Jung and Kundalini

For C. G. Jung, yoga is a general term indicating all Eastern thought and psychological practice. Although such a general usage of ‘yoga’ can be found in Eastern thought, it is more frequently used to designate a specific spiritual discipline. Thus there is the yoga of Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras, the yoga of the Bhagavad-Gita, the yoga of Theravada Buddhism, and the yoga of the Chinese Taoists. Kundalini is one such specific form of yoga. Jung's interest in these different yogas is focused on their power to produce a spiritual development of the personality. In his lectures Jung observes that in India the practice of yoga involves both psychology and philosophy. To be a philosopher in the East requires one to have undergone the spiritual development of yoga as a way to release and self-realisation. However, the conception of the nature of self-realisation to be achieved, and the proper method to follow, are points on which Jung and yoga — especially Kundalini yoga —show significant differences. Yet, in spite of these differences, Jung found that important insights were to be gained from the parallels which Kundalini Yoga provided for his own theory of individuation.

References to Kundalini Yoga appear sporadically throughout Jung's writings. The occasion which prompted his set of four lectures devoted specifically to Kundalini is reported by Barbara Hannah — one of Jung's students — as follows:

It was in the autumn of 1932 that the Indologue, J.W. Hauer, at that time professor for his subject at Tübingen, came to Zürich to give us a seminar on Kundalini Yoga. This was a thrilling, interesting parallel to the process of individuation, but, as always happens when a perfected Indian philosophy is placed before a European audience, we all got terribly out of ourselves and confused. We were used to the unconscious taking us into this process very gradually, every dream revealing a little more of the process, but the East has been working at such meditation techniques for m