It is quite possible that India is the real world, and that the white man lives in a madhouse of abstractions.
To be born, to die, to be sick, greedy, dirty, childish, ridiculously vain, miserable, hungry, vicious; to be manifestly stuck in illiterate unconsciousness, to be suspended in a narrow universe of good and
evil gods and to be protected by charms and helpful mantras, that is perhaps the real life, life as it was meant to be, the life of the earth.
Life in India has not yet withdrawn into the capsule of the head. It is still the whole body that lives.
No wonder the European feels dreamlike: the complete life of India is something of which he merely dreams. When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the earth?
It needs all the acrobatics of the higher yoga to make you unconscious of the earth. One would need some sort of yoga if one tried seriously to live in India.
But I did not see one European in India who really lived there.
They were all living in Europe, that is, in a sort of bottle filled with European air.
One would surely go under without the insulating glass wall; one would be drowned in all the things which we Europeans have conquered in our imagination. Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 518, Para 988
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