Carl Jung & psychological insights for spiritual growth, The Monks Podcast 128 with Hanumat Preshaka Maharaj

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Hare Krishna Maharaj. Thank you very much for joining once again on the Monks Podcast.

As always, it's an honour. Many devotees, they wrote back to me personally and said that, you know, they never thought that, especially those who had read contemporary literature, they said that a discussion like this, they thought, they wouldn't have thought possible maybe a decade ago. That normally we had this idea that everything mundane is to be dismissed.

So I feel that it opened a lot of horizons, not just for me, but for quite a few readers. It's amazing. So today, Maharaj, I thought we could discuss about Carl Jung.

You also mentioned that Prabhupada said he seems to be the most sensible among the Western philosophers. So I thought of broadly taking this in three parts. You can, of course, suggest an alternative framework.

One is that we can look at Carl Jung's role in Western intellectual history broadly, where he was coming from, and then we better understand his ideas. And then second is then we can look at where his ideas interact with, how they interact with Bhakti wisdom or Vedic wisdom. And then we could talk about how it relates with us in today's world.

As devotees, when you are practising or sharing, we could go it that way. I mean, we could go from the third to the first also, the other. But that is a broad framework, I thought.

It's my nose. So it sounds very nice. It's a nice way to approach it.

Because, you know, where did Jung come from? This is very nice because you're coming in some ways from this Asian perspective of life. You have that heritage. And we're considering the possibility of building bridges here between cultures to get benefits.

But at the same time, too, I think you probably were raised up in the industrialised society, right? Education, everything. And so that's coming, was generated out of England and places like that. So we have it.

So Jung's perspective is not like, it's just basically in some ways our perspective. So what's coming to me is that if many people like yourselves to find your own heritage, Jung then becomes a tool by which industrialised Asians can find their own heritage, which is what Prabhupada was also trying to do, too. By finding your own heritage, you're talking about the archetypes or I mean, how would Jung help us to find, are you talking psychologically speaking or because historically speaking, or how? That's a remarkable way of looking at it.

I think one very, very nice place to start with here. Let me just show this. You see, here we have Philemon Foundation, Shonur Shandashini.

And he's professor, he was, he's at the University of London, University College London. And he was in the history of medicine with focussing on Jung. But now he's a professor in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society, which of course includes Carl Jung, the German.

And also now he's Vice Dean of Arts and Humanities in the faculty. So he's had his own very, very extensive development in his own like career and trying to promote these things and help culture like that. I think he's from Sindi, Sindi background.

They have again, cultural background. So the reading list you see here too, you see the books I have on top there from Carl Jung. I asked many times, Jungian followers, you see Carl Jung sitting there.

And I asked them, I say, if Carl Jung was alive to now, would he still be smoking a pipe? And everybody all kind of stop and smile for a second and then shake their head, no, probably not. He wouldn't be smoking anymore. But that was a long time ago, the cultural ambience.

So there's the, what are called the Tavistock Lectures, which are a series of lectures he gave at the Tavistock Foundation in London. And it's still there. It's a very powerful intellectual organisation, organising these like, you know, conferences and things like that.

Then there is the Kundalini Yoga Walkup, which is a seminar that Jung did with another philosopher, which is again, very good because, you know, we can match up the Kundalini development. Then the autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, which was done with one of his lady students. And then especially we have Carl Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, the Dream of a Science.

And that is like Jiva Goswami's Anuchedas, I mean, what do you call it? Sandarbhas. Oh, okay. So Shonur Shambhashini did that.

And it took me like two or three months to read it. And it's written like that, I think, in Anuchedas. It's like, little like, you know, one page, two, three page essays on different topics, which are put together in roughly a chronological order about Jung's life and how he developed and stuff like that, and people he was encountering.

And it's a very nice way to look at it. Finally, the one I read the most recently was Jung in India, which was, I was directed to that by Bernardo Nantes, who is the translator of Jung's Red Book into Spanish and has his own very powerful institute, like that. So the one, Carl Jung and Making of Modern Psychology, the Dream of a Science is very much, you know.

And again, these are for people who have a passion for these things, like myself, and who have a scholarly intention. And now I see, I can talk about these things from any level, university level, professors, anybody. And Shonur Shambhashini, he did the Philemon Foundation, he translated the Red Book and so on.

So he's a nice example of someone coming out of this Indian, you know, cultural heritage and trying to, that's the thing, you know, trying to connect with his, let me see, with his own heritage, you know, of thought, perspective, attitude. And you're asking them, what does it mean historically, culturally, everything else? And that's where I think we have to get into this point of who are we and how much baggage we're bringing with us and how deep it is and so on. So right away, we get into this point of who am I and do I really inherit things from a certain family, you know? And do I take them in my mother's womb? Do I take them with my mother's milk? Do I take them with my first day in school, you know? Yeah.

And how much do these form allow me to understand things or not understand them, you know? Okay. So what you're saying is that in some ways, our subtle body, our subtle body is formed by the culture and the society in which we grow up. And that shapes both our, the way we look at the world and even the way we look at Krishna Consciousness.

So that's part of what I was saying. Okay. The other part is we come into this life and Jung's exact term is, how does it go? Rasga, it's interesting, something, tabula rasga.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Rasgar means to scratch and tabula means we don't come into this world as a blank slate. Yeah. We don't come into this world as a blank slate.

Yeah. And so this is, let me show you this one more slide here. Two things are very central here.

One is this one here. Okay. So this, because these are just slide shows we've been doing all over the world.

Can you see it now? Yes. Yes. Okay.

So this was the book Dialectical Spiritualism, A Vedic View of Western Philosophy. And as I understand the history, the Prophet asked for Shamasundar Das and the Hayagriva Das, Professor Howard Wheeler, I guess his name was, to do this, to ask him questions and tell him, to describe to him Western philosophers, you know, and then he would give them his comments. So you see the list here, it went from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, John Locke, Darwin, Herjavec, and Freud.

And then Howard Wheeler, I guess Hayagriva said, that ends our session with Jung. He's the last one. And Srila Prabhupada said, so far he seems to be the most sensible.

Oh, so, so very, what very, you know, distinct analysis of Jung's perspective from this, from the Bhaktivedanta, you know, purport. Yes. So that I think is, that's in many ways, that's why I took some interest in it, because it's such a declaration, you know, and so on.

So again, it's the same thing that we say, Prabhupada says, our Siddhanta, that you don't come into this world as tabula rasga, you bring a lot of karma with you. And maybe you're taking birth in a certain nation, because, you know, that's what you're destined to do. And that's how you understand things, and so on.

Okay. So two questions. First is that when Prabhupada had these discussions, there are some devotee scholars who have expressed some concerns about this, that the philosophers themselves were not represented properly, because the devotees were presenting those philosophers were not well versed in those philosophies.

So, so how, I mean, you could say that these discussions are starting materials for the way we can engage with these philosophers, we can't say necessarily that these are like conclusive deliberations. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that I think both the people who did it would say the same thing, they just read a book, and they have some background.

And it's not completely wrong. Of course. Yeah, there's a lot of work that needs to be done.

Okay. But still based on whatever Prabhupada has presented about those philosophers, he considered Jung to be the most sensible, which is a significant thing. I think he liked Socrates.

He said he was a good boy. He just didn't have a guru. Okay.

Yeah. And when he said that, when you talk about the tabula rasa, did Carl Jung have any idea of reincarnation? See, in my development in this process, we're trying to find somebody on the other side of the bridge. Okay.

Because I have some development here in this idea, and you have some development, you know, but we're yelling across the river. And we're trying to, Professor Ravi Gupta, and myself, we're trying to get a hold and have a conversation together with Shona Shambhachani. Because he's a very busy man, everything else, and we've had some contact with just a little bit.

And we're trying to find somebody from his side, who has this interest, you know, that we have in the project. And who knows Jung? Because Jung's ideas, I think, were changing from the time he started to the time he finished. My general perspective, you know, and again, you see what I've researched and everything else, was that he was caught in the same kind of ambience that everybody else was at that time.

That the self is a product of the body, you know, to some degree, to some degree, to some degree, I'm saying, to some degree. And a lot less than probably anybody else, in many, many ways. And that when he was talking about the subtle self and so on, it was something which was, to some degree, generated out of the DNA.

You know, which, again, is not all that, you know, invalid in terms of what we're talking about. We accept the commonality of our physical nature, you know, as human beings, and this kind of stuff too. But definitely, yeah.

It's a very subtle point. I have to go through my mind here. But he was, it wasn't, I don't think he was ruling it out.

And I, ruling it out. But at the same time too, I think he might have thought that, you know, boy, this is what I have to investigate too. Yeah.

Yes, Maharaj. One of the things which, I have studied a few books on Western intellectual history, I won't say very deeply, but I have a decent level of familiarity. So, he seemed to be, you could say, the least hostile toward religion.

Sigmund Freud was quite, Sigmund Freud was his, in one sense his teacher, but he was, he considered religion almost to be a pathology or a childhood, childhood crutch which one should outgrow. But Carl Jung, there is this famous quote that he says that, among all the patients that I have treated, I think this is a well-known quote, in 30 years I have treated many patients, among all my patients in the second half of life, every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age had given their followers. Yes.

And none of them were really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. So, he does seem to be distinct in the sense of appreciating at least, if not ontologically, but at least you could say psychologically or practically the value of religion. I think his father belonged to some kind of like Swiss church, you know, Protestant or something like that.

It wasn't exactly like Lutheran or something, whatever it was, you know. And he could see that his father, as I'm understanding, was becoming so frustrated because he couldn't kind of go beyond the, first there was religion as karma, you know, as ritual. I am Jew, I am Muslim because I do the ritual.

And Jung just wasn't satisfied with that. If the rituals were working, that was something else, you know. But so many times people just would identify with that.

Then beyond that, of course, his religion is gyana, you know, where you start, like we're doing, talking about it intellectually, you know. And, of course, it was very prominent in the Swiss community and his family and everything else. But even still, that wasn't satisfying because karma, gyana, and then we start to get to the level of dhyana, you know, mysticism and these kinds of things.

And I would say because of his previous karma, that's where Jung was situated and he was having experiences from the time he was a child, you know, about that. And so I think he was, you know, again, he was not rejecting ritual, but he was rejecting niyamagraha, rejecting, you know, empty ritual or even perverted ritual, you know, that was causing bad things in the name of religion. And he was rejecting intellectualisation, which was considered as the end and so on.

And he was coming to the platform where there has to be a mysticism within religion. And the next step, bhagavan, because once you come to the level of bahunam jamanam mante ganivam mam prabhajan de vasudeva sarvam iti samahamas udulabham, once you come to the level of vasudeva consciousness, it's like you can look through a, you know, a fence with these chain-link fences with wires, you know, you can see a lot through those things. You can't go through, but you can see so many things.

So once you come to the level of mysticism in your religion, then the experience of bhagavan starts to be very compelling if you're progressive. And so another quote is that somebody, I think this is actually on the YouTube, it was a, maybe not, one or two interviews were actually there, and somebody asked him, do you believe in God? And he said, I have to be, you know, perfectly honest. I don't know if there's a God or not, you know, as a person in that sense, you know, but I think that anybody who claims to be a psychologist, you know, has to investigate this without a doubt.

So I don't know if there's a God or not, but I do know that if you don't believe in God, you'll go crazy. Oh, okay. Yeah.

So that is. Yeah. Preparing for this podcast, I was looking at various, whatever I had read about Jung, so I found this quote also, something similar to what you're saying.

I could not say I believe, I know, I have an experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God. Yes. Yeah.

There is this quite an influential modern psychologist, Jordan Peterson, who says he has drawn a lot from Carl Jung. Oh, yeah. And he also is that way non-committal.

He's non-committal about God. He says that the way he puts it is that I don't know if God exists, but I live as if he exists. Oh, yes.

Yeah. You know, the Pascalian wager, no? Pascalian wager, yeah. Yeah.

And Albert Camus, of course, French also presented, he said, I'd rather live as if there was a God and find out there wasn't, than live as if there was a God and wasn't a God and find out there was. Oh, I didn't know Camus said that because Camus seemed to be quite an aggressive atheist from what I read. He was a nihilist in the sense that he rejected tradition quite a bit.

At the end, they're saying there was a lot of rapport and conciliation with the Catholic Church in his life. Oh, okay. Everybody's changing.

Most of the people, that's the point, they're evolving in their philosophy and culture. So, it's important to know. I'm trying to find somebody who knew how Jung's ideas were developing and how they've developed since him.

Historically speaking, again, he was born into the culture in Switzerland, you know, very clean, pure atmosphere. And his father was a priest, I think his grandfather, uncle also, in a small town, village, small town, some valley. And then at that time, psychology, as our reading goes, was very bad.

If you were psychotic, you know, and talking to people and dysfunctional in society, if you were poor, you'd be like driven on the street and somehow or other just, you know, beaten and basically killed, basically. Yeah, there seemed to be that association of, sorry, there seemed to be that association of madness with crime. That if people are mad, then they will become criminal.

And that's why they have to be like strictly controlled, put in some remand homes or it was quite ghastly. I don't know. Was it something like that in India also? I haven't read anything like that.

But it does seem to be prominent in Europe, at least at that time. Especially, as Jung makes this point at that time, he said before every village had a few interesting people. Mr. So and so.

And there was one when I was in Calcutta preparing for our Science Congress in 1995, one year there, we were in Raghunathpur, which is out near the airport. And it was a little area and stuff. And there was one guy, one guy, he was maybe like about maybe 27 years old.

And he had the intelligence of something probably like about a four year old child. And he just belonged to the neighbourhood. You know, when he needed a haircut, somebody would grab him like a kid.

And he was like submissive, you know, and stuff. But he couldn't talk so well, some words. They would just kind of take him off.

He needed a haircut. He was frightened. But a man would get a haircut and they can get him bathed.

And they would give him food. And with some work to do unloading bricks, he would be walking by. They grabbed him and say whatever his name was, you have to help.

He would help. So he was like a little child of the neighbourhood, you know. And and so Carl Jung said the same way it was that people like that could be absorbed into the village culture because everybody knew everybody.

But he said with industrialisation, it became more and more impossible. And that's when you just had to eliminate these people, you know, somehow or other, you know. And of course, there's some idea of also being possessed by devils and by ghosts.

And, you know, they'll get us. So he was growing up in that atmosphere with psychology. And he was trying to argue between he was having these experiences, you know, which which I think we would classify quite happily as, you know, experiences of Hiranya Garba, you know, a little above the Virat Roop, below Paramatma, above Virat Roop, different things happening in the Catholic Church and so many things which were quite elevated experiences and nobody with whom to discuss them and how to organise them himself and, you know, delivering and discovering a lot of deeper tendencies in his own nature for construction and things like that.

So anyway, when he went into the university, finally, I think he opted for medicine, rather than rather than something hard sciences. Finally, the psychiatry was, you know, was coming out of medicine at that point. So as I remember, his professor was one Bueller, one of the very first people to to really start trying to investigate the mind and more like a scientific mode.

They were using techniques like free association, you know, that. Free association. Yeah, I'll say a word and you say the first word that comes into your mind.

Okay, blue. Don't hesitate. Sky.

Ugly. Occupying. Yeah, yeah.

Now, now what's happening is you're having a lot of what's called latency, you know, so you're a person who who has a hard time letting their internal self go. Okay. Okay.

Okay. India. Spirituality.

Okay. Wife. Life partner.

So you see, this is very dangerous, you know. Yeah, very dangerous. I've done this with people a little more open and stuff.

And after a couple of words, something comes out where they just cover their mouths and everybody laughs and everything else. Okay. Yeah.

So they started having really good effects and people were starting to come out with, they could let things come out, which was behind their personality. And they started coming in contact with the psyche and measuring latencies and the word associations. And from that, they started to develop an idea about what is the structure of the mind.

So Shondur Shambhashin, in his book, he just said, you can have the history of the West in terms of war, in terms of politics. And that's usually what happens. Almost all history books will take you, okay, this happened, that politician and this, you know, scientific development, this war, that war.

But Shondur Shambhashin's book for intellectuals, it's a way to look at the development of intellectual thought in terms of the self and the mind. And there were so many people, Benet and other people in France and everybody else developing these ideas. Jung was just a part of it.

And they were developing an idea against the self, the mind, dreams, what their function is. And finally, he came in contact with Freud's work, which also involved the subconscious. Jung didn't like the word unconscious.

Prophet also didn't like the word unconscious. Oh, is it? Yeah. But unconscious is almost universally associated with Jung, isn't it? But he didn't like that.

He said the subconscious. He said, why call it the unconscious? He said, it's unconscious now, but as soon as you think about it, it becomes conscious. Oh, okay.

And many things that we just don't deal with, if we have a little bit of experience and ability, we can contact them. So again, it was exactly the same way as Prophet was looking at it. So the subconscious, the subconscious mind was starting to be investigated and thought about.

So then he went to see Jung. They exchanged some ideas, I guess, by letter at that time. And Jung had about maybe 20 minutes for him in the morning.

And once they started talking, Jung cancelled all of his medical appointments for the entire rest of the day. And they sat talking for like eight hours together. And so Freud was about the age of Jung's father in some ways.

And so for years, as I'm understanding this, for some time, it went ahead. And Jung was like the protege. And he became president, manager, whatever, of Freud's society.

But then there were certain specific things. They even travelled together. They shared hotel rooms in Chicago, apparently, everything.

They analysed each other's minds, their psychoanalysis of each other. And a very intense relationship. But there were certain things that Jung felt where Freud was actually limiting himself, where he was too much obsessed with sex, other things in life besides that.

And also where he wasn't accepting real mysticism and the physical force of mystical things within the gross world and stuff, specific things. So finally, he thought, I have to go on. If I want to go on, I have to go on by myself.

And that's where he started to separate himself and present ideas. And then finally, there became this. Listening to Jung, the antagonism was mostly from Freud's side and Freud's followers, more than anything, more from Freud's followers.

And he himself just wanted to go ahead without, you know. Freud, Jung, and I think it was Adler, those two were the most powerful at that time. And Jung said, we have our own ideas, you know, ways of looking at it.

We're just starting off. Why should there be so much conflict? So then after that, he was, in the morning times, he would have, I think he would have his patience. He was patient because he investigated all of Western philosophy, Western history.

One of the symptoms of a Samstapaka Acharya is that he synthesises all the previous Acharyas and presents it. And that way, his followers don't have to go back themselves. So Confucius did the same thing.

Confucius synthesised all the previous, you know, social philosophers and everything else before him, and then put that into his philosophy. So Carl Jung, the same way, once you've studied Carl Jung exhaustively, you are able to have studied Nietzsche, who was, he knew people who knew Frederick Wilhelm Nietzsche. He talked to them.

And he walked the streets that Immanuel Kant walked. So the parampara is there. He took it back then to the alchemists, who were, the alchemists were a very, very valid competitor for control of Western thought.

The alchemists, yeah. I thought alchemy was discredited right from the dawn of science. No, is it? Okay.

There's a very, very good essay by Harvey Cox, which was done for the Bhaktivedanta Institute, Synthesis of Science in Congress, Science and Religion in Congress in 1984. It's published by the BI. And they asked him to give a history of science.

And Harvey Cox, of course, is from Harvard. So it's called Science and Religion, a Lover's Quarrel. Oh, okay.

Yeah. And he says, I offer this as a little gift on the anniversary of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's appearance, whatever, and always bringing us Radha and Krishna. He talks about it like that.

He says, two lovers, at some point they say, I'm never going to talk to you ever again. And they both know that they can't do it. Okay.

So he points out science. He said, the first person we might call a scientist, proto-scientists were, of course, amongst the Greeks, you know, before Aristotle. And by the time it came to Aristotle, we're really looking at the roots of science.

And we are really, you know, descendants of Aristotle, Aristotelian perspective. But that's another discussion. In some ways, Aristotle and Plato, their relationship was somewhat like Jung and Freud.

Because it seems that Aristotle focused more on the empirical, whereas Plato focused more on the inferential. And he was more into the essence of things, try to understand the essence. So I thought it was more like he was more into Hanuman.

He started Hanuman as the founding basis, and then come to the Pratyeksha, whereas Aristotle wanted to start from Pratyeksha and then come to whatever Hanuman was reasonable. Yeah, yeah. And of course, Plato's guru, of course, was Socrates.

And you read Socrates is full of all kinds of religious rituals and participation. He was doing all these things. It was just part of his life.

He accepted there are gods, you know, and they touch our lives. So you're saying it is a whole genesis from Socrates, to Plato, to Aristotle, to the group, to the getting into this now, to the Arab philosophers in Spain, and there to St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas rediscovered Aristotle through the Islamic scholars, otherwise he wasn't there.

And he's the one who said, he was following Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas was following the analytical view of life of Aristotle, and Bonaventura was looking at life in a synthetic sense. Bonaventura said, you want to understand the bunny? You live with him, you see what he is, you talk with him, you integrate with him. Analytical view was to cut off his ears, pop out his eyes, pull out his teeth, okay, and now we know the rabbit.

And the Pope officially declared that Aristotle's, I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas's ideas would be the official philosophy of nature of the church. So that's the history of how we're looking at it, you know. And we don't, and other modern people, Nobel Laureate candidates are saying, let's go back the other direction, start being synthetic with nature rather than analytical.

Yeah, but that's a whole different thing. But that's, but it's related because that's what Jung was coming out of, you know, and he was trying, and he was, Shunryu Shandakshin, he's pointing out, he was trying to bring psychology to the level of being an analytical science that would be accepted and be able to give those results. But at the same time, appreciating through the Mithra cults in Rome, he went to Africa, he was participating in their programmes there.

He went so far into Africa that the two, you know, black police officers with guns who were sent to go with him were becoming frightened. You know, and then he was put in rituals with tribal people and talking with them. He really penetrated, like I'm saying, he was really an acharya.

And the alchemists, okay, according to Harvey Cox, there were two groups of philosophers developing at the beginning. There were the mechanical philosophers and the alchemists. And it goes back to Magnus and Paracelsus.

Magnus and Paracelsus were two of the guys. And there was a competition, who's going to control these things? So, in the end, the mechanical philosophers who became the physicists, in their point of view, won. So, then psych chemistry then became the second class science.

And alchemy, of course, got, you know, developed fundamentally. But many of the principles of alchemy that we agree with, you know, for example, alchemy includes macrocosmic and microcosmic resonances, okay? That if I move my hand in a certain way and make a certain, you know, mudra or something, that has an echo, which goes to the primordial principle of hands. I have hands, birds have hands, ants have hands, the gods have hands.

So, they accepted this, what you call macrocosmic and microcosmic resonances in the world. Another one was they accept that everything has meaning, which is very related like that. And these were principles that weren't there in the, what do you call it, the mechanical philosophers.

So, we see physics. Maharaj, just a minute. Sorry.

So, when you are using the word alchemy, it's not simply in the sense of transforming iron into gold. It seems to be a whole well-developed school of thought, is it? Yeah, the quintessence, the fifth element they were aiming at was to get back, they were trying to refine things, not just a physical level, but also on an essential level. What is the self? Who are we? It was meant to be a character transformation, just to see everything had meaning.

So, understanding physical nature meant to be a character transformation as well. That's remarkable. So, that seems to be much, that seems to be almost like the sadhana we do for purification.

And then we also do, like when you do deity worship, we do some kind of bhuta shuddhi, we purify even the elements. You can imagine if Jung at 18 years old moved into the Boston Temple or something, the London Temple, the pujari rituals and everything else. That's the point, what I'm saying is that by approaching him, you begin to see the possibilities in our rituals.

And ask yourself, why are we doing them? It's not just because, and Prabhupada will tell you, it's not just because Prabhupada said, but no, there are certain reasons why certain mudras have a certain effect in the body and things like that. Why we have five generations on the altar, certain reasons. So, now I'm getting a clearer sense when you said about the analytical and the synthetic.

So, it seems Jung was more approaching life as it was lived, rather than simply as, from what I read about Freud, it was more of, he was observing patients on the psychologist's couch, but not so much in the real world. So, one of the things I read about Freud was that he studied, he primarily studied pathologies and then he inferred about humanity from the pathology. Yeah.

Again, I think that was another contrast that Jung was more interested in studying healthy people. Yes. Well, I say, well, yeah, as much as he took it all as the thing, but he was, yeah, everything, but he was also a doctor.

So, he would have his time with his patients and stuff too, and study them. But many times by pathology, you can understand healthy being because in the pathology, you see when things aren't as they should. And now in the contrast, you can see, okay, well, what has taken this out of the norm? Let me begin to find out what the normal is, what's missing there.

Yeah. So, Maharaj, just, I don't know whether this is going on a tangent, but mental health doesn't seem to have been a major concern in, say, Indian intellectual history, as far as I know. There's a lot of analysis of the mind per se, but in the Sankhya as well as in the Yoga, but that is more for the purpose of transcending and getting liberated, not so much for mental health as a dimension in itself.

Now, we are, of course, many devotees are trying to, I say, draw insights about psychology from the Yoga texts or from Sankhya and then see how that can help in managing the mind. But is there any historical reason for that? Or is it like mental health is a problem that becomes prominent after a certain level of physical well-being and prosperity has come? And the West had that to some extent, at least after industrialisation, whereas India never had that. And at least in the recent historical times, that's why that problem was not highlighted.

So, again, I mentioned that one about Mountain Lake. So, Carl Jung, he was travelling all over the world. He went to Africa, he eventually went to India, and he went to the US, and this is all 1930s, 1920s, you know, and he was also investigating the philosophical roots of all these places, the literature and stuff.

So, you know, again, he was able to synthesise Nietzsche, Kant, all these things. And when you read him and Shundar Shandashni's book, you know, Carl Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, the Dream of a Science, that this is so profound, so well-researched. This is something which is very strong in the Jungian heritage.

It's extremely good scholarship, good, satisfying. So, when you do that, you know, okay, this is how we got where we are in terms of our view of reality and everything else. So, when Jung was with this one Shaman, I mean, I mentioned this before, maybe his name was Mountain Lake.

He was a Hopi Indian Shaman in New Mexico, I think. And they're very famous to this day. They've maintained their culture and their language is a different kind of basis in the way it deals with reality and the way they deal with reality.

They maintain their culture. So, Jung was talking about these ideas he had and he asked, well, why is it that your people think that all Europeans, you know, are crazy? You know, people coming from Europe. So, Mountain Lake said, he said, because they say they have thoughts in their heads.

And Jung said, well, hey, you know, of course, where else are you going to have thoughts, you know? And Mountain Lake said, only a madman has thoughts in his head. A sane man has thoughts in his heart. And when he heard that, Carl Jung said, perceptive guy, everything else, in respect to the study, he was so shocked that he just couldn't say anything.

He was just like sitting there in shock, you know, for maybe one minute, two minutes. And Mountain Lake being a subtle guy, just let Jung go process, you know, a gigantic world change. He said for the first time in his life, he actually realised how other cultures looked at Europeans.

There's a black poetess from South Africa, I think it's one. And she says, a woman thinks with her belly. A man thinks with his heart.

And a white devil, he thinks with his head. So, maybe we got some brown devils, you know, listening to this now too, you know. But that's the industrialised society.

And a woman is thinking about, you know, maintenance, survival, you know, things like that. And more tendency, a tendency, you know, with the heart, this is where the seat of the booty, you might say, the heart, okay, when I'm there. And when I move into the mode of passion, I start thinking with my head, you know, planning, all these kind of things, time factor, what's going to happen.

In the mode of ignorance, then I move into my senses and the sense objects. So, this is very nice analysis. And so, Carl Jung, it's the point, in the mode of goodness, the citta, the citta, the catharsis is in the heart, my heart.

Okay, there we go. Okay, in the mode of goodness, you know, yeah. But then when it moves in the mode of passion, when the morning programme is over, and the sun comes up, and the bank's open, and the business is open, okay, what kind of booty have I built during my morning programme? How much was I able to assemble a basis, a perspective, a bhava, an attitude, you know? And then when I confront all this activity in the mode of passion, got to do this, got to be there then, and what can I, you know, his cake is bigger than my cake, you know, yeah.

Then we're goal-orientated, then we have a basis why we're doing it. I'm making money for Krishna, right? And somebody else is making money for his family, somebody else is making money for his, you know. And then when the mode of ignorance comes, and the happy hour comes at six o'clock at night, alcohol, half price, you know.

Of course, the happy hour for devotees is, you know, is Brahma Muhurta, you know. So, and the businessman, he's unhappy. Oh my God, if the banks had just been open a half an hour more, I could have finished that deal, and I could have made so much, and I could have done so much, or I could have, you know, finished that correspondence, and our nation would be safe, you know, mano maya.

But the fool, okay, now he's happy at six o'clock, and now he can just take things and eat things, which will force them to be absorbed into his senses, you know, and that's what he wants. So, Jung was having this, in the Kundalini lectures, well, I had to give a lecture on that at the university, at the National Library of Peru, big programme. The head of the Psychological Association was there, several people, very prominent.

So, I wondered, well, what am I going to talk about? My presentation was, you know, Jung was Kundalini Yoga, and right that morning in the class, there's so many times happening, which Jung would call a synchronicity, you know, but things happen. Yeah, it seems to be the hand of God and things. The purport was all about probably talking about Kundalini Yoga before, and that afternoon, I had to make my presentation on Kundalini Yoga.

So, I just said exactly what I did. I presented it that way, and people, well, it's a nice way to look at it. It was very complete.

So, when he's talking about the chakras and everything else, you can see Anamaya, Pranamaya, Manomaya, and then, and that's about as, I would say Jung's perspective, my experience, he's just about up to the throat. That's where he's hanging out, you know, in terms of his bodily conception like that. He says, we Swiss people do not like to talk about anything below the belly, sorry, below the diaphragm, you know.

But he said, Germans, many times, they're quite happy talking about their guts, you know. He says, Swiss people come in contact with this. Oh, my goodness.

So, their culture is okay, you know, some prominent consciousness in that level, but Swiss people are more upright, you know. So, again, I would say Jung was at this level. That's where he starts to say, he comes up to the level of space as the element, and he's talking about space.

That's where he's starting to say it has, it's spiritual, you know. Yeah, but if you're on that level, which is sound and everything else, then your psychological activities are much more accessible to you than an ordinary person, you know. Yeah, yeah.

That's remarkable. So, in one sense, you use two frameworks. By the way, by your body language there, I see you, you pull your eyes away, you roll your head back, and you bring your chitta back up into your head.

Yeah. So, you can go back to a linear organisation for this conference, which I appreciate. Thank you.

That's fine. Now, till now you talked about two, you could say, two ways in which you place Carl Jung within, we could say, a Vedic framework. One was earlier you talked about the, like, with respect to his level of God consciousness or spiritual consciousness, you placed something at the Hiranyagarbha level.

And then now you talked about the overall analysis of, you could say, self in terms of the level of the consciousness, where you place it at the level of the space. So, this is very interesting. That means, we can have a particular, you could say, self understanding and an understanding of the divine.

And at one level, both can go in parallel, but sometimes they may not go in parallel, in the sense that somebody may be ritually worshipping God, but they may still be thinking of themselves as the body. And they may be worshipping God for material gains. So, both these going in parallel is, I think, what will lead to the holistic growth of consciousness.

Yes. Kinista Adhikari, Upadesa Amrita, some of you think, oh, Prabhupada talks about Kinista Adhikari smoking marijuana and associating improperly with the opposite sex. No.

Kinista Adhikari can also be a very pukka South Indian Brahmin family who does puja to the same deities for the last 32 generations and everything else. 32 generations, okay. Yeah.

So, it can be Kinista Adhikari in the mode of consciousness or Kinista Adhikari in the mode of ignorance. Yeah. The modes are influencing the senses or influencing the sense objects, the senses, the mind, and the intelligence.

So, we can get a different combination of those. Somebody may be pure, renounced, clean, everything else. He may be a very, very pure Buddhist monk, but his mind is controlled, no anger, but in his booty, in his heart, he may be in the greatest ignorance.

By doing all this, I will become God, which is the greatest, the greatest possible insanity you can have. So, senses and mind are in goodness, but his intelligence is in the deepest, deepest mode of ignorance. That's remarkable.

Yeah. So, you know, it's sometimes when you think about consciousness, we sometimes have a little bit of a simplistic understanding of what consciousness means, and this takes it at a much higher level overall. Chitta.

Chitta, no? Yeah, Chitta. Yeah. Now, so does that kind of cover the history of how things were developing in Western thought? And so, finally, into the modern 20th century, Jung was going into it.

He, in the West, he met with, you know, William James, the big philosopher, he met with him in the West. The variety of religious experiences. Yeah, yeah.

So, he met him. When he came to America, they had a lot of consultation and talking, and I think William James was a little bit older, but he very much respected him. He got his good ideas and everything else, and it wasn't that Jung was thinking, I'm the only guy on the planet with intelligence, but many people, you know, he felt were caught in the lower platform, you know? And so, he himself, should I become an artist? Should I go on? He had many different challenges.

He married, now here's a point of side, but he himself would talk about this. He would say people have their certain necessities they have to satisfy. So, as far as I understand, he married into a very nice family.

His wife had, you know, he brought with her a good dowry in terms of that, and they, you know, they married his entire life. But I think on the side, he may have had, you know, two or three relationships outside of marriage, you know, which in his culture, in his community, was not considered the grounds for divorce. You know, it was considered like, all right, as things were going on, and certain relationships are there, and men have things they have to satisfy.

And also, he was smoking tobacco. It's a perspective, but the thing was, I think in general, he was quite conscious of his foibles and things like that, and understanding these are problems I have. These things are going on, you know.

And he was, yeah, he was getting, he was a big, he was an international figure. He was getting criticism from different angles and people like that, which would bother him. Then he went ahead to involvement in the scientific community.

He was trying to make it into a science, and even went to the point of, he was working with Wolfgang Polly. You know Wolfgang Polly? He was Nobel Laureate. There's a book, it's a very, very good book, Quantum Questions by Ken Wilber.

I think I mentioned it. It's an anthology of the mystical writings of all the founders of modern physics, Schrodinger. And one of them, I think it's Louis de Broglie, or somebody has, maybe it's Heisenberg.

It's Wolfgang Polly and his philosophical outlook. And in the book, he's giving a biography of Polly. He says, as he says, amongst all the Nobel Laureates there, he was one of the most fanatic about rigorous thought and data and stuff.

He was very, very fanatical about rigorous use of mental thought and stuff. But Heisenberg, I think it says, somewhere along, maybe it's very early in his career, Polly came to the limit of rational thought, and at that point decided there had to be pre-rational roots. Things that happened in our consciousness, which is Immanuel Kant, as far as I'm understanding in Nietzsche.

Kant said, yeah, there had to be a priori things. You had to be able to break things into categories. You had to be able, yeah, what I call categories, I think.

You had to be able to see things as unique individuals. I had to be able to see you as something unique. I had to see your glasses as something unique.

I had to be able to see the microphone as unique. So Kant came up with these categories, which we had to have before we could have any hope of having any kind of rational thought or perception of the world. And then Nietzsche took it into being archetypes, like things that weren't just impersonal categories, but the virgin, the prince, and things like that, the snake.

And then Jung then took it, I think, a step further, but working on Nietzsche's work. So Polly and Jung were actually starting to work together on certain levels of, for example, certain levels of guaranteed imprecision with quantum mechanics and stuff, Heisenberg's principles of uncertainty. And they really were working together and stuff.

And so he was very much tied into the mainstream scientific community, you know, trying to make this bridge. And actually, historically then, when Jung was leaving his, then he wanted to do a biography. He's getting older, he's going to leave.

So Anna Jaffray, and Shona Shandashani says that a lot of it is not Jung's, you know, things. She actually wrote things in, like, you know, which apparently, you know, Jung, she wrote stuff that Jung didn't say, you know, it wasn't that she was lying or anything, but Jung didn't dictate the entire book. And the other biographies he recommends, which are just openly, you know, collecting stuff and presenting them.

So the biography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections with Anna Jaffray and Jung is actually an autobiography and Anna Jaffray's, you know, comments. And they asked him, give us what you really think about things. And he said, if I told everybody what I really thought, you know, the theologians would all attack me as being an atheist, you know, that everybody, the psychologists would say I'm mad, you know, and the physicists would say it's all just fairy tales, you know, you got to do it, you got to do it.

He said, okay, I'll do it, but it cannot be published until after I'm dead, you know, because I'm just a human being, how much, you know, so, and so when he left, one of the greatest things, he's finishing the history here now, when he was leaving, one of the most terrible things that he could hope for or expect was happening, which is quite quite natural, was that they were, what's the word, what's the word, stultifying, what's the word, petrifying, they were petrifying Jungian philosophy. This is Jungian philosophy, this is Jung's view of the world, this is how, what Jung says, the world is like this, the world is like that. Jung, what's his name, Ramon Mojica told me that his professor who was a Jung's associate said, Jung said, all of my ideas are conditional.

And even in his literature, he says that again and again, we're just, I've just discovered a few things that seem to be true, but we're just, and there's a quote I have there that introspective psychology, Jung says, I have it among my slides there, what wasn't born yesterday in the West, it was born this morning, you know, compared to Asia and places like that, we're far, far behind them. You can look at those quotes later, but he was saying that, they were my ideas, and so, and it's Shonar Shamdashni also entering into the politics now, because to get your degree as a Jungian analyst, you have to go and live in, pretty much live in Zurich sometime and work on it and stuff like that. So Jung felt that, and that's why also, as I understand, he's saying that Pauli left him, left the community, because he thought they'd done that, they'd given up their sense of creativity, their sense of intellectual honesty and investigation, which he felt were Jung's greatest contributions, his honesty and his courage, you know, and they were just trying to make it into a stultified thing where they could now sell it, you know, and deal with it in that sense, which is quite natural, but carrying on from Jung into the modern world, okay, I think many, there have been a big, a lot of controversial lines, and they've fought with each other, Hillman, and different people like that, about what's going on and reforming Jung's ideas, and Shonar Shamdashni and the Philemon Foundation has been dedicated to publishing a lot of the works.

There's a lot of resource material, which was not available, even for 100 years after Jung left his body, or did the materials like that. So those are still coming out. And then, trying to get involved in this whole thing, in my own limited perspective, we're talking to people who are working there.

We were invited, they'll come to the symposium, and let me share my screen here now. So they said, oh, of course, you're coming to the, this symposium in Santa Barbara, California, aren't you? And I said, well, I didn't know about it. They said, oh, yeah, yeah, everybody will be there.

So that's the level we got to on this level of, like, you know, and so, of course, we're in Tennessee, and I investigated the whole thing. It was going to be April 4th to 7th, 2019. Art and Psyche, the fourth thing.

The Illuminated Imagination, sponsored by the Art and Psyche Working Group, Pacific Graduate Institute, which is very powerful. Museum of Art, Design and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. The Jung family, his own family, which got the copyrights to so many things, he passed them on like that, and something else, Aras, you know.

They were sponsoring this whole thing. It had been organised someplace, four different places before had been organised, three different places. This was the fourth one, Art and Psyche.

And I investigated, I paid my money. It wasn't cheap, it was like $125 to register or something, you know. And then I talked to Giriraj Maharaj, because he's in Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara is down by Los Angeles, and it's one of the big campuses of the University of California. I never went there. I went to UCLA and Berkeley and Davis and stuff, you know.

But I know Giriraj Maharaj was there, and I got a hold of him, and he said, oh, so nice to hear from you. And yes, I would love to attend this whole thing with you. I didn't know about it, but I have to, I won't be there, you know.

So, but I have one disciple follower, the second generation devotee. And he said that he wrote a letter to him saying, I would host, I would just jump at the chance to host Maharaj myself and you host him. So, he said, yes, yes, very much.

He was a very nice devotee. I've forgotten his name now. Very nice, you know.

His parents were devotees. I knew his parents actually up in Santa Cruz. And he was working as the cultural director at a pretty big retirement community, maybe like 400 units or something, you know.

And so, he was, you know, he was very happy with that because he could introduce nice ideas and stuff and pursue his Christian consciousness. So, I stayed with him, and it was a big adventure, you know. All this stuff is so adventurous.

I had to rent a car, invest that money. And on the aeroplane going there, there were people going to the conference and stuff. And the Jungians, they were talking.

And when I got off, I went to, I said hello to one guy, and we started talking a little before and stuff. And they were people that could talk with you, you know. So, when I got off, I went over to wait for my one bag to come off, and this guy came with me.

And I said, oh, you're also coming to get your bag? And he said, oh, no, no, no. I just came to hang out with you. I wanted to associate with you.

My goodness. And the women were very intellectual and also seductive, you know, for someone. Here we are now with women who are like insightful and dressing artistically and everything else, you know.

So, then I was going to go get my car, and he said, well, okay, well, I'll see you at the conference. Wow. I felt myself like, this is dangerous.

I can see this is dangerous. Many times I've seen this, many times. I can get very much seduced into this level of consciousness.

That's the question you're talking about. How much is it related to Krishna? How much is it related to sense gratification? Your head cook, how much you're cooking the things you want to eat, and how much you're cooking the things you want to eat. So, this is coming right down into the modern world, and so many people were there.

Yeah, Shri Ram Dasani was there. It's the first time I saw him, saw him live. Patricia Locia, and that lady, she's our critic for the New York Times.

Ah, look at her name. Very nice person. So, everybody was there.

We were saying hello and everything else, and I was walking around dressed in my outfit and so on, and I learned so much. The University of California, Santa Barbara, walking across the campus was like walking across Rome during the height of the Roman Empire. There were slaves being brought from foreign provinces, three gigantic libraries, I mean art libraries, and beautiful young men and women going around on motorised skateboards.

I had to find my way. I had to park and everything else, and they had special parking designations for conference people. We had a little sign set up for the designated parking lot, Jungian Conference this way.

Follow them, you know, and it's like, you know, follow the yellow brick road. Finally, I got to the building. I came in, and I said hello, and it was like, you know, 25, 27-year-old young men and women registering people, the volunteers, you know, and so it's not a dead thing at all.

Many very, very active young people are participating in the whole community, and then it was like four days or something we got here, four, five, six, seven, but I couldn't even handle it. I basically took the morning programme through it, and and I think I did the afternoons or some sessions. I stayed for some sessions, but it was just too much, too intense, and again, I could see so many ways that we could relate to these people, and so many people I just, you know, broke into conversations with them.

There was a guy from China there who had 25 people with him developing Jungian stuff. We got into a whole conversation, you know, so anyway, that's kind of like saying how it's here in the modern world. It's a very active community.

It's a certain kind of community, and Radhika told me recently talking to some person, and he didn't even mention me or anything else. He said, you know, I think it's going to be another wave of Jungian consciousness, and it may be because of a little bit of contact with Bubble Pod, you know, and stuff like that, that now they're getting more ability to express their ideas and understand what's happening to them without having the organisation, you know, so kind of that's, you know, I think how it's developed. Stop sharing.

Okay, how it's developed in Jung's life down into the modern world, you know. Is that two of our topics? I think what you're talking about is confidence. That also addresses the third point which I was mentioning.

How is it relevant today? So it does seem that in today's world, there are a lot of thoughtful people who are trying to gain more and more tools for making sense of life, making sense of oneself, and Jung seems to be a very important resource in that endeavour. Devotees who approached me on this topic, and I mentioned before, I think, Bhakti Vignan Maharaj from Russia. Yeah, you mentioned that he said that Jung is critical for, is essential for reaching out today's audiences.

No, yeah, he said Jung is essential for our preaching and trying to make, but he tried to contact him after that, but he was just too busy with administration and stuff like that, you know. Okay. So I think it's something that's happening in our own society.

There's a lot of people who like this, but it's kind of like, it has to get to a certain point where they can get a hold of it, you know, and stuff, which I think is happening. More and more people are getting involved. So even within our own society, everybody who I give these books to, Nityagora Sundar, Ravi Prakash Singh, head of geriatric psychiatry, my boss here in Nashville, from Lucknow, he read Jung's biography and the same thing is that it's very interesting if you have this kind of perspective.

It allows us to look at Sankhya from a much more practical way, and also it allows us to look at our own psychological nature and character, you know. It's very therapeutic. Every devotee who I've come in contact with, all of Jung's literature has been very, very therapeutic for them in developing their Krishna consciousness and purifying themselves, you know.

So it's a wonderful resource for devotees. I mean, I have, just recently we had one incident in Chile where one devotee just had a psychotic breakdown, right, in the temple and stuff, you know. And so the one devotee who was involved with it was trying to calm him down and use good psychological perspective, some idea about, okay, this is a psychological, psychotic breakdown, and probably we're talking about it, he'll snap out of it.

But it didn't. So at some point, then the devotee had to, you know, a lady had to start screaming, and then the temple president came in and grabbed the devotee from the back and wrestled him to the floor. More devotees came and they called up the psychiatric police, and they took him off to an emergency psychiatric ward.

And then as a devotee, we could look at this and talk about it and give perspective, and people were so happy. Okay, what's happening? Yeah, we didn't, you know, and I understand that it's, you know, he was diagnosed bipolar. Mittagor Sundar Das, Ravi Singh said, if you're a poor black lady, you usually get diagnosed psychotic.

If you're a rich white lady, you get diagnosed bipolar. Okay. Yeah.

So anyway, he was diagnosed as bipolar, rich white kid, and was on medication. But stopped taking it. And then apparently, you know, these things happen.

So you have to go into, we have the tools to go into it deeper. And the psychologist in the first round, it came to exactly the same conclusion that I came to, about what had happened, and so on, when what should be done to the next step in dealing with therapeutically. So Jung, yes, in the modern world, Jung is, I think, a very, very good tool.

So we're building bridges to that Western people can appreciate him. So many Western people, he comes out of that culture, he has that language, he has that respect. But yeah, when they get our perspective and tools, and they can become 100 times more effective, how to apply it.

But if you have somebody with psychotic breakdown, yeah, grab him and hold him so he doesn't commit violence and just restrain him and call the police. They'll give him a little bit of a, what's it called? The name of the tranquillizers, and he'll be happy. Be peaceful for a while.

Yes. So this is remarkable, because I've also had podcasts on topics like say, emotional or psychological challenges on the spiritual, on the devotional path. But to some extent, sometimes we presume that just by practising bhakti, all mental problems or emotional problems or psychological problems will automatically go away.

But it's not that simple. So could you elaborate a little bit on this point? You said that even for devotees, it could be therapeutic. So are there, in what way that just it gives us a better understanding of how the mind works, and then we can learn how to manage it? Or in what way is it helpful even for devotees? Boy, these are big questions.

What is bhakti yoga? How does it go? Diksha Kali, Bhakti Kali, Atma Samarpan. Say Kali, Krishna Kali, Tari Atma Sam. Yes.

The time of Diksha, when the devotee does Atma Samarpan, when he surrenders to Krishna, this is second initiation. Yes. When you take second initiation, either informally or formally, come to that level, at that time, Krishna takes him as good as himself.

Now we're actually connected to Krishna in our life, in our body, and so on. So how many devotees have actually come to Atma Samarpan? How many officially have taken second initiation, but weren't ready for it? You probably directly chastise temple presidents for submitting people who weren't ready for second initiation. So I would say at that point, when you come to second initiation, you've got some idea of your varna ashram, which of course is very tied into your psychology in a big sense.

When you come to the third initiation, Baba's talking about, which is Goswami or Goswamini, formally or informally, you can achieve it before you're even initiated with Harinam Diksha. But when you come to that level of devotional service and appreciating Krishna as the Paramatma, then of course these things become clear. You can see your mind, you can see your intelligence, you can see so many things.

So what level is our society at? As a society, in terms of the one million members we have, are they mostly Kinista Adhikaris who are becoming initiated so that the Acharyas can fill up their pockets? Some people would say that. Or are they actually people who come to Harinam Diksha and actually coming to second initiation? I would say yes, I'm happy with my institution. I'm fighting against problems in my institution, but honestly speaking, I think it's the best institution in the world.

All glories to the GBC. It's a tough job. But most people are not in this level I don't think of.

They're not Goswamis. They may understand the mind and these things in the level of Brahman, which is a very broad sense that there is a mind and it's spiritual. But in terms of specifically what happens at the time of death, what happens during psychological things like that, they're not experienced for the most part.

So that's what I'm saying. If you follow the process of Bhakti Yoga, as described by the Goswami, accepting an Acharya and applying it, you will experience these things. Everything will follow automatically.

All the verses I'm quoting are cited in the Upadesha Amrita. This is something else, the Bhakti Vedanta Library. If you follow the citations and learn them in the Upadesha Amrita, you'll have a fantastic understanding of all of our philosophy and culture.

I can cite these, they're nice, they refresh them. So yeah, if you disengage in Bhakti, everything else will follow. But Prabhupada says, go to a medical man, go to the local authorities.

I've seen this citation, somebody was telling me what Prabhupada was talking about, taking their medication, going to a psychologist. So it's within the scope of Bhakti Yoga. We're neophyte, we don't realise this.

Prabhupada is recommending people, yes, take your medicine, do these things. Have you taken your medicine? Yeah, yeah. Because for example, bipolar, what do you call it? It used to be called manic depressive syndrome.

They'd be called bipolar. And so for some time, you have intense energy, and you can just accomplish many things, and your mind is working twice as fast as anybody else's. And you go into these slumps where you can't even get up to open the door to answer the doorbell, you know, manic depressive.

Harikesh Prabhu was diagnosed with slow manic depressive, you know. And these are realities that people find. So one medication for this that worked was lithium.

And nobody knew why it worked. But people taking some milligrammes of lithium every day, it would slow down these big modality switches like that and stuff. So I was talking with Nithyagorasundar, even just yesterday, I was asking him, you know, because he said many of these psychoactive drugs they're using, he says, if you look at the thing where it says mechanism, it says unknown.

Some of them they know, yeah. And they know, for example, I forgot what is that, it'll come back to me. It's present in hot milk with sugar.

It's one of the most common tranquillizers there are, tryptophan, tryptophan. It's one of the most common tranquillizers that are used. Like if our devotee ended up in the psychiatric ward in the emergency room, you may give him an injection or say, take this.

And then submissive enough, he says, okay, this stuff, thank you very much. We will help you calm down. Okay.

So tryptophan, it's very common. I think Nithyagorasundar told me and his uncle, who's a food chemist for the US government, both said, tryptophan is present in hot milk with sugar. So you take hot milk with sugar, what happens? Boil it three times, bring it to, and you sip it with the sugar in there.

It goes right to your head. You can just feel yourself just there. Okay.

Yeah. So it's there naturally, naturally it's there and stuff. And we're taking it, probably recommends it every night, take your tryptophan.

Yeah. So, but in some ways, the mechanism is known. It deals with these kinds of neurotransmitters and that kind of stuff.

Many of these things, the mechanism is unknown. It works. Psychiatry, it works.

We tried it on dogs and it didn't kill them. And we gave convicts in prison the option of getting six months off their prison term if they'll take it. They took it, it didn't kill them.

Then we tried it on four black ladies and it didn't kill them. Okay. Now we're going to give it to rich white ladies because they have lawyers.

And that's the history. I'm being a little cynical here, but we'll say that's what happens. It works.

So, so much of psychiatry we have now is pragmatic. It doesn't understand Ayurveda, things like that, but still probably also saying, yeah, in an extreme condition, there are some things which work. If you can find, I know somebody, I know people, it's my background.

I know people who are on medication, but they finally got to India. They got Ayurvedic, good Ayurvedic doctor, and they solved the problem. It was simple, certain food diet.

First off, they got rid of the problem. And then there was some intense care. And after that, so it doesn't reoccur, avoid these foods, live like this.

This is your problem. And they didn't ever had it again. And so Ayurveda also has great possibility for helping these things, but it takes a different approach in terms of the analysis stuff.

But if you haven't got that, yeah. I mean, take your medication. I know one case I mentioned, which is that the person killed, killed, killed his father.

He had the, his name was Ujwaladas. He had the impulse control, maybe so alive, impulse control of like about a four-year-old or a three-year-old. So when a three-year-old is frustrated, he just starts banging things and slapping his mother and crashing things.

You know, he just, he's just, the impulse control is just so undeveloped, you know. But if you're like six foot tall and, you know, 35 years old and 180 pounds, that much, that's the limit of your impulse control. He did at some point, he just killed his father, that and stuff.

So he was in, you know, in a psychiatric hospital, I think it was after he became a devotee and was outside, you know, back with his father. See, he was in a mental health facility for the criminally insane. It's called Vacaville in California and stuff, you know.

It's a whole story, you know, you can go on with this, but it's the same thing. Maybe I, he came out of it. What you're saying is that overall, that there could be just, just that there could be cases of somebody getting physically injured.

Similarly, somebody can get psychologically also injured or damaged or sick, and there could be various ways in which it could happen. In some cases, in some cases, medication may be required. And in some cases, just as we might take medication, sometimes we might also take insights from psychologists like Jung, and that can also help in healing.

Definitely. Pitta Karmadas, case studies. My very good friend, he was Cuban.

He was growing up right when Castro had the revolution and he had this, there's some serious traumas in his childhood with the revolution. His father, who was a very big prominent doctor, he was studying at the Sorbonne. He came back to Cuba and they had maybe like six ladies, you know, ladies of colour serving in their house, their hacienda in Cuba.

And, you know, so, so many things, but then they lost everything. They had to escape. His father showed him where he was burying the family jewels and then, you know, the backyard or something like that, and told him, you know, later on, you can't take these with us.

You'll never get them out, but I'm showing you where I'm burying all this stuff. He said he couldn't exactly remember, you know, I should go back to Cuba and dig it up. But he got out, I think with his sister and his mother and his father with just almost the clothes on their back.

And in some ways they were lucky they didn't get killed. They came to US. And of course, all of his medical certification wasn't accepted.

So what he ended up doing was being a technician in a mortuary before he'd been a highly respected, socially prominent physician and his father. And now he was there, you know, sort of squeezing dead bodies to get them to look nice and stuff. So it was a big challenge.

And then Krita Karma grew up in the whole thing. And eventually he became a devotee, my very good friend, actually. You're talking about Krita Karma Prabhu, the scientist? No, no.

Krita Karma. Krita Karma. Okay.

Krita Karma. Okay. And he was very, very confident in many ways.

And he came from this background and socially and everything else very good. And then he went to India when Prabhupada left his body. And he was there in Vrindavan when Bahavananda was there as the Zonal Guru.

And he was the temple, it was called the manager, general manager, because he could deal with people, he understood India, everything else, you know. And then the story of Bahavananda's homosexual problems and stuff came out. And he got blamed for it.

And part of it is, oh, you were inspiring this stuff and everything else, you have these tendencies and stuff, you know. So he became really upset by all this. And then he got expelled from India because he tested positive for HIV.

So he was locked up in a jail with another devotee for about three days. And fortunately, it was an Indian jail. So he got some kind of vegetarian food.

And they tossed him on an aeroplane back to the U.S. And he had maybe something like, you know, $50 with him or something. He told me his whole story. He wouldn't mind me telling it at all.

He left his body. So on the aeroplane back, he was so angry at Krishna that he ordered a whisky bottle, little whisky bottles they have on the aeroplane like that, just to show Krishna that he was finished. Krishna, I gave so much to you.

I'm finished with you. I don't believe in you anymore. And he said it was really disgusting and terrible, but he forced himself to drink this entire little bottle of whisky just to show Krishna.

Then he landed. I guess I got to kind of summarise here. Okay.

He landed in the U.S. My sister sent the money. She paid for the ticket and he had $50. So he landed in the U.S. in San Francisco.

He had jet lag. He went to the really poor part of town where he could get a hotel room for like $5 a night or something, you know, really drunken people and homeless people, everything else. He couldn't sleep.

So he got up in the morning. The sun was coming up. It was maybe six o'clock in the morning, five o'clock in the morning.

It was summertime. And he went down to the doorway to the hotel. Everybody else was still sleeping from their previous nights.

He said, okay, my new life starts right here. You know, I'm no longer going to be a devotee and I'm going to start my new life. So he went to the doorway and right across the street in the four-story hotel of the same terrible, terrible type, a person on the roof had climbed to the roof and he screamed at the top of his lungs, I can't take it anymore, and jumped off and fell three stories and smashed to his death right in front of Krita Karma.

And at that point, his background, his thing was, he said that Maya was just right there saying, welcome to the fun house, Carlos. This is the kind of girl I am. I'm not disguising anything to you.

It's your choice. You know, come on, I'm waiting, you know, to have fun with you. And if you want to come here, this is the kind of girl I am.

So very ontological, you know, level. And he said he sat there, stayed in that doorway for two hours. You know, the police came and, you know, they investigated and did somebody push him, everything else? No, nobody pushed him.

It was the whole thing. He said, you can see it was his choice. Am I going to go into this or not? Am I going to go into this or not? So finally he made the choice and he went into it.

Okay, I'm through with you, Krishna. So he went through a whole series of things, which I'll cut out, which are also very interesting. And finally, he came back to the point where he was starting to make a lot of money.

He was really making his material life. He's got all kinds of intoxication available, everything else. But he decided, oh my God, I have to go back and everything else, you know.

So he went back, you know, and I think it was maybe it was before this or after this, but along with this, he was having these fall downs, you know, and he would go back and visit his old friends and stuff and Sangha, Sanjaya, take him off and falling down into the intoxication. Or I think a couple of times he had like, not heavy, but fringe homosexual fall downs, a couple of them. And then we'd be like, he'd come back totally embarrassed, humiliated and maybe three years later, it would happen again.

So like that, it was happening over, you know, okay, chant Hare Krishna, eat rice, chapatis and dal. But it was happening a couple of times like that. So I told him, go see a psychologist.

There's in Berkeley, there's people, there's one lady, she was Mexican. And she was doing it, you know, it was a dollar an hour or something you had to pay. So he went there and she, you know, she knew devotees.

She incorporated his japa into the therapy. So, okay, when you're chanting, she was Catholic. Okay, what do you, and she knew you pray to God is the same God I pray to.

So this, this, until next week, I want you to chant your rounds. And I want to think, I want you to think about this when you're chanting. And so after some time, he developed some rapport with her, you know, that it's called, what's it called? It's called transference and stuff and connection.

And finally the trauma came out. And it was a pre-conscious trauma. That means if you want to think about it, you can think about it, but you don't want to think about it.

It wasn't a something which he had to go into hypnosis or anything else very deep to get to. He was a little boy in Cuba. His mother told him never come home from school along this route because it's dangerous.

Just to a little low class, you know, drunken area and that kind of stuff, you know? And so he may be like about in the second grade or first grade, second grade. So one day he disobeyed his mother and he came home through that route. This is a history.

And some kind of, you know, perverted type guy would probably because of his own background, kind of pulled him into the alley. And, you know, I won't describe the details, but he sexually molested him and used him for sexual gratification like that. Yeah.

So he came home in complete shock and his mother is like looking what's wrong, what's wrong. But he couldn't tell her because he disobeyed her. And she was afraid, oh my goodness.

So it's like a wound. It's a wound, physical wound. What do they do? They don't let it heal.

They put some packing in there because it'll form an abscess. It'll close over on the top, but inside there'll be pus and contamination. So he was able to do that.

He was able to compensate for it, close it over, but it was still there inside of him. So the technique was, and the psychologist finally had him said, okay, I have this stuff here. Pick out some garment, which reminds you of your mother, a hat or something, and put it on a chair in front of you.

Okay. These are powerful techniques. So he did it.

Okay. Now you described the scene to me to go through it again. You're coming back, you're coming home and there's your mother.

And now this time I want you to tell her what happened. So he's talking to the chair with a garment on it. So these things, these archetypes, the clothes and everything else, they take us there.

They bring us there. He expressed it. He told it and he's crying.

He's going back to like eight years old or whatever it is, six years old. These are very dangerous unless you know what you're doing. So, okay.

Calm down, Carlos. It's okay. I'm here with you.

I'm a lady. I'm one of the serving girls. Now I want you to go and take your hat off there and put it on your chair.

And I want you to sit in your mother's chair. And I want you to tell it to, I want you to be your mother and tell you what she would have said. Yeah.

And that was it. Obviously his mother wouldn't have rejected him. She wouldn't, she would have started crying and hugging him and everything else.

And they could have gone through it together. And that was it. He never had that problem again.

But as a devotee, everything that happened, we can see it. These are, what do we call? These are called vasanas, right? Vasanas. When will I become free from these? When will Nityananda free me from these vasanas? Some are good.

Some are bad. Some are left. Some are right.

They're dealing with the subtle body we have. And they're also dealing with the ambience that comes with that. There's a certain karma of material elements, of psychological elements in the Virat Rupa, which come with that.

And that's what Carl Jung was experiencing. So that those are the archetypes. The Varna Ashram, you look at that every time it describes the archetypes.

I was myself, I can see this. The Varna Ashram is a part of the Virat Rupa. It's material.

It's the highest material trap. Yeah. I will now tell you a poem by William Blake.

Okay. You know this poem, The Sunflower? You know this poem? No, not really. Everybody in American school has heard this poem.

Oh, sunflower, weariest of time, who counteth the days of the sun, aspiring after that sweet climate where the traveller's day is done, where the youth pined away with desire, and the virgin shrouded in snow, arise from their graves and inspire, where my sunflower is longing to go. The traveller's day is done. There's an archetype.

Everybody, you can take it so deep. The same time too, the youth pined away with desire, the young man, you know, full of youthful sexual agitation, taking away our life. There it is.

Yeah. I got it right. Yeah.

It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

Pale virgin. And we see this, the girls, they grow up and they have more, they're troubled with more lust. They can't just pine away with desire.

They got to enter into a refrigerator physically and keep their bodies from driving them nuts, you know, Romeo and Juliet. So these are, this is all a part of the Verat Rup. It's being expressed in the stories of the pregnancy of Diti in the evening.

You know, what is it? Harangina and his queen. You start looking at these things, you know, and you can put them into Shakespearean language. You can put them into William Blake's language.

And these were people who were experiencing these things. They were expressing them. But Jung is nice because Prabhupada gives a certification to him.

And, you know, I've gone that way in my psychological way. So that's what I say that Jung was experiencing the Verat Rup. He was going to level beyond that of just the Harangia Garba where it's actually alive and stuff.

And he was seeing how each of us individually have our own individual archetypes. And we also have the collective archetypes, which the Paramatma represents them. You know, there's a, yeah, I get carried away.

Can you explain what you mean by the word archetype? Because, you know, because we need different people, but you are using it like, say, Varnashram or Vasanas. In that context, what exactly do you mean by archetypes? I'll give another example. This is good.

We have one disciple, Ananga Manjari. She was an educational psychologist, you know, very nice person, very educated. And she was saying she grew up, she's probably about maybe like 60 years old now, maybe something, you know, maybe 20 years ago, even when she was describing this, when she grew up in Peru, it was very, very much, you know, like the very standardised society.

And at that time, all young girls did what their daddies said, you know, okay, you can go out, go out with your friends, but don't be alone with boys, you know, don't wear that, wear this, be back by this time, you know. So when she was growing up in Lima, it was very much, you know, rigid society in terms of what girls could do and stuff. Maybe like India in the 1960s.

Is that going to get us? Did you grow up in India? Yes, Maharaj. Yeah. You did, okay.

Did you have sisters? Cousins, not immediate sister, but yeah, I understand. It's a very protective environment. Somebody told me that you were never allowed to have a private conversation with a boy unless your father or a big brother was there, someone like that.

Yeah. So when they were married, it was the first time they ever talked to a man alone, personally. And you can in school, you can say, hand me the pencils or something.

But I remember that was, you know, so that was how it was in Lima. So she figured, well, I want to get free from this. I want to be independent.

She got married. Okay, now I'm independent. Then she got pregnant.

And then she had a little baby girl, Daniela, who's also a disciple. And I don't know if she knows this story or not. She'll hear it for the first time.

So anyway, so Ananga brought Daniela home and she had divorced Daniela and birthed Daniela and feed Daniela and, you know, and everything else. She said after a few days, she was looking at little Daniela, little girl baby sitting there in her crib. And she said this panic struck her, very deep panic.

I'm more trapped now than I was before, right? Before I was trapped and controlled by my father, but now I'm more trapped and even more trapped than I was before. Because she's trapped with her baby. She has to give her milk to the baby.

She has to, you know, live for the baby. And so this panic hit her, you know. And but at that point, then Daniela, her little daughter, which is on the same on the same Burmandala as her mother, you know, was picking up her mother's rejection, you know, and started to cry and, you know, and everything else.

And so Ananga Manjari said, but it wasn't like, you know, demanding. It was more like, you know, I understand that I'm a big burden for you, but what can I do? I'm completely helpless, you know, and I'm sorry, but that's the position I'm in. Please don't abandon me.

And so it was, you know, then her compassion was stimulated. And she said at that point, this archetype descended upon her. I am a mother.

Ah, don't mess with my baby. The whole thing came down on her. And it was it's that when she, you know, she didn't have to do anything.

It was there. Being a mother is an archetype, which is a part of the Virat Rukh. How you get it as your individual archetype, of course, depends upon your individual vasanas.

Another one is the king. We might say, I mean, have you ever been a temple president? Fortunately, no. Okay.

Yeah, exactly. Myself, I did the job a couple of times and the same thing too. I could see this whole consciousness came on to me where I could do it.

I knew things I didn't know before everything else. These are bhava, attitudes, perspectives, you know, consciousnesses. And on that basis, then we think, you know, I am a mother.

Okay. Yeah. And again, when I enter into the kitchen, I'm a cook.

That's not so much an intense, maybe, you know, archetype, the cook, collection of these things. That's what Jung was calling them. And so then we come to this point.

Oh, my goodness. For example, Sanyas probably says the highest material trap is varna-arsham dharma, the highest material trap. And we can only go beyond that when we make friendship with a devotee.

When we enter into a personal relationship with Prabhupada or through his disciples in the mode of goodness passing it, then we can realise, yeah, I'm not a clever, austere sanyasi. I'm not a good interactive podcast. Dude.

Yeah. I'm not a mother. You know? Yeah.

Yes. And devotees. One disciple, she was saying after being a nun, you know, working in a nursery school and having her own thing.

Some of the nursery school teachers would talk about staying with kids all day long and going home and having this mommy mind, the mommy mind. They start looking at their husbands like that. Yes, yes.

So Maharaj, I just want to understand this. So when you said that that archetype of the mother descended on her, is this, you're talking this more in poetic terms or is it ontological terms also? Because why I got this question is that in the fourth canto, I think in the Dhruva Maharaj pastime at the start, it described that various qualities are personified and then how deceit is born from whom and how some virtues are born from whom. So it's of course a complicated subject and we won't go into that.

But when you talk about archetypes, are you talking about something which are, that means when we assume certain roles, then in some way, some kind of, we could say either it can be an empowerment to do that role or it can be an entanglement in that role, whichever way we want to, whichever way we are approaching it. But is it like some kind of, like in a Christian tradition, they had the idea of the Holy Spirit that enters into the faithful person. So is it something like that you're talking about or because I'm just trying to… Okay.

When Lord Chaitanya, what is it, Sanatana Shiksha? Yeah. Yeah. Prabhupada translated that.

Those chapters, of course, explain everything. Instructions to Rupa Goswami, of course, explain everything, but it's just one chapter. So Sanatana Shiksha, it's all there.

And Lord Chaitanya explains all the, you know, Vaibhava Prakash, Taratmika Prakash, he explains all the expansions of Krishna. Then he explains the incarnations of Krishna. Then he explains the energies of Krishna.

Okay. And how the jiva can be involved with the energies of Krishna and so on. So what we're talking about now, I think is about, the question comes up, daivim prakritim ashritah, that is the external energy, material or spiritual? And that's where it really is, it comes to the point, is the Virat Rupa, does the Virat Rupa exist? Is it material? Is it an incarnation? Well, what I understood in the Bhagavatam is that it is Kalpita.

It's like a conceptualised tool for meditating on the Lord through the universe. Yeah, exactly. So that's what these things are.

It's the objective material incarnation of Krishna. Krishna never incarnates as an object, so it's not really true, but that's what it is. Shiva is the functional material body of Krishna.

You want to play with a kitty cat, you don't start smashing around with your hands, he's dirty, he'll scratch you. So you get a nice big thick piece of yarn and you can play with the kitty cat and the kitty cat loves it. So that's the Virat Rupa, that's Lord Shiva.

It's just like water into a sponge, but they could not exist except for the fact that there is a personality behind them. The whole thing within the Virat Rupa is being assumed at different times, the Yamaraj, you know, the Kali Yuga. Different personalities, Jivatmas, are given that thing to animate the body of the collective subconscious, the collective element of fire.

Maybe there's so many fire gods and they then are given the authority to animate those 49 kinds of fire as their bodies. And then we take up a part of that and so they are present just exactly like I mentioned my gardener is the guy who turns out is the guy who's in charge of the evening shift for the water purification for the city. So I'm like, wow, this is the guy, my gardener.

And so now I have a whole difference. Every time I take the water now, I think of him, you know, and I trust the water a lot more now that I met him. And also I take his information, the way he tells me in terms of his character, getting to know him and talk to him and become friends with him and give him a pia prasadam and his wife and stuff.

So the water is becoming, it's like the personification of my tap water now. That's amazing. Okay.

Yeah. And the gross, five gross elements, those are like really separated. But they're, how are they connected everything else? And that's why I think it's presented several times in the Bhagavatam, yeah.

And of course, these are the personifications are not spiritual. Those are parts of the Bharata Rupa, different people are empowering and different people become the Yamaraj, become the Indra, become the Brahma. So this is a remarkable correlation.

So then, do we consider the archetypes to be like a finite list that is given in the Vedic scriptures or it is? How many bodies are there? Countless, 8.4 million species, but countless bodies? Species. Yeah. Species.

That's it. There's a limited number. I'm sorry, you cannot be a horsey-ducky.

I want to be a horsey-ducky. Okay. So you can say that archetypes are associated with the bodily forms then? Yeah.

And also again with Varna Ashram, these are, Varna Ashram applies to human form and also Devatas, I guess too. So then when you earlier gave the example of a sannyasi or a mother, that means you're saying that if somebody takes up that role, then that archetype sort of infuses them with the energy or the responsibility to do that role? Prabhupada said that initiation, the fire sacrifice and everything else Prabhupada said, is a formality. You've already got a relationship with Diksha Guru.

You've already experienced that. We surrender to Krishna on a personal basis at some point in the mode of goodness. I surrender to you.

Please take me back. So the actual formality with the fire, the Guru, the vows, the devotees, the devotees, he said it is a formality, but not a meaningless formality. So these formalities, when they're done properly, that's what you were saying, when they're done properly, they have an effect.

So there's the effect that maybe we're going to, you're going to wear a thread after this point, right? Something like that. But the effect is that there is a change in your individual, in your buddhi, in your bhavas, in that part of your body, your intelligence body. And a portion of that becomes your manas body.

And a portion of that becomes your space body. A portion of that becomes your touch body. A portion of that becomes your fire body.

So at all these levels, something can happen. But especially at the level of buddhi, what's happening, bhava, there's a change by the arrangement of Krishna and the higher authorities. Okay, we're going to plug in the plug, you know, and then the city sits all there, electricity is there, the generator is there, the superintendent of the generators is there.

But now then somebody says, the adults can say, okay, now the sewing machine's plugged in. So it's no longer just a piece of dead junk, you know, now it's a sewing machine, right? Yeah. So if the ritual is properly, if you're properly married, and the consciousness and everything else, and Krishna accepts the sacrifice, which is there, the marriage sacrifice, and depending on what kind of marriage it is, then there's a certain change.

Okay, when do, I don't know, do modern Indian girls hold hands with guys, teenagers? Well, it depends. I mean, India has also changed a lot in the last 20 years, in the last 10 years also. 10 years, it's fast.

So I would say 20-30 years ago, no. In the last 10 years, we also even have live-in relationships which are common. Yeah, because Indian girls know, people, what we know, at the time of the marriage, when you hold hands for the first time, astrologically, what happens? When you're in the marriage ceremony, especially when you take your holy father's hand, what happens psychologically? Do you know? Astrologically? No.

Before the marriage, you read the husband's left hand. After the marriage, I think you read the right hand, yeah. At the time of marriage, there is a subtle exchange of half of the body.

I think the husband gives the wife half of the body, yeah. And in English, we say, introduce your wife as my better half, yeah. In Spanish, you say, this is the other half of the orange, yeah.

So it's exactly the half of the body. So there is, you know, so, and even girls, you know, this is a big deal when you're growing up, you're an adolescent, you're 12 years old, you're going on dates with the girls and boys and stuff, you know, taking the girl's hand and letting her, letting you take her hand, it's a big deal. It's shocking.

Oh my God, we held hands last night. Oh wow, she let you hold her hand, yeah, for a few minutes. Yeah, so all these things, these external things have a definite significance.

Okay, yeah. So you are saying that in one sense, we could say these external things are the ways in which we connect with the archetypes? Yeah, with the Virat Roop. Yeah.

Oh, there is a certain thing about, you know, again, this is, you see, there's so many things in terms of the world, which have, and Krishna says, I'm the taste of water, I'm the light of the earth, yeah. And some of these things are integrated with other things in a certain logical way, and they represent marriage, you know, something else represents the coronation of the king, you know, yeah, yeah. Something else, what else represents the renunciation of family life, you know, the vanaprasth stage.

In America, there's a definite vanaprasth stage, which is going on, you know. And, you know, yeah, there's people, they renounce the family, for example, turning over the master bedroom to your son and your new daughter-in-law, right? The private bath and having the whole thing redone, new bed, new mattresses, repainted, new flooring, the whole bathroom retiled. And then you meet your new daughter-in-law, and you say, hey, you know, I've been the father, mother of this, head of this house, you know, I've been the lady of this house for 25 years, and now you've got my son, and he's in your care, and my husband and I are going to take over his room, we're kicking him out.

And if we come in and visit, we'll stay there, we'll keep some things there, and we'll come and see you. Oh, thank you for coming, God, and we need your help, yeah. But now you're the lady of this house.

You can see how this is your bedroom. You can see what the effect is. It's just, wow, it's just, at that point, you start crying, and your mother-in-law embraces you and smells your head, and boy, but you feel, oh my God.

Yeah, this is a big, I got a big job now. Please mother-in-law, please do come. This becomes like a big subject.

But again, I'm just trying to understand that. So you earlier talked about karma and jnana. So and then beyond both of them is bhakti.

So we could say that the analysing the archetypes, in one sense, is like the jnana aspect. And embodying those roles is actually was originally meant to be done through the karma aspect. But if they become disconnected, if it has no understanding of the purpose, then things become more complicated, or things become lost, you could say.

You've got it. This is a piranha. This is the yaha experience.

Exactly. And so that's why you have a problem. It says karma yoga action in Krishna consciousness.

But it means that we're karma mishra bhakti, jnana mishra bhakti, jnana mishra bhakti, amishra bhakti. We're primarily primarily executing it on the level of what we call karma. But we know the goal.

You know, where's the goal? Brahmandi, brahmaticam, bhagyavanjiv, guru krishna, prasadhi, paye, bhakti lagya. Got an experience. You protect it.

And we know, okay, I've got to stop smoking. I've got to get up in the morning. I've got to channel these beads.

Our major focus of connection on the yoga ladder is doing it. But we have the perspective. And maybe we're really in the jnana, but somehow by Lord Chaitanya's mercy, that experience is being maintained.

But then we start to develop the jnana. Well, wait a second. And then, of course, the karma is much more secure.

We start doing it properly. We're better at doing it more properly. That's why I'm supposed to be channelling on the beads.

Now I understand it. I'll do it better. So then we move from basically now we're focussing on the jnana level, like right now.

And then jnana is where it comes to poetry, introspection, insight, our artistry, music. And this is where you see Jungians, again, they're on that level. They're on a good historical level, very strict historians, everything else.

They got money. They bought the original Jungian art, which is in Zurich. It took them like three years to negotiate it.

And it cost them like about $50,000 to the $12,000, $25,000 for the museum in Santa Barbara University to bring Jungian's original art, the big stuff, and put it up there. And they figured they got their money's worth with security and everything else, like anything. It was there for three months, and they had so many big exhibitions about it.

And then the family came along, and they were also introducing it. But that's it, yeah. If you've got the goal in mind, because Vajrayanti is mercy, then it's karma bhakti.

And Maitreya was a jnana, it was a jnana-mishra bhakta. And he had to approach it from the intellectual perspective. And once his intellect was adjusted, he saw Uddhava and Krishna, and then he could appreciate, wow, maybe at that point he became a jnana, he became a bhakti, you know.

And then when he was able to preach it to Vidura, oh, yeah. So maybe, then two hours, or maybe… Yeah, we went over a lot of directions, but I'll just, maybe one last point I'd like to clarify. So what you're saying is that, to some extent, if people are at the karma level, then it is only through karma-mishra bhakti that they will come to karma-amishra bhakti.

And similarly, if they're at a jnana level, then we, they will need to have some jnana-mishra bhakti options open for them. And only then they will come to, come to jnana-amishra bhakti, we can say. So in one sense, when Prabhupada started the Bhaktivedanta Institute, or say the kind of intellectual research you are doing, so that will open doors for certain people.

And say, for example, people who are already very religious or very, they have the culture of going to temples and doing, we could say rituals, not in a negative sense, but doing religious activities. So for them, the jnana-mishra approach might seem unnecessary. But for them, to the extent that karma-mishra approach is open, so in one sense, it's actually, in a sense, reaching out in these ways, analysing influential contemporary thinkers, it's actually an expression of Lord Chaitanya's compassion to open those doors of, doors to bhakti through people who may not be able to walk through any other doors.

Lord Chaitanya's movement is sublime. What does the word sublime mean? What does it mean in physics? Did you study physics? Did you study chemistry at all? Sublime means above the normal. What is, what is a sublime state transformation in chemistry? Is that a term? I don't remember the sublime state.

If something goes directly from a frozen state to a gaseous state, not passing through the liquid state is called a sublime reaction, sublime state change. Sublima, I think it means below the limit. Lima means sense perception.

So it's below the level of, an example of this is dry ice. Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide. But you see, you never see liquid carbon dioxide and it goes directly to the gas, directly.

You try and put a lid on a thing of dry ice and heat it up, it'll blow it up. Very, very, very, very, very narrow temperature range where you can keep it in a liquid stage, you know, 212 degrees Fahrenheit, 100 degrees centigrade is where, you know, it changes from liquid to, what do you call it, to 32 degrees, you know, for freezing zero and 100 degrees for water. But carbon dioxide, it goes, this is maybe like two degree range or something.

If you keep it at that, you'll get a liquid. Other than that, anything higher just pops right up. So we take people who are eating hamburgers and drinking beer and have two girlfriends, you know, and we're turning them into, you know, vastly appreciating Baptists in the temple within two weeks.

Even Lord Brahma is amazed at that. So I would say, yeah, somebody who's on the level, if they connect up to karma, they can go very rapidly right through that. But what will happen is their karma will be very quickly infused with jnana and very quickly infused with dhyana.

It'll become, they'll understand why they're doing the ritual and then they'll do it with meditation, with poetry, with, you know, bhooti, like that and stuff. But they'll still go through the karma and the jnana and the dhyana stages, but it'll be the fast route, you know. The Bhagavatam describes that.

If you want to take the slow route, second candle, yeah, you stop off on this planet, you stop off on that planet, and maybe you have to stop off on jnana for a little bit, but you go, okay, I got that, I got that. The thing is the Chaharikrishna, Chaharikrishna, I experienced that with A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I just have to spend a lot of time on the jnana level, you know. But it's just something, you know, you have to get, you're publishing, you have to get some kind of logic and stuff figured out, a little bit, just enough, you know, and then enough, at that point where you're actually coming, where you stimulate, you know, jnana. So for us it's smaranam, shravanam, kitanam, kitanam, vishnanam, smaranam.

You have to go through this, you know, avabhastha, smaranam, the stages like that. But again, it can be, once you've got that bija, you know, you've seen Lord Chaitanya, narottam, das, takur, sar, lord, you know, dancing, or whatever it was. Yeah, he figured it out, he entered into meditation, and he was with Lord Chaitanya.

Yeah, yeah. Science and the natives. Okay.

So I want to thank you for getting a chance to do Hamlet and Arjuna, and today, our title we've come to now is the Science, Psyche and Spirituality, the Encounter of Carl Jung with the Bhaktivedanta of Classical India. Because Bhaktivedanta was born in 1874, Carl Jung was born in 1875. So you can, from both sides, you can look at either culture, and by building the bridge between those two cultures, say they grew up, one grew up exactly in India, came right up to Prabhupada, another one grew up exactly in the West, you know.

So it forms a tremendous ability to bridge our two cultures. Yeah, yeah. Jung, and then he got Jung into the modern world.

So we're going to change the world here. We're going to get rid of all these archetypes. We're going to purify Putin of his archetypes.

We're going to purify Donald Trump of his archetypes. The Pope, they'll all be chanting and dancing ecstasy at the feet of the Virgin Mary. She's an incarnation of Radha, or Durga.

I'm just amazed at how many cross-cultural correlations you're able to just spring off the top of your head so quickly. Yeah. When you're 72 years old, you'll be a lot more, a lot more, what is the word, crazier than I am.

I hope I can be half, like the last time I mentioned, I hope I can be half as alert as you are. Should I try to summarise Maharaj? It was very diverse. I'm not sure whether I can, but at least I'll make an attempt.

So today we discussed primarily, you could say that Carl Jung as a psychological research resource for understanding and practising bhakti, you could say, for practising and sharing bhakti. Broadly, that was the theme. And then we started talking about a historical context.

So you said that Carl Jung can, because we are all born and brought up in the legacy of the industrialised world, so the way Carl Jung analysed the human mind and human society, that can help us to understand our own inheritance or what has formed us at the psychic level. And you talked about the reading list of books which can, through which even Indian intellectuals are also studying Carl Jung and how, broadly speaking, when you talk about Jung, the whole idea was that he came at a time when there was a lot of disaffection with institutionalised religion, even if the institution has conception of God. But at the same time, there was enquiry into the nature of the world, especially the nature of the mind.

And then we discussed some parallels between, say, how Freud and Jung worked together. And eventually, it is not that Jung became antagonistic to Freud, rather Freud felt that he was limited by his obsession with sex. And then he went on his own way.

We also discussed some quotes about how he was appreciative about the value of religion. And he did say that there is some higher reality, even if he didn't specifically talk about a personal God, he talked about some higher reality. So then we discussed some parallels between Jung and Freud and similarly Aristotle and Plato.

And then you mentioned this whole, that is a new dimension for me, that alchemy and mechanical science, mechanical physics. Mechanical? They were called the mechanical philosophers. Mechanical philosophers, yeah.

So alchemy is not just about transforming iron into gold, it is about basically refining and purifying. So not just external elements, but also the inner elements. And the idea that everything has meaning, which was lost.

So you said that how Thomas Aquinas was the person who tried to analyse everything and his philosophy was, his way of analysing was standardised by the church. But was it Bonaventure who said that he wanted to, he said the other thinker, Bonaventura, good fortune. Bonaventura, yeah.

St. Bonaventura, they took their PhDs at the same moment from the University of Paris. Oh, okay. Same moment.

Bonaventura was synthetic, Aristotle was analytic. Yeah, so you said that, so Carl Jung was both analytic but also synthetic in the sense that he was not just studying people who were sick but also he was in India, went to Africa, deep into the African culture and then interacted with thinkers like William James and others in America also. So broadly, so he was more looking at life as it was lived, normally, not just at sick people but also at healthy people and trying to understand how things work.

And then you talked about the correlation with respect to the Vedas, that was the second point is that, multiple ways. One is that his conception of the ultimate reality was something like above the Virat Rupa, around the Hiranyagarbha level. And his consciousness in terms of self-understanding was at the level of ether or space, like we go through Annamaya, Pranamaya, those levels of consciousness.

So going deeper into, toward deeper levels of self-understanding. And then as far as how is it relevant today, you talked about your experience in going to the conference in California where there are a lot of young people and a lot of thoughtful people, it was there. So he is a very vibrant influence even in today's world.

And then you talked about, especially I think, it was elaborate but very relevant section was how as devotees can also be helped. Reading him can be therapeutically valuable for devotees. So you talked about how several influential devotees and a wide range of devotees have had problems.

And sometimes some problems require psychiatric intervention, some medication. But also you talked about that exercise where there was a trauma in childhood and this taking different roles and understanding how that trauma can be dealt with. So that helps prevent, sometimes otherwise we overreact to certain issues because they have triggered some festering wounds from our past.

And then lastly, I think one of the most insightful parts of it was the idea of archetypes. So the archetypes are you could say they're not just like psychological constructs, but rather they are, you could say almost like universal truths, I don't know, like a part of the Virat Rupa. They're, you could say, conceptualisations or embodiments of universal roles and realities that when we try to, when we function in the world, we all embody those to different degrees.

And understanding them can help us perform our particular roles properly. And you talked about how Varanashram at one level is meant to elevate, but Varanashram can also become the highest trap. So and then talk about Karma Mishra and Gyan Mishra.

So ultimately, we want to go towards Shuddha Bhakti. But for some people, the doors will open if they are from the Karma background. And Karma Mishra Bhakti is what opens the doors for them.

And for people who are from the Gyan background, then Gyan Mishra Bhakti, which involves a lot of intellection and analysis and self-reflection, that is the way the doors to Bhakti can open for them. And then I think the concluding point you mentioned was that when we are ourselves practising or sharing Bhakti, the more we understand ourselves, like George Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's Sanatana Shiksha, he's telling that he's ultimately giving us ecstasy, dancing in ecstasy like Lord Chaitanya did. But to go toward that, Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's mercy can be manifested in many different ways.

And that mercy can touch us and we can go touch others also through us. So it's great. So you talk about Trump and Putin, all of them being also archetype that can be purified.

That's a word of expansive vision. So remarkable. Thank you very much for sharing this.

I would say it is a rollercoaster intellectual journey. Intellectual rollercoaster. And now we can get off and let's not get back on again today.

Thank you very much. And also thank the devotees who came and are listening. Ishwari Rane, Srinivas, Subhupi, Sundararika.

I thank them also for being in our audience there. Oh, thank you very much for joining. I think Srinivas Acharya has shared something about the human metrics, personality.

Is this something that you have prepared, Maharaj? No, no, no. I didn't notice what he gave like that. Oh, okay.

I'll have a look at that. Thank you very much, Maharaj. Thank you all very much.