To Ronald W. Weddell 6 December 1960
Your experience with the Eastern magic method is not uncommon.
People in the West are peculiarly severed from their unconscious, so that the latter cannot participate any more in conscious life and causes a state of dissociation.
The East on the other hand is not dissociated in the same way and to the same extent as the West.
The connection is maintained and the East has developed a number of methods to restore this connection when it has been severed.
Subud is such a method.
Thus you are filled with a new power of life when you can respond to such a method.
It is something like hypnotism which can also heal certain dissociations through the intervention of the hypnotist.
In such a case healing comes to you like a gift.
A door is opened and you do not know how, and something comes in and you do not know what.
The danger is naturally that someday something walks in through the door which is less welcome.
Our Western endeavour therefore is to learn about the thing we are dealing with. We try to know what that open door means and what is waiting behind it.
Thus we learn how to deal with and how to control the powers we invite.
This is a much needed safeguard against the unknown contents and powers of the unconscious which might overwhelm consciousness.
These Eastern methods don’t enrich consciousness and they don’t increase our real knowledge and our self- criticism, and that is the thing we need, namely a consciousness with a wider horizon and a better understanding.
That at least is what I am trying to do for the patient: to make him independent and conscious of the influ- ences of the unconscious.
Just as we, in the West, are separated too much from the unconscious, the East is apt to be too much identi- cal with it.
Therefore most of the Eastern methods are invented to fetter and suppress the unconscious powers, which are too strong for them.
One certainly has a better chance to control things when you know them than when you simply open a door to them.
What you have read in The Secret of the Golden Flower gives you a glimpse of such methods.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 613-614
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