Still it all sounds as if East and West were infinitely far away from each other. Perhaps the principle of aesthetics could make it possible for us to understand how deeply Kirpal Singh was filled with the sight of his teacher Sawan Singh were we to imagine an art-maniac in view of a masterpiece or a landscape-enthusiast in ecstasy because of certain surroundings?
But also esthetics, even Kant’s term of transcendental esthetics, naturally does not suffice here.
And, even Freud’s assumption that esthetics is to be regarded as a fortunate attempt in satisfying a desire does not fully explain the ecstatic happiness of a yoga follower upon seeing his master. “When it comes to art”, says H. Segal, then the real artist becomes adventurous and applies creativity in producing the work of art thus solving “the depressive conflict, which also includes the previous oedipal constellation”.1
As early shame-guilt complexes of the deepest kind are solved, such as are not even tangible with classic psychoanalysis, the artist achieves bliss as well as success. But we aren’t all artists. And insofar, Surat Shabd Yoga also represents a method that is apt to solve such deeply rooted complexes – because an ecstatic instance is achieved in a ‘firsthand experience’ from the beginning on, and which, provided ample exercise, can be maintained.
However, such exercises, including a variety of social, nutrition and sexual asceticism, represent an expensive ticket for a successful healing process. The imaginary signifier, which works so much better in Yoga, is damaged there through a much more inexact, symbolically rigid or through an inexact verbal signifier.
Even if Kirpal Singh constantly criticized that people sleep too much (because dreaming only is a kind of „… going to the movies …“), for us in the West the ‘astro-mental’ levels are also nothing else than a „going to the Indian fairytales“. Subsequently, might that not be all that advantageous, either?
1 Segal, H., Traum, Phantasie und Kunst, Klett Cotta (1996) page 120
Anmerkung der Redaktion: Dieser Artikel stammt aus einer Beitragsreihe zum Thema: Analytische Psychocatharsis.
