14.06.09
Ouspensky’s mutterings on ‘criminal sudras’
Comment of Revolution from the Right
mybrainisafleamarket said,
14.06.09 at 8:36 am
There is a Buddhist quotation that seems more reliable:
You cannot find freedom by replacing one illusion with another illusion.
Good point.
It is a hard lesson for many of these liberal New Agers, and followers of Gurdjieff, to discover the extreme reactionary character of the man, and of his follower Ouspensky, who made the point clear if anyone has the attention to look at his plain statements.
For example, Ouspensky would ‘mutter’ about ‘criminal sudras’ in reference to leftist political figures.
If someone dislikes a leftist that’s one thing. But to call them ‘criminal sudras’ is a bit much, a sign of the state of mind of such nineteenth century reactionaries.
(Sudras were the low caste in the Code of Many caste system). Ouspensky’s Psychology of Evolution with its praise of Manu and Hinduism’s caste system should have blown the whistle, but did not.
It’s not just part of the background scenery.
mybrainisafleamarket said,
15.06.09 at 9:20 am
I am in the midst of reading a book entitled ‘The Jung Cult: The Origins of a Charismatic Movement’ by Francis Noll
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=jung+cult+noll&btnG=Google+Search
I appreciate some of the Jung material, but decided, before getting more deeply involved, to try and learn something about Jung’s social context. I want to be able to appreciate and use ideas and methodologies, but remain adult and autonomous in relation to such methods and such systems.
I want to be appreciative but not to become an inmate of anyone’s system, no matter how useful I happen to find it for my own private use.
Noll’s book is of the utmost value, even if one does not happen to be interested in Jung’s work. Noll shows us a method we can use to become and remain adult in relation to charismatic guru figures.
Noll studied the history, culture and sociology of the place and time and ideas that formed Jung’s own social context, and that of Sigmund Freud. He also utilizes the work of Weber and suggests, very forcefully that Jung did not in the end function as a scientist, but created a society of discipleship around himself.
Now, what is of interest to Darwiniana’s readers is that Noll gives us a terrific list of sources that can applied very much further than even the career of Jung.
1) Noll shows us that the 1890s to 1920s were especially fertile for elitist study circles and reform societies. He focuses on Central and German speaking Europe and desribes many of the Volkish philosophies that were in vogue–various belief systems that people were formed by their countries and terrains of upbringing, that Germans had a special root to their northern geography, versus Jews and others who were rootless, and genetically orginated from desert areas.
Noll has a lot to say about Neitszche. He commented that there was no single movement that derived from N. That people were inspired by him but too their inspirations and invoked his name as part many, many different trends of influence.
Noll also described the impact of Wagner–Wagner was also part of this Teutonic revival moment and wanted to create an opera house that would actually be a site for an initiatory/tranformational experience in which Germans would get ecstatically in touch with their ancestral energies by making pilgrimage to Bayreuth, and then listening to the Wagnerian Ring Cycle of operas, to emerge thrilled, exalted and transformed….
Some of these volkish philosophies remained benign. But others went on to form ideological roots of National Socialism–Nazism.
Noll also utlizes Webers methodology to desribe the process by which Jung and Steiner and Keyserling, became charismatic leaders of their study circles and then, after their deaths, how their charisma became ‘routinized’ and institutionalized as a source of legitimation for successors (eg the various Gurdjieff spin off groups today)
Noll also tells us about the appeal of such elitist study groups, in which members considered themselves outsiders, but with a special destiny, set apart from and in opposition to mainstream society.
Finally, I must mention yet another thing I found a revelation. Noll told how these volkische movements and societies created a seekers scene in Southern Germany and especially Switzerland, a terrain that included Kusensacht, where Jung lived, Bollingen, Ascona, and Burgholzi, the town in which Jung trained and practiced psychiatry at the local asylum.
According to Noll, people pushed themselves too hard, were at risk of suffering breakdowns, and some for whom such breakdowns were severe would have landed at Burgholzi psych ward–where Jung practiced.
So when Jung reported solar symbols and mandalas amongst the halluciantions of his schizophrenic patients–he does not always tell us whether these people had been pre-exposed to elements of Volkish philosophy, with its emphasis on solar symbols, runes, nordic myths and images.
So some of Jungs schizophrenic patients may *not* have been ideologically naive at all–some of them may well have arrived at Burgholzi psych ER with their heads already full of material from Teutonic revivalist fantasies, and were, even if temporariliy, inpatients in a clinic situated in the 19th to early 20th Century Swiss equivalent of Marin County, San Francisco, Sedona, Arizona, Totness in Devon, UK, or Byron Bay, Australia–all nodes on today’s seekers circuit!.
According to Noll, this really was a proto hippie scene of sorts. People hiked, sometimes strenuously, dieted, tried what drugs were available in those days, went on Teutonic vision quests.
This may still be the case today, because some weeks ago, in the news, there was a story about upcoming elections in Appenzell, a conservative canton in the Alps, located in a lovely and famous area which has attracted many hikers from other German speaking countries. The Appenzellers were angry because many visitors from Germany were hiking in the nude, and refused to give respect to the modesty of the local culture.
So the citizens of Appenzell voted to make nude hiking illegal in their area.
This to me shows that the brutish visitors had no respect for the modest people who make their homes in Appenzell’s mountains. The selfish visitors were probably following a vision of private bliss, caring only about their private concepts of place and rootedness, feeling free to disrobe caring only for the beauty of the mountains.
The people who had lived in Appenzell were part of German culture. They’d lived amidst those mountains for centuries. They disapproved of public nudity–but as far as the vistors were concerned, the Appenzellers could be ignored.
Only the landcape mattered to the visitors. The people for whom that landcape was indeed home–mattered nothing. Such is the selfishness of any ideology, even volkishmus, when taken to extremes.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=nudity+nude+hiking+switzerland&btnG=Google+Search
So I say all this to encourage people to appreciate ideas and even systems, but remain adult in relation to them. Find out the social background and ambitions of whoever created a system that fascinates you.
And especially do this before you become too emotionally and financially involved.
Noll tells us that Jungs American students would have lacked the cultural and linguistic background to know about Jungs ideological roots in Volkish revivalist philosophies.
And later in his career, Jung published and taught much more in English, and became to emphasize alchemy, the Grail myth and gnosticism, shifting his earlier Volkische interests into the background.
Nolls can help us take a similar adult and autonomous stance in relation to our own intellectual and spiritual mentors. He make it clear that Jung created a most interesting body of ideas. But he also makes it clear that too much of this was based on Jungs personal charisma and tight control, making it a context in which the material could not be tested scientifically.
And, ironically for a man who spoke of individuation, Jung offered himself as the role model of individuation. To be truly loyal to Jung, one must avoid
being charismatically beguilled by him. In a way, Noll has taken a true individual path–because publishing his book probably brought him real hardship, perhaps even hatred from persons charismatically invested in Jung, and unwilling to become adults in relation to their admired role model.
Hats off and my best bow to Richard Noll. He gives us a method by which to assist us to appreciate someone’s ideas, yet at the same time avoid the trap of discipleship–to learn from someone while keeping control of our projections, our energies–psychologically, emotionally and even financially–and at a time when finances of are of the utmost importance to us all. .
Note: Noll has extensive footnotes and mentions James Webb as a most valuable source of information–most noteably Webb’s book The Occult Establishment.
mybrainisafleamarket said,
15.06.09 at 9:45 am
Dear nemo, I published an article about Richard Noll’s study of CG Jung’s social background.
Just now I found this article, which summarizes Noll very nicely and adds to your collection.
And…by golly, there is a reference here to correspondance between Jung and a student of his. The student was interested in the work of Ouspenksy and…Jung advanced some most peculiar reasons to avoid getting involved with Ouspensky’s material…based on racialist Germanic Volkishismus ideology..that there is something toxic for Aryan Europeans in Russian ideas.
http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/jung.htm
(the entire article is worth reading. But here is an excerpt)
(quote)Jews had allegedly lost their pagan roots so long ago that they no longer had access to the collective unconscious. By contrast, Germanic peoples had lost their paganism at a relatively late date, roughly 500 to 1100 AD. Thus the pagan collective unconscious lay close enough to the psychological surface that it could still be dug up if only one were persistent enough. Since for Jung being in touch with the collective unconscious is a precondition for psychological health, Germanic types like himself are potentially healthier than Jews.
This idea is scientifically unsound, as it confuses what can be learned with what can be biologically inherited. It also links psychological health more to one ethnic group than another and could easily provide a rationale for anti- Semitism. Jung tended to think of the collective unconscious in racial terms until late in his life. About 1936, when he was already 60, he realized that a stress on this aspect of his thought would not go over well in the English speaking world where Jung thought he could find the greatest number of disciples. In fact, his views about an essentially Aryan collective unconscious put him close to the kinds of things that Hitler was saying.
The Letter to Constance Long
I am not making this up. Here is a letter he wrote December 17, 1921 to Constance Long, an important American disciple then living in England. (TAC, 258-59). Long had begun to come under the influence of exiled Russian mystic Ouspensky, and Jung correctly feared that he would lose her allegiance to Ouspensky at a time when she was important to his desire to expand his influence in the English speaking world. Jung wrote:
Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but the vegetable gods you have raised in your own garden are nourishing. They are perhaps less beautiful but they have [illegible].
You shall not make totems of foreign trees [ ]. No one shall keep you else you trespass your limits; but blessed be the place where we meet the beginning of our limitations. Beyond one’s frontiers there is not but illusion and misery, because there you arrive in a country of the wrong ancestor spirits and the wrong charms . . .
Why do you look for foreign teachings [i.e., the Russian's]? They are poisons, they did not come out of your blood. You should be on your own feet, and you have your own rich earth below them. Why should you listen to the word of a man who is off his own soil [Ouspensky was in exile]? Truth is tree with roots. It is not words. Truth only grows in your own garden, nowhere else.
Only feeble men eat the food of a stranger. But your people need a strong man, one who gets his truth in his own roots and out of his own blood. . . . ”
After Hitler, who also spoke incessantly of soil and blood and portrayed himself as a strong man, this document is an embarrassment for the most devout English-speaking Jungians. But there’s no mistaking how Jung is thinking here. When he appeals to Long to be true to her own roots, he means the Aryan (or Indo-Germanic) roots. His point is not that Long should be loyal to her American or English roots, as distinct from Germanic roots. In fact Long was until then among Jung’s most loyal disciples; and he is an ethnic German who happens to be a citizen of Switzerland.
Jung thought that Germans, English, and Anglo-Americans were all part of the Germanic family tree. The Jews, in his view, had been civilized too long–uprooted from the soil. The Russians were polluted by too much Asian/Mongolian blood. Jung thought his kind of analysis will get (Aryan) people in touch with their roots, still latent inside them, and restore their wholeness.
Jung shared these ideas with a number of individuals who became Nazis. This is not to say that Jung was a Nazi. But he made one of the same basic errors that Nazism made: he failed to distinguish acquired cultural characteristics from inherited biological ones. It is understandable that Jung, like many intelligent Germans, could be confused on this question early in the 20th century when the science of genetics was barely getting started. But he continued to believe in it into the 1950’s, according to Noll; and this is strong evidence of the fundamentally problematic nature of his key concepts.
(Unquote)
nemo said,
17.06.09 at 12:58 pm
Sorry for dealy in seeing these comments.
The Gurdjieff Con » The Jung Cult said,
17.06.09 at 1:00 pm
[...] Comment on Ouspensky mutterings… mybrainisafleamarket said, 15.06.09 at 9:20 am · I am in the midst of reading a book entitled ‘The Jung Cult: The Origins of a Charismatic Movement’ by Francis Noll [...]
The Gurdjieff Con » More on Jung said,
17.06.09 at 1:02 pm
[...] Another Jung comment… mybrainisafleamarket said, 15.06.09 at 9:45 am · Dear nemo, I published an article about Richard Noll’s study of CG Jung’s social background. Just now I found this article, which summarizes Noll very nicely and adds to your collection. [...]