Philosophies of India, Vol. 26 Book

"The chief aim of Indian thought is to unveil and integrate into consciousness what has been resisted and hidden by the forces of life. The supreme and characteristic achievement of the Brahman mind was its discovery of the Self (atman) as an independent, imperishable entity underlying the conscious personality and bodily frame. The effort of Indian philosophy has been, for millenniums, to know this adamantine Self and make that knowledge effective in human life." - Heinrich Zimmer

This book means a lot to me. Most of my review of this book takes the form of a narrative therapy exercise related to some of the reasons why this book grips me.

I'm intensely interested in integrating Analytical (Jungian) Psychology and narrative therapy as a unified means of catalyzing human optimization and antifragility.

Zimmer was a friend of Carl Jung's and was interested in the depth of Jung's psychological vision, and its potential as a theoretical framework that could bring unity and greater consciousness to the symbolic and religious experiences and phenomena that have been fundamental aspects of human existence across space and time. Many of the personal meditations included in his books explore the topics at hand from the comparative theoretical perspective of analytical psychology.

At the same time though, his aim in this book was not an attempt to try to force the phenomena of Indian life into a dogmatic Jungian box. About 2% of the book consists of personal asides meditating on the possible connections between Indian culture and depth psychology. The other 98% is Zimmer attempting to weave the many-tapestried story that is Indian religious thinking with a degree of refinement and scope that is simply stunning. If you are at all interested in the topics of Indian history, philosophy, and religion you should read this book.

From the perspective of Analytical Psychology, we're never without a personal myth in life, even if we remain unconscious of it. What this particular psychological vision means by making this assertion is that we're always individually and collectively embedded within some emotionally-charged, image-centered symbolic narrative that animates the soul and channels the energy of our life in service to some value, to the pursuit of some ideal future state contrasted with our present situation.

Seen from this angle, some personal myths are much more agreeable to the limited view of the ego; others are much more harmonized with the Self; the purposive pattern of wholeness that Analytical Psychology posits as governing the totality of an individual's psyche, apart from the all too often wounded and blinded ego. I don't believe that the parallels between the Self of Analytical Psychology and the atman (Self) of India are a coincidence'I actually believe that Carl Jung and those who have carried the project he started forward are exploring the territory of atman.

As children, each of us was forced or steered by the circumstances of life to establish certain attitudes towards ourselves and others, particular patterns of action and behavior, and unique reflexive responses, all called for by whatever developmental environment we had to adapt to.

These attitudes, behaviors, and reflexes can be very distorting, and can influence and shape our ego in deeply problematic ways over time. After all, they're committed to their own twisted history; they're all too often lovingly wrapped around the space, time, and emotional environments in which they emerged ' they're "sub-personalities" who can be constantly caught up in incest with their own pasts.

The distorted commitment of these attitudes, patterns, and reflexes ' these sub-personalities ' to certain values generates the personal myth that we live out during the first part of our lives, with one degree of consciousness or another.

It's sort of unavoidable for the first part of life to be anything but a series of mistakes. What I mean by this isn't that we necessarily make mistakes deliberately, but that we actually can't avoid acting out the "provisional personality" that we develop into as a result of the attitudes, behaviors, and reflexes that were formed in us by the demands of the unique adaptive environments of our childhoods.

This "provisional personality" is often defined by forced fakeness; we all act out its quirks with one degree of consciousness or another, in any given situation. As we grow and our personalities develop, there come times in every person's life where old attitudes, patterns, and reflexes are authoritatively challenged by the psyche's call for more of our potential to be realized in ways that our current personal myth is neglecting.

Maybe something unexpected erupts in our life and our former perspective of ourselves is shattered, or we mysteriously lose our ability to function in everyday situations; we obsessively try to revert to the strategies of the past, but even as we do we recognize they're now useless, perhaps even harmful.

Maybe we hit a wall we just can't get around, and come to a place where we have to face our fears, or finally begin to radically question the direction of our lives. Maybe we realize we're nothing but a three-legged workhorse, wearing ourselves down to the bone for things that glitter but sap our soul. Maybe our old life is swallowed up, and we're given the simultaneously terrifying and promising chance to create a new one.

We're usually not happy to have the rug pulled out from under us like that, for our old values to die so that new ones can take their place; it's natural to be afraid in those situations. Yet it's often where we feel the most fear that the richest meaning is to be found.

Many times people wander between worlds, lost, isolated, and alone, their story having collapsed into a nightmare, before they find a way back to life. Sometimes they never find that way back.

This type of developmental call is partly what drove Carl Jung deep into his studies of the history and psychology of alchemy in the second half of his life; he longed to understand what myth he was living in, and what myth was living in him, as a 20th century human embedded in a modern industrial, materialist, and scientific society that had partially surfaced out of the focused fantasy of alchemy.

These are questions you have to ask yourself as well.

What myth are you living in? What myth is living in you?

Are you living out the story of your parents' unlived lives? How much of their unlived lives do you want to live out?

Is your life on autopilot at the hands of unchallenged, maybe even unconscious patterns of action that you've come to identify with over the course of time?

The answers to these kinds of questions are the raw material from which you create a life.
You can bring intentionality to the process of weaving a personal myth out of the emotionally-charged and image-centered impulses that arise within you.

You can actively focus your imagination, and use it to help you purposefully create a life. By discerning and paying attention to the images and impulses that are spontaneously expressed by your psyche in dreams and waking life, you can harmonize your conscious choices with the indications of the unconscious.

You can grow more competent to choose from within, in order to realize your personal potential with more intentionality and virtuosity.

This is something that you couldn't do as a dependent child, but as a courageous and capable adult, this has changed.

In the end, all this comes down to whether or not you'll submit to who you're being summoned to become by the Self. To follow that call is to walk the way of individuation.

Creative writing can be an exploratory practice that connects you with your own ability to follow that call, and to care for and nurture yourself.

It can generate models of personal possibility beyond what you've been exposed to in your family, or the culture or environment in which you've grown up.

By itself, or paired with research and reading, it can be a way of traveling, of learning and incorporating the experiences of others.

It can be a powerful way to deepen and broaden the often-narrow possibilities that you conceive of for your life.

There's a fateful karmic sense in which your choices become your own measurement of the worth of your life. Writing expands the range of your imaginative possibilities, which can help encourage you to make more holistically authentic choices concerning the life that you're creating.

Creative writing can be a way of getting in touch with the unconscious, of stimulating the spontaneous expression of emotionally-charged symbols and visionary images that call for a conscious developmental response from you.

Living out this developmental response, incarnating the meaning behind these images, is one way of creating a life; you're capable of imaging the life you can imagine.

But how do you focus your imagination? How can you use writing to build a solid foundation of support under your visions of possibility?

I'll provide an example from my own life, not as a generic formula, but simply as an image of the possibilities that might inspire you to dedicate yourself to the kind of evocative writing that will create your life over time.

The Partition that created India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh is a massively complex, non-linear reason why I exist, and (partly) why I am who I am. It's a story I'm living in, and a story that's living in me.

One of my grandfathers and one of my uncles disappeared in it. No one knows anything about what happened to them.

A creative writing project that I've been engaged in lately is to try to tell the story of what might have happened to them through a series of episodes/vignettes, each basically self-contained but also occupying a place in the larger story.

My dad's childhood was deeply impacted by the Partition in general, and by his family's specific relationship to it.

There are many developmental paths that my dad chose not to take, and some he was forced to take, as a direct result of the Partition. Some of those paths he didn't take are now confronting me in life; some of the ways I've adapted to the paths he was forced to take are no longer viable ways for me to live. They were provisional patterns of action and behavior; it's time to grow on, grow up, grow out.

His adaptive history has personally impacted me in more ways than I'll ever really be able to know, but through research and writing I can more thoroughly discriminate, and come to a greater understanding of, some of the cosmic circumstances that have shaped my family and I, and indwell those circumstances with more intentionality and virtuosity.

This writing is already helping me order parts of my world that I haven't paid as much attention to. Learning more about the Partition through researching and writing about it will help give me more context to shape some of my own memories into a story that will make sense out of certain events and aspects of my life that seem meaningless.

By researching and exploring the brutality that occurred during the Partition I can integratively dialogue with my own capacity for malevolence, and also come to a deeper understanding of how people acted to transcend the temptation to enter into a creative union with evil in those apocalyptic circumstances.

It will be a spontaneous way of evoking emotionally-charged symbolic images of the kind of bravery and heroism possible in that situation. This process could reveal how noble character traits could actually increase in their capability to thrive in people as a result of the kinds of stressors, shocks, volatility, mistakes, attacks, and failures that the Partition gave birth to.

It will teach me many things that are beyond me, but that I may be able to later assimilate into myself; things that may end up being especially relevant if I get caught up in a mass human migration or refugee crisis at some point in my life, which are legitimately plausible possibilities.

I can use this writing to grow a personal myth which is the reflection and product of my family's history, but also of my own soul; one that I emotionally and intuitively assent to from within; a story that will feed me with meaning and help to organically organize and channel the energy of my life.

A story that I can truly dedicate myself to living-a final flowering of the Self in me.

You can do this too:

"Concepts and words are symbols, just as visions, rituals, and images are; so too are the manners and customs of daily life. Through all of these a transcendent reality is mirrored. They are so many metaphors reflecting and implying something which, though thus variously expressed, is ineffable, though thus rendered multiform, remains inscrutable. Symbols hold the truth to the mind but are not themselves the truth, hence it is delusory to borrow them. Each civilization, each age, must bring forth its own.

We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ. This is the real reason why we become vexed and stimulated, uneasy yet interested, when confronted with the concepts and images of Oriental wisdom. This crossing is one to which the people of all civilizations come to in the course of the development of their capacity and requirement for religious experience, and India's teachings force us to realize what its problems are. But we cannot take over the Indian solutions. We must enter the new period our own way and solve its questions for ourselves, because though truth, the radiance of reality, is universally one and the same, it is mirrored variously according to the mediums in which it is reflected. Truth appears differently in different lands and ages according to the living materials out of which its symbols are hewn.

We shall therefore have to follow the difficult way of our own experiences, produce our own reactions, and assimilate our own sufferings and realizations. Only then will the truth that we bring to manifestation be our own flesh and blood. The ineffable seed must be conceived, gestated, and brought forth from our own substance, fed by our own blood. We cannot borrow God. We must effect the new incarnation from within ourselves. Divinity must descend, somehow, into the matter of our own existence and participate in this peculiar life-process." -Heinrich Zimmer