Daniel Paulus One inner world Read the essays

Different languages,

Two traditions describe the same inner events. Below is one paragraph written in both. Move the dial and watch it change hands.

Move the dial

One paragraph, two vocabularies

Nothing in the meaning changes. Everything in the reach does.

Depth psychology Vedic tradition

Drag

Every word that moved is doing roughly the same work. Not one of them is doing exactly the same work. That gap is not a nuisance to be smoothed over. It is the whole subject.

One inner world, two maps

Three of them nearly meet. Four have nothing to meet. That is the honest result, and it tells you more than a tidy diagram would.

Depth psychology described the inner landscape most people never visit. The Vedic tradition teaches how to live in it. Daniel Paulus

A necessary distinction

Translation is not the same as merging

It would be easy, and it would sell, to say that these traditions are two descriptions of one truth. I do not think that is true, and I think saying it does damage.

The moment several traditions are folded into one teaching, the differences vanish, and the differences are where the useful information is. A tradition earns its authority by having chosen something and given other things up. Flatten that and you have not honoured four paths. You have built a fifth, and it is thinner than any of them.

So I translate. I show the same event in more than one language, including the places where the languages contradict each other, and I leave the choice with the person in front of me.

What I do

  • Put a term into plain language without thinning it out
  • Read one person across body, psyche, myth and culture at once
  • Show the same question in several traditions, differences included
  • Say which part is documented, which is a traditional model, and which is my own reading

What I do not do

  • Merge traditions into a single teaching
  • Offer techniques as shortcuts
  • Ask anyone to believe something before they can test it
  • Take the position of a teacher who is not to be questioned

Where the material comes from

Two apprenticeships, running at the same time

Twenty years in senior management in international companies, and the same twenty years in personal psychological and contemplative work. Not one after the other. At the same time, and for a long while without either side knowing about the other.

The psychological side runs through Jung, von Franz, Hollis and Johnson, and through my own analysis. The Eastern side runs through study with David Frawley and Robert Svoboda, and through initiation in the Śrī Vidyā line, where a technique and a mantra can only be received from someone who received them.

I state the lineage once, plainly, because it says where the material comes from. It is not a claim to authority and it is not for sale.

Where this continues

Which of the two languages have you been missing?

I write an essay every two weeks. One idea, followed to the end, through a primary source and a particular case.

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