Review article
https://doi.org/10.31337/oz.79.4.6
Jung’s Attitude Towards Yoga: A Psychological–Theological Approach
Josip Blažević
; University of Zadar, Department of Religious Sciences, Zadar, Croatia
Abstract
In this article the author explores, interculturally and interdisciplinarily, Carl G. Jung’s relationship to yoga in his efforts to understand the unconscious of people living in the East and people living in the West in the birth process of analytical psychology. Jung approaches yoga from the perspective of a psychologist, impartially and with respect, but critically, pointing out the constitutive differences between the unconscious of people living in the East, and those living in the West. The denial of the metaphysical component to the spirit and its reduction to a psychic function paved the way for yoga in the West. Jung’s thesis is that yoga managed to impose itself on the Western mind as a kind of „scientific religion.“ It simultaneously satisfied the two needs of Westerners, intellectual and spiritual hunger, but without the requirement for religious commitment. Yoga tends to liberate and separate consciousness from subjection to object and subject. However, it is not possible to separate from something that is unconscious until the subject has mastered it, so the yoga technique will not achieve the desired effect because it is applied exclusively to the conscious mind. That is why Jung dissuades Westerners from practising yoga and advocates the birth of „Western yoga“ on Christian foundations, which he sees as being realized in the Ignatian spiritual exercises in the Catholic Church and in psychotherapy in the medical field. The modern affirmative medical attitude towards yoga, however, should not divert attention from the essential, which Jung correctly observed as being the fact that yoga was not constituted for the sake of health, but for the sake of liberation — the liberation of the spirit (puruṣa) from matter (prakṛti).
Keywords
Carl G. Jung; yoga; East; West; conscious; unconscious; individuation; analytical psychology; Ignatian spiritual exercises
Hrčak ID:
321088
URI
Publication date:
2.10.2024.
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