The Image of Yoga: A Re-Yoking of the Symbolic Life

Read the Bhagavad Gītā as scripture, and you receive doctrine. Read it as psyche, and you receive a map to Selfhood. Arjuna’s chariot halts on Kurukshetra, the field of dharma, and the war he dreads is not only a war. It is the liminal inner terrain where the ego meets the Self and asks what to do with its own paralysis. Krishna does not abolish the battle. He teaches the paradox of action with non-action. Obtaining without grasping. That is the symbolic life in a single gesture: to act fully inside an image while holding its meaning loosely enough for potential and possibility to fill the gap.

Jung would call this psychologically necessary because Western man “has become so far removed from his roots that his mind was finally split into faith and knowledge” (Jung, 1969a, para. 866). The symbol is the suture. It carries “the larger and more important part of the unconscious” (Jung, 1969a, para. 872), the stratum that literalism cannot reach. But here I depart from the easy reading. The Gītā does not rescue anyone by being copied. Jung warns that imitation yields only “an artificial stultification of our Western intelligence” (Jung, 1969b, para. 911).

The danger in a disenchanted world is not too little ritual. It is literalism wearing two masks: the materialist who sees only mechanism, and the seeker who treats Krishna as a technique to apply. Both mistake the finger for the moon. Both lose the symbol. And yet, as Hölderlin says, “Where danger is, / Arises salvation also” (Jung, 1970, para. 195). For me, this symbolic orientation toward the Gītā yokes (yoga) both the East and the West to a golden thread that unites us all.

References

Jung, C. G. (1969). Yoga and the West (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 11, 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1936)

Jung, C. G. (1969). The psychology of Eastern meditation (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 11, 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1943)

Jung, C. G. (1970). Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower” (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 13). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1931)