SCIENCE AND SPIRIT; OUTER AND INNNER: AND MISUNDERSTANDING BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

Richard Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated and Explained by Richard Wilhem, with a Foreword and  Commentary by C. G. Jung; and part of the Chinese meditation text The Book of Consciousness and Life, with a Foreword by Salome Wilhelm; translated form the German by Cary F. Baynes (New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book; A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931, 1962) (From Cary F. Baynes, "Translator's Preface": "The relation of the West to Eastern thought is a highly paradoxical and confusing one. One the one side, as Jug points out, the East creeps in among us by the back door of the unconscious and strongly influences us in perverted forms, and on the other we repel it with violent prejudice as concerned with a fine-spun metaphysics that is poisonous to the scientific mind/" "If anyone is in doubt as thaw far the East influence us in secret ways, let him but briefly investigate the fields covered to-day by what is called 'occult thought'. Millions of people are included in these movements and Eastern ideas dominate all of them. Since there is nowhere any sign of a psychological understanding of the phenomena on which they are based, they undergo a complete twisting and are a real menace in our world." "A partial realization of what is going on in this direction, together with the Westerner's naive ignorance and mistrust of the world of inner experience, build up the prejudice against the reality of eastern wisdom. When the wisdom of the Chinese is laid before a Westerner, he is likely to ask with a special lift of the brows why such profound wisdom did not save China from its present horrors. Of course, he does not stop to think that the Chinese asks with an equal skepticism why the much-boasted scientific knowledge of the West, not to mention its equally boasted Christian ethics, did not save it from a World War. But as a matter of fact, present conditions in China do not invalidate Chinese wisdom, nor did the Great War prove the futility of science. In both cases we are dealing with the negative sides of principles under which East and West live, and it had not yet been given, either to individuals or to nations, to manage the vices of their virtues. Mastery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophes. Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the demonic forces of the latter and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture. The solution cannot be found either in deriding Eastern spirituality as impotent or by mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality, and that science must turn to the spirit for the meaning of life." Id. at vii-viii.).