For me, psychology was the unexpected pathway that led to the Eastern religions. As a young adult, I was initially drawn to psychology in the hope that it could help me to understand myself, but I didn’t yet realize it held a door to a profound spiritual discovery.
That door was opened by Carl Jung, specifically through the accessible work, Man and His Symbols, which served as an ideal introduction to Jungian thought. At the time, I was having intense dreams that were illuminating issues I needed to address, and Jung’s framework provided the context and the tools to engage with them.
Jung himself had a deep, almost innate attraction to Eastern spirituality, an attraction that began in childhood. He describes this foundational curiosity in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
“…I remember a time when I could not yet read, but pestered my mother to read aloud to me out of…an old, richly illustrated children’s book, which contained an account of exotic religions, especially that of the Hindus. There were illustrations of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva which I found an inexhaustible source of interest. My mother later told me that I always returned to these pictures.”
This early exposure to the Hindu pantheon suggests that his later academic exploration of Eastern religion was driven by a powerful, pre-conscious inner pull.
Later in his life, Jung wrote the essay “The Holy Men of India,” which detailed his fascination with Indian sages. His interest wasn’t in the individual man, but in the archetypal figure of the rishi (seer) or holy man. Jung’s psychological insight was that this figure is an expression of the Self archetype—the central, all-knowing and ordering principle of the entire personality. This Self often emerges in our dreams and visions, bringing an illumination that the limited conscious mind cannot otherwise access.
It was this concept of the Self archetype that so profoundly resonated with me when I encountered Man and His Symbols. It validated a dimension of my personality I had experienced on many levels—an inherent completeness that transcended the formal, often rigid concept of spirituality I had inherited as a baptized Catholic.
Jung’s Near-Death Experience
Jung’s theories were not abstract concepts; they were reflections of his own powerful inner life, including a harrowing near-death experience (NDE) that fundamentally altered his view of reality.
In 1944, following a broken foot and a heart attack, Jung slipped into a state of unconsciousness and experienced a classic, vivid NDE, which he recounted in detail:
“It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light… Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India… My gaze was directed chiefly toward that. Everything else appeared indistinct… I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.”
As he journeyed toward a colossal stone structure—a temple—the process of shedding his earthly self began:
“As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me—an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me… I consisted of all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history, and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. ‘I am this bundle of what has been, and what has been accomplished.'”
He was certain that this purified essence would receive ultimate knowledge inside the temple:
“I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand… what historical nexus I or my life fitted into... My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered… I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all these questions as soon as I entered the rock temple.”
As with many NDE accounts, a messenger from Earth intervened and informed him he had to return. Jung described feeling tremendous disappointment at being forced back into the “box system” of physical reality and having the anticipated revelations cut short.
Jungian psychology is indeed a reflection of his personal crises and visions. The concepts he developed provide psychological language for spiritual experiences:
- The Persona, the mask we wear and the personality we project, is precisely the superficial self that was “stripped away” from him during the NDE. Jung’s experience validates his teaching that the ego must be detached from the persona to discover the deeper Self.
- The Shadow, the repressed and darker side of the personality, was a concept he was forced to integrate following his own confrontation with the unconscious after his split with Freud—a period he called his “confrontation with the unconscious.”
Jung’s greatest contribution may be his insistence on the inseparable connection between psychology and spirituality. He was correct in incorporating a spirituality that transcends human religion into his psychological framework. Since, as he discovered, we are inherently spiritual beings having a human experience, divorcing spirituality from our life can only lead to adverse consequences for our mental health. We are fortunate to have a psychologist who so skillfully mapped the terrain between the material world and the mystical realms.
