Alan Watts - Understanding your dark side with Carl Jung

now this is to me the primary thing that Yung saw that in order to admit and really accept and understand the evil in oneself one had to be able to do it without being an enemy to it as he put it you had to accept your own dark side and he had this preeminently in his own character I had a long talk with him back in 1958 and I was enormously impressed with a man who's obviously very great but at the same time with whom everyone could be completely at ease there are so many great

people great in knowledge or great in what is called holiness with whom the ordinary individual feels rather embarrassed he feels inclined to sit on the edge of his chair and to feel immediately judged by this person's wisdom or sanctity Yung managed to have wisdom and I think also sanctity in such a way that when other people came into its presence they didn't feel judged they felt uh enhanced encouraged and invited to share in a common life and there was a sort of Twinkle in yung's eye it gave me the impression that he knew himself to

be as just as much a villain as everybody else there's a nice German word hint ganka which means a thought in the very far far back of your mind you only had a hint gadan in the back of his mind which showed it showed in the twinkle in his eye it showed that he knew and recognized what I've sometimes called the element of irreducible rascality in himself and he knew it so strongly and so clearly and in a way so lovingly that he would not condemn the things thing in others and therefore would not be

led into those thoughts feelings and acts of violence towards others which are always characteristic of the people who project the devil in themselves upon the outside upon somebody else upon the scapegoat now this made Yong a very integrated character in other words here I have to present a little bit of a complex idea he was a man who was thoroughly with himself having seen and accepted his own nature profoundly he had a kind of uh unity and absence of conflict in his own nature which had to it this additional complication that I find so fascinating

he was the sort of man who could feel anxious and Afraid and guilty without being ashamed of feeling this way in other words he understood that an integrated person is not a person who simply eliminated the sense of guilt or the S sense of anxiety from his life who is fearless and wooden and uh kind of sage of stone he's a person who feels all these things but has no recrimination against himself for feeling them and this is to my mind uh a profound kind of humor now in humor there's always a certain element of

malice there was a talk given on the Pacifica stations just a little while ago which was an interview with Al capap and Al cap made the point that he felt that all humor was fundamentally malicious now there's a very high kind of humor which is humor at one self real humor is not uh jokes at the expense of others it's always jokes at the expense of oneself and of course it has an element of malice in it it has uh malice towards oneself the recognition of the fact that behind the social role that you assume

behind all your pretentions to being either a good citizen or a fine scholar or a great scientist or a leading politician or physician or whatever you happen to be behind this facade there is a certain element of the unreconstructed bum not as something to be condemned and wailed over but as something to be recognized as contributive to one's greatness and to one's positive aspects in the same way that manure is contributive to the perfume of the Rose Yung saw this and Yung accepted this and I want to read a passage from one of his lectures

which I think is one of the greatest things he ever wrote and which has been very marvelous thing for me it was in a lecture delivered to a group of clergy in Switzerland considerable number of years ago and he writes as follows people forget that even doctors have moral Scruples and that certain patients confessions are hard even for a doctor to swallow yet the patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted too no one can bring this about by mere words it comes only through reflection and through the doctor's

attitude towards himself and his own dark side if the doctor wants to guide another or even accompany him a step of the way he must feel with that person's psyche he never feels it when he passes judgment whether he puts his judgments into words or keeps them to himself makes not the slightest difference to take the opposite position and to agree with the patient off hand is also of no use feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity this sounds almost like a scientific precept and it could be confused with a purely intellectual abstract attitude of mind

but what I mean is something quite different it is a human quality a kind of deep respect for the facts for the man who suffers from them and for the riddle of such a man's life the truly religious person has this attitude he knows that God has brought all sorts of strange and inconceivable things to pass and seeks in the most curious ways to enter a man's heart he therefore senses in everything the Unseen presence of the Divine will this is what I mean by unprejudiced objectivity it is a moral achievement on the part of

the Doctor Who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and Corruption we cannot change anything unless we accept it condemnation does not liberate it oppresses I am the oppressor of the person I condemn not his friend and fellow sufferer I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve but if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is and he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted

himself as he is perhaps this sounds very simple but simple things are always the most difficult in actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one's whole outlook on life that I feed the beggar that I forgive an insult that I love my enemy in the name of Christ all these are undoubtedly great virtues what I do unto the least of my brethren that I do unto Christ but what if I should discover that the least amongst

them all the poorest of all Beggars the most impudent of all offenders yay the very fiend himself that these are within me and that I myself stand in need of the arms of my own kindness that I myself am the enemy who must be loved what then then as a rule the whole truth of Christianity is reversed there is then no more talk of love and longsuffering we say to the brother within us Rocka and condemn and rage against ourselves we hide him from the world we deny ever having met this least among the lowly

in ourselves and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form we should have denied him a thousand times before a single had crowed well you may think the metaphors rather strong but I feel that they are not so needlessly this is a very very forceful passage and a memorable one in all yung's works trying to heal this Insanity from which our culture in particular has suffered of thinking that a human being can become hail healthy and holy by being divided against himself in inner conflict paralleling the conception of a

cosmic conflict between an absolute good and an absolute evil which cannot be reduced to any any prior and underlying unity in other words our rage and our very proper rage against evil things which occur in this world must not overstep itself for if we require as a justification for our rage a fundamental and metaphysical division between good and evil we have an insane and in a certain sense schizophrenic Universe of which no sense whatsoever can be made all conflict Yung was saying all opposition has its resolution in an underlying Unity you cannot understand the meaning

of to be unless you understand the meaning of not to be you cannot understand the meaning of good unless you understand the meaning of evil even St Thomas aquinus saw this for he said that just as it is the silent pause which gives sweetness to the chant so it is suffering and so it is evil which makes possible the recognition of virtue this is not as Yung tries to explain a philosophy of condoning the evil to take the opposite position he said and to agree with the patient off hand is also of no use but

EST Stranges him the doctor or EST Stranges him the patient as much as condemnation let me continue further reading from this extraordinary passage healing may be called Yung says a religious problem in the sphere of social or national relations the state of suffering may be civil war and this state is to be cured by the Christian virtue of forgiveness and love of one's enemies that which we recommend with the conviction of good Christians is applicable to external situations we must also apply inwardly in the treatment of neurosis this is why modern man has heard enough

about guilt and sin he is sorely beset by his own bad conscience and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother the modern man does not want to know in what way he can imitate Christ but in what way he can live his own individual life however meager and uninteresting it may be it is because every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile that he Rebels against the force of tradition that

would hold him to well trodden [Music] ways all such roads for him lead in the wrong direction he may not know it but he behaves as if his own individual life were God's special will which must be fulfilled at all costs this is the source of his egoism which is one of the most tangible evils of the neurotic state but the person who tells him he is too egoistic has already lost his confidence and rightly so for that person has driven him still further into his Neurosis if I wish to affect a cure for my

patients I am forced to acknowledge the Deep significance of their egoism I should be blind indeed if I did not recognize it as a true will of God I must even help the patient to Prevail in his egoism if he succeeds in this he estranges himself from other people he drives them away and they come to themselves as they should for they were seeking to Rob him of his sacred egoism this must be left to him for it is his strongest and healthiest power it is as I have said a true will of God which

sometimes drives him into complete isolation however wretched the state may be it also stands him in good Stead for in this way alone can he get to know himself and learn what an invaluable treasure is the love of his fellow beings it is moreover only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience The Helpful powers of our own Natures end of quote this is a very striking example of yung's power to comprehend and integrate points of view as well as psychological attitudes that seem on the surface to be completely antithetical for example

even in his own work when he was devoting himself to the study of Eastern philosophy he had some difficulty in comprehending the let's say the buddhistic denial of the reality of the ego but you can see that in practice in what he was actually trying to get at he was moving towards the same position that is intended in both the Hindu and the Buddhist uh philosophy about the nature of the ego just for example as the Hindu will say that the eye principle in man is not really a separate ego but an expression of the

universal uh life of Brahman or the godhead so Y is saying here that the development of the ego in man uh is a true will of God and that it is only by following the ego that one and and developing it to its full extent that one fulfills the function which this you might say temporary illusion has in man's psychic life for he goes on and says here when one has several times seen the development at work one can no longer deny that what was evil has turned to good and that what seemed good has

kept alive the forces of evil the arch demon of egoism leads us along the Royal Road to that in gathering which religious experience demands what we observe here is a fundamental law of life enantiodromia or conversion into the opposite and it is this that makes possible the re Union of the Waring halves of the personality and thereby brings the Civil War to an end end of quote in other words he was seeing that as Blake said a fool who persists in his folly will become wise that the development of egoism in man is not something

to be overcome or better integrated by opposition to it but by following it it's almost isn't it the principle of Judo not overcoming what appears to be a hostile Force by opposing it but by Swinging with the punch or rolling with the punch and so by following the ego the ego transcends itself and in this moment of insight the great Westerner who comes out of a whole tradition of human personality which centers it upon the ego upon individual separateness by going along consistently with this principle comes to the same position as the easterner that is

to say to the point of view where one sees conflict which at First Sight had seemed absolute as resting upon a primordial Unity thereby attaining a profound unshakable peace of the heart which can nevertheless contain conflict not a piece that is simply static and lifeless but a piece that passes understanding I suppose that some of you have read very fascinating work that was written many years ago by CG Yung a commentary that he wrote to a translation of a Chinese classic by Rickard vilhelm called The Secret of the Golden Flower now you may remember that

in that commentary he takes the very fascinating problem of the dangers inherent in the adoption of uh Oriental ways of life by westerners but more particularly the adoption of Oriental spiritual practices such as yoga and I remember I learned a great deal from that essay and appreciated it very much in ever so many ways because even in my own fascination with forms of Oriental philosophy I've never been tempted to forget that I'm a Westerner but as I think this essay over I'm not sure that Yung discouraged the practice of yoga by westerners for quite the

right reasons I find so often the difficulty in yung's ideas lies in his theory of History which is I feel a hangover from 19th century theories of History uh encouraged by Darwinism namely that there's a sort of orderly progression from the ape through through the Primitive to the Civilized man and of course naturally at that time that was all hitched in was a theory of progress and it was highly convenient for the cultures of Western Europe which were then a one up on everybody else to consider themselves in the van of progress and when they

visited the natives of Borneo and Australia and so on to be able to feel that they were perfectly justified in appropriating their lands and dominating them because they were giving the benefits of the last word in evolution and uh therefore under the influence of that sort of theory of History which is felt in the work of both Freud and Yung one gets the feeling of there being a kind of progressive development of human consciousness and Yung is charitable enough to assume that because the Chinese and Indian civilizations are immeasurably older than ours they've had the

the possibility of far more sophistication in psychic development even though he feels and probably rightly that there are things they can learn from us but the reason why he discourages the Westerner from the practice of yoga is that he says this is a discipline for a far older culture than ours which along certain lines has progressed much further and has learned certain things that we haven't mastered at all yet and thus he points out that when somebody Embraces uh vanta or theosophy or any yoga School in the west and tries to master a discipline of

concentration in which uh they have to oust from their Consciousness all wandering thoughts he says that this for a Westerner may be a very dangerous thing indeed because just exactly what the Westerner may need to do is to allow free reign to his wandering thoughts and his imagination and his fantasy because it's only in this way that he can get in touch with his unconscious and uh that his unconscious will not leave him in peace until he gets in touch with it and he assumes the members of Oriental cultures have done this long before they

went into yoga practice now I don't think this is quite true but I do think there are other reasons why Western people need to exercise a good deal of discrimination and caution in adopting Eastern disciplines and ways of life in other words it's rather like the problem of taking medicine you know if you don't feel very well and you go to a friend's medicine cabinet and you sort of look it over and see bottles of medicine in there and uh you say I'm sick I need medicine so you take some medicine any medicine will do

well it won't and uh according to what's the matter with you so the medicine has to be prescribed and I don't think that the things which some of the Eastern disciplines are designed to cure are quite the same things that we need now it's fundamental to my view of the nature of such forms of discipline as Buddhism and Daoism that there are ways of Liberation from a specific kind of confinement that is to say their ways of Liberation from what I've sometimes called the social hypnosis in other words every culture every society as a group

of people in communication with each other has certain rules of communication and from culture to culture these rules differ in just the same way that languages differ and a culture can hold together on very very different kinds of rules I won't say any kinds of rules but very different kinds of rules always provided that the members agree about them whether they're forced to agree whether they agree tacitly or whatever the reason may be and these rules are in a way very much like the rules of a game in other words uh take a game like

chess you can have the kind of Chess we play with an eight square board or you can have a kind of Chess that the Japanese play with a nine square board uh doesn't make any difference so long as you both play on the same board and by the same rules but since this is a chess is a game and in the same way the development of human cultures is also in a way a game that is to say it's the elaboration of a form of life and the fun of it in a way is the

fun of elaborating it in just some interesting form that's the same as the fun of a game the fun of a game is it has a certain interest but it doesn't follow that the rules of the game correspond to the actual structure of human nature or to the laws of the universe but because in every culture it's necessary to impress upon especially its younger members that these rules Jolly well have to be kept they are usually in some way or other connected with the laws of the universe and given some sort of divine sanction and

there are indeed cultures in which the senior members of the group realize that that's a hoax that that's as if it's made up and is done to terrify the young and when they uh become senior members of the culture themselves they see through the thing but they don't uh let on they keep it quiet they don't let out to those who are supposed to be impressed that this was really a hoax to get them to behave well anyway after a great deal of careful study I've come to the conclusion that the function of these ways

of Liberation is basically to make it possible for those who have the determination and we'll see why in a while to make it possible for those who have the determination to be free from the social hypnosis in other words if you were a member of the culture of India at almost any time between maybe 900 BC and 1800 ad it would be for you a matter of common sense about which everybody agreed that you were under the control of a process called karma not exactly a law of cause and effect but a process of cosmic

Justice whereby every every fortune that occurred to you would be the result of some action in the past that was good and every Misfortune that occurred to you would be the result of some action in the past that was evil and furthermore that this action in the past might not have been done in this present life but in a former life it was simply axiomatic to those people that they were involved in a long long process of reincarnation reaping the rewards and punishments and there were not only there was not only the possibility of being

reincarnated again in the human form but if you were exceedingly good you might be born in one of the heavens the paradises and if you were exceedingly bad you might be born for an insufferable period of years not forever in a purgatory and the purgatories of the Hindus and Buddhists are just as in G iously horrible as those of the Christians well of course everybody knows I I mean anybody seems to be have any sense that all this uh imagination of postmortem courts of justice is a way of telling people well if the secular police

don't catch you the celestial police will catch you and therefore you had better behave and it's an ingenious device for encouraging our ethical conduct now but remember that for a person brought up in that climate of feeling where everybody believes this to be true it seems a matter of sheer common sense that it's so and it's very difficult for a person so brought up not to believe that that is the State of Affairs take an equivalent situation in in our own culture it's still enormously difficult for most people to believe that space may not be

Newtonian space that is to say a three-dimensional Continuum which extends indefinitely forever the idea of a four-dimensional curved space seems absolutely fantastic and can't even be conceived by people unversed in uh the mathematics of modern physics or again as I've often pointed out it's very difficult for us to believe that the forms of nature are not made of some stuff uh called matter uh that's a very unnecessary idea from a strictly scientific point of view but it's awfully difficult for us to believe it to believe in other words that there isn't this underlying stuff and

uh not so long ago it was practically impossible for people to conceive that the planets did not revolve about the Earth encased in crystalline spheres and it took a very considerable shaking of the imagination when astronomers began to point out that this need not necessarily be so all right so now let's go back to the problem of somebody living in the culture of ancient India here it is is a matter of common sense you see that he's going to be reborn now there's some perhaps exceedingly intelligent person who for one reason or another discovers that

this idea is not so after all when uh you get such disciplines as vant and Buddhism they say that the ultimate goal of the discipline is release from the Realms of rebirth and incidentally also which is fundamental to it release from the illusion that you are a separate individual confined to this body but so far as both of these things are concerned they also say that the person who is liberated from the round of rebirth as well as from the illusion of being an ego sees when he is liberated that the process of rebirth and

the whole cosmology of reincarnation and Karma as well as the individual ego are in a way illusions that is to say he sees that they are Maya and I would like to translate Maya at this moment not not so much illusion as a playful construct a social institution so he sees you see that those things are not so they are only pretended to be so and you see he ceases to believe in karma and reincarnation and all that in exactly the same way that a modern agnostic no longer believes in the resurrection of the body

at the day of judgment I I know this to be so because although you will get very many Hindus and Buddhists who say that they believe in reincarnation and come over here and teach it as part of the doctrine of vanta or Buddhism the the most sophisticated and the most profound I'll say perhaps profound rather than un sophisticated Buddhists that I have known have said that they don't believe in it literally at all and so I could say that those who do believe in it believe in it simply because it's part of their culture and

they've not yet been able to be liberated from it and so it seems to me very funny indeed when Western people who become interested in Vidant or Buddhism that is to say in forms of discipline to liberate Hindus and uh Chinese people from certain social institutions Western people adopt it and then also adopt the ideas of reincarnation and Karma from which these systems were designed to liberate them and of course they adopt them because they feel it's consoling that one will go on living and that wasn't the point at all or that it explains something

that why one suffered in this life was not because the universe was unjust but because you committed some misdeed in the past and so westerners who take up the Oriental doctrines in that Spirit unfortunately take up the very Illusions from which these doctrines were supposed to be ways of Deliverance now that may be difficult to see just because so many practicing Hindus and Buddhists say they believe in reincar ation and this whole process of the cycles of Karma and so on and uh they after all are practicing it and they should know well now look

here there's a certain good reason why they shouldn't of course I'm making an exception of the Indian or Chinese who's been educated in western style and he ceases to believe maybe in the cosmologies of his own culture but he's not liberated in the Buddhist sense because in receiving a western education he's become a victim of our social institutions instead and me he's just exchanged as it were one trouble for another but uh when you take the situation as it stands or as it did stand in India isolated from Western culture obviously no Society can tolerate

within its own borders the existence of a way of Liberation way of seeing through its institutions uh without feeling that such a way constitutes a threat to Law and Order anybody who sees through the institutions of society and sees them for as it were creative fictions in the same way as a novel or a work of art is a creative fiction anybody who sees that of course could be regarded by the society as a potential Menace but then then you may ask well if if Buddhism and and vidanta and so on were indeed ways of

Liberation how could Indian or Chinese Society or burmes Society have tolerated their presence well the answer lies simply in the much misunderstood esotericism of these disciplines in in other words that those who taught them the masters of these disciplines made it incredibly difficult for uninitiated people to get in on the inside and their method of initiating them in a way was to put them through trap after trap after trap to see if they could find their way through in other words uh such a master would not dream of Beginning by disabusing the neoy and saying

well you know all these things you heard from your father and mother and teachers and so on were fairy tales oh no [Music] indeed uh he would do what is called in Buddhism exercise the use of upaya the Sanskrit word meaning skillful devices or skillful means sometimes described as giving a child a yellow leaf to stop it crying for gold after all when you approach one of these ways of Liberation from the outside it looks like something very very fantastic here you are literally going to be released from a literally true and physical cycle of

endless incarnations in Heavens and Hells and all kinds of states and therefore naturally to do that what an undertaking that must be what a wonderful extraordinary person you've got to become and so the muite is ready for almost anything and the teacher because the the fundamental problem in this whole thing is for him to get rid of the illusion you see that he's a separate ego if there's no separate ego or sort of Soul then there's nothing to be reincarnated so all the teacher really in he has all kinds of complicated ways of doing it

but all that he really says to him is but now um if you will look deeply into your ego you will find out that it is a non-ego that your self is the universal self as he might say if he were a vedantist or if you were a Buddhist you might say if you look for your ego you won't find it so look for it see and really go into it and so he gets the man meditating and trying by his ego to get rid of his ego well that is a beautiful trap it can

last forever until one sees through it in other words this is like trying to uh you know sweep the darkness out of a room with a [Music] broom or it's like it's worse than that ler uh drona rather had a nice figure for it beating a drum in search of a fugitive that's to say you know when the police go out because they had a telephone call that there's a burglar they uh come racing to the house with a siren for blast and they burglar hears it and runs away because of course to try and

get rid of the ego for one's advantage in some ways an egotistic Enterprise and you can't do it and so of course the student gets to the point where he begins to realize that everything he does to get rid of his ego is egotistic and uh this is the kind of trap in which the teacher gets him until of course he comes to the point of seeing that uh his supposed division from himself into say I and me the controller controlling part of me and the controlled part of me the knower and the known and

all that is is phony there is no way of standing aside from yourself in other words and as it were changing yourself in that way he discovers this finally at the same time he discovers uh almost at the last minute you might say the fallacy or rather the fantasy nature the game like nature of the system of cosmology which has existed to as it were under pin or give the basic form of the social institutions of his particular culture or Society in other words you may put it in in in another way one of the

basic things which all social rules of convention conceal is what I would call the fundamental Fellowship between yes and no say in the Chinese symbolism of the positive and the negative the Yang and the yin you know you've seen that symbol of them together like two interlocked fishes well the great game I mean the whole pretense of most societ is that these two fishes are involved in the battle there's the up fish and the down fish the good fish and the bad fish and there's out for a killing and the white fish is one of

these days going to slay the Blackfish but uh when you see into it clearly you realize that the white fish and the black fish go together they're twins they're really not fighting each other they're dancing with each other that you see though is a difficult thing to realize in a set of rules in which yes and no are the basic and formally opposed [Music] terms when it is explicit in a set of rules that yes and no are positive and negative of the fundamental principles it is implicit but not explicit that there is this fundamental

bondage or Fellowship between the two but the fear is you see that if people find that out they won't play the game anymore I mean supposing a certain social group finds out that its enemy group uh which it's supposed to fight is really uh symbiotic to it that is to say the enemy group Fosters the survival of the group by pruning its population we'd never do to admit that we'd never never do to admit the advantage of the enemy just as George Orwell pointed out in his uh fantasy of the future in 1984 that uh

as dictatorial government has to have an enemy and if there isn't one it has to invent one and uh by this means by having something to fight you see having something to compete against the energy of society to go on doing its job is stirred up and what the Buddha or bodh sappa type of person fundamentally is who's one he's one who's seen through that who doesn't have to be stirred up by hatred and fear and competition to go on with the game of life