think of man from above down, taking him from the Sukshama or para aspect. Inner experience is to them revelation; they would never say about this experience “I thought it.”

Looked at from the sth.la aspect the collective culture of India really is in Muladhara, whereas ours has reached anahata. But the Indian concept of life understands humanity under the sukshma aspect, and looked at from that standpoint everything becomes completely reversed. Our personal consciousness can indeed be located in anhata or even in ajana, but nonetheless our psychic situation as a whole is undoubtedly in Muladhara.

We now understand that the diving into the water and the enduring of the flames is not a descent, not a fall into the lower levels, but an ascent. It is a development beyond the conscious ego, an experience of the personal way into the suprapersonal—a widening of the psychic horizons of the individual so as to include what is common to all mankind. When we assimilate the collective unconscious we are not dissolving but creating it.

And as long as the ego is identified with consciousness, it is caught up in this world, the world of the Muladhara cakra.

The symbols of the cakra, then, afford us a standpoint that extends beyond the conscious. They are intuitions about the psyche as a whole, about its various conditions and possibilities. They symbolize the psyche from a cosmic standpoint. It is as if a super consciousness, an all-embracing divine consciousness, surveyed the psyche from above.

LECTURE 1 (12 October 1932)

Kundalini

Expressed in psychological terms, that would mean that you can approach the unconscious in only one way,

namely, by a purified mind, by a right attitude, and by the grace of heaven, which is the Kundalini. Something in you, an urge in you, must lead you to it. If that does not exist, then it is only artificial. So there must be something peculiar in you, a leading spark, some incentive that forces you on through the water and toward the next center. And that is the Kundalini, something absolutely unrecognizable, which can show, say, as fear, as a neurosis, or apparently also as vivid interest; but it must be something which is superior to your will.

Of course the idea of an impersonal, psychical experience is very strange to us, and it is exceedingly difficult to accept such a thing, be-cause we are so imbued with the fact that our unconscious is our own— my unconscious, his unconscious, her unconscious—and our prejudice is so strong that we have the greatest trouble disidentifying.

1st Cakra: Muldhara

Here, of course, in this conscious world where we are all reasonable and respectable people, adapted individuals as one says. We are in our roots right in this world.. And then the self is asleep, which means that all things concerning the gods are asleep.

It is a place where mankind is a victim of impulses, instincts, unconsciousness, of participation mystique, where we are in a dark and unconscious place. We are hapless victims of circumstances; our reason practically can do very little.

Only at times have we an inkling of the next cakra. Something works in certain people on Sunday mornings, or perhaps one day in the year, say Good Friday—they feel a gentle urge to go to church.

We must realize, or take into consideration at least, that Muladhara is here, the life of this earth, and here the god is asleep. And then you go to … the unconscious, and that is understood to be a higher condition than before, because there you approach another kind of life. And you move there only through the Kundalini that has been aroused.

That the Hindu commentaries put the conscious world inside the body is to us a very astonishing fact. According to their idea Muladhara is a transitory thing, the sprouting condition in which things begin.

2nd Cakra: Svadhisthana

So in crossing from Muladhara to Svadhisthana, the power that has nourished you hitherto shows now an entirely different quality: what is the elephant on the surface of the world is the leviathan in the depths. But it is one and the same animal: the power that forces you into consciousness and that sustains you in your conscious world proves to be the worst enemy when you come to the next center. For there you are really going out of this world, and everything that makes you cling to it is your worst enemy. The greatest blessing in this world is the greatest curse in the unconscious.

LECTURE 2 (19 October 1932)

3RD Cakra: Manipura

Now this third center, the center of emotions, is localized in the plexus solaris, or the center of the abdomen. I have told you that my first discovery about the Kundalini yoga was that these cakras really are concerned with what are called psychical localizations. This center then would be the first psychical localization that is within our conscious psychical experience

Now, in manipura you have reached an upper layer where there comes a definite change.9 The bodily localization of this cakra under the diaphragm is the symbol for the peculiar change that now takes place.

So this third center is rightly called the fullness of jewels. It is the great wealth of the sun, the never-ending abundance of divine power to which man attains through baptism.

4th Cakra: Anahata

In anahata you behold the purusha, a small figure that is the divine self, namely, that which is not identical with mere causality, mere nature, a mere release of energy that runs down blindly with no purpose.

Through Manipura he is in the womb of nature, extraordinarily automatic; it is merely a process. But in anahata a new thing comes up, the possibility of lifting himself above the emotional happenings and beholding them. He discovers the purusha in his heart, … In the center of anahata there is again jiva in the form of the linga, and the small flame means the first germlike appearance of the self.

So anahata is really the center where psychical things begin, the recognition of values and ideas. When man has reached that level in civilization or in his individual development one could say he was in anahata,  and there he gets the first inkling of the power and substantiality, or the real existence, of psychical things.

You see, that is a picture of psychical existence over or beyond the manipura form. It is nothing but a thought—nothing has changed in the visible world; not one atom is in a different place from before. But one thing has changed: the psychical substance has entered the game. You see, a mere thought, or almost an indescribable feeling, a psychical fact, changes his whole situation, his whole life, and he can step across to anahata, to the world where psychical things begin.

But to cross from anahata to vishuddha one should unlearn all that. One should even admit that all one’s psychical facts have nothing to do with material facts. For instance, the anger which you feel for somebody or something, no matter how justified it is, is not caused by those external things. It is a phenomenon all by itself.

LECTURE 3 (26 October 1932)

Each of the four lower centers has an element belonging to it— Muladhara, the earth, svvdhisthana, the water, then comes fire in manipura, and finally air in anahata. So one can see the whole thing as a sort of transformation of elements, with the increase of volatility— of volatile substance.

5th Cakra: Vishudha

In Vishuddha center one reaches a sphere of abstraction. There one steps beyond the empirical world, as it were, and lands in a world of concepts.

If you have reached that stage, you begin to leave anvhata, because you have succeeded in dissolving the absolute union of material external facts with internal or psychical facts. You begin to consider the game of the world as your game, the people that appear outside as exponents of your psychical condition. Whatever befalls you, whatever experience or adventure you have in the external world, is your own experience.

6Th Cakra: AJNA

God that has been dormant in Muladhara is here fully awake, the only reality; and therefore this center has been called the condition in which one unites with jiva. One could say it was the center of the unio mystica with the power of God, meaning that absolute reality where one is nothing but psychic reality, yet confronted with the psychic reality that one is not. And that is God

And yet there is another psyche, a counterpart to your psychical reality, the non-ego reality, the thing that is not even to be called self, and you know that you are going to disappear into it. The ego disappears completely; the psychical is no longer a content in us, but we become contents of it.

Therefore it is rather bold to speak of the sixth cakra,10 which is naturally completely beyond our reach, because we have not even arrived at vishuddha. But since we have that symbolism we can at least construct something theoretical about it.

And yet there is another psyche, a counterpart to your psychical reality, the non-ego reality, the thing that is not even to be called self, and you know that you are going to disappear into it. The ego disappears completely; the psychical is no longer a content in us, but we become contents of it. You see that this condition in which the white elephant has disappeared into the self is almost unimaginable. He is no longer perceptible even in his strength because he is no longer against you. You are absolutely identical with him. You are not even dreaming of doing anything other than what the force is demanding, and the force is not demanding it since you are already doing it—since you are the force. And the force returns to the origin, God.

7th Cakra: Sahasrara

To speak about the lotus of the thousand petals above, the sahasrara center is quite superfluous because that is merely a philosophical concept with no substance to us whatever; it is beyond any possible experience. In Ajna there is still the experience of the self that is apparently different from the object, God. But in sahasrara one understands that it is not different, and so the next conclusion would be that there is no object, no God, nothing but brahman.

There is no experience because it is one, it is without a second. It is dormant, it is not, and therefore it is nirvana. This is an entirely philosophical concept, a mere logical conclusion from the premises before. It is without practical value for us.

Some interesting thoughts from his Q & A in the seminar

Mrs. Sawyer: I would like to ask you if the Eastern idea of going up through the cakras means that each time you have reached a new center you have to return to Muladhara?

Dr. Jung: As long as you live you are in Muladhara naturally. It is quite self-evident that you cannot always live in meditation, or in a trance condition. You have to go about in this world; you have to be conscious and let the gods sleep.

Mrs. Sawyer: Yes, but you could think of it in two ways: as doing all these things together, or as making a trip up and down.

Dr. Jung: The cakra symbolism has the same meaning that is expressed in our metaphors of the night sea-journey, or climbing a sacred mountain, or initiation. It is really a continuous development. It is not leaping up and down, for what you have arrived at is never lost.

And if you get through the water and into the fire of passion, you never can really turn back, because you cannot lose the connection with your passion that you have gained in manipura.

Mrs. Crowley: Do you think the idea is to experience those cakras, which one has gone through, simultaneously?

Dr. Jung: Certainly. As I told you, in our actual historical psychological development we have about reached anahata and from there we can experience Muladhara, and all the subsequent centers of the past, by knowledge of records, and tradition, and also through our unconscious. Suppose somebody reached the ajna center, the state of complete consciousness, not only self-consciousness. That would be an exceedingly extended consciousness which includes everything—energy itself—a consciousness which knows not only “That is Thou” but more than that—every tree, every stone, every breath of air, every rat’s tail—all that is yourself; there is nothing that is not yourself. In such an extended consciousness all the cakras would be simultaneously experienced, because it is the highest state of consciousness, and it would not be the highest if it did not include all the former experiences.

LECTURE 4 (2 November 1932)

Mrs. Baynes: What does Professor Hauer mean by the metaphysical aspect?

Dr. Jung: That again is the s.k.ma aspect. We can speak of it only in symbols. Such symbols, for instance, are water and fire, the metabasis into the unconscious.

Mrs. Crowley: Is there a connection between the sa.skvra and the creative principle? And is the puer aeternus related to them?

Dr. Jung: The samskara can be compared to Muladhara, for they are the unconscious conditions in which we live. The samskara are inherited germs, we might say—unconscious determinants, preexisting qualities of things to be, life in the roots. But the puer aeternus is the sprout that buds from the roots, the attempt at synthesis and at a release from Muladhara. Only by synthesizing the preexisting conditions can we be freed from them.

Mrs. Crowley: Is there any connection between citta and Kundalini?

Dr. Jung: Citta is the conscious and unconscious psychic field, collective mentality, the sphere in which the phenomenon of Kundalini takes place. Citta is simply our organ of knowledge, the empirical ego into whose sphere Kundalini breaks. Kundalini in essence is quite different from citta. Therefore her sudden appearance is the coming-up of an element absolutely strange to citta. If she were not entirely different from citta she could not be perceived.

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Shashi

ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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Don't Kill Him (OSHO)                                                             Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu