Carl Jung Commentary to the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation.
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation
“Psychological Commentary o the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation.”
- The Difference Between Eastern and Western Thinking
759 Dr. Evans-Wentz has entrusted me with the task of commenting on a text which contains an important exposition of Eastern “psychology.”
The very fact that I have to use quotation marks shows the dubious applicability of this term.
It is perhaps not superfluous to mention that the East has produced nothing equivalent to what we call psychology, but rather philosophy or metaphysics.
Critical philosophy, the mother of modern psychology, is as foreign to the East as to medieval Europe.
Thus the word “mind,” as used in the East, has the connotation of something metaphysical.
Our Western conception of mind has lost this connotation since the Middle Ages, and the word has now come to signify a “psychic function.”
Despite the fact that we neither know nor pretend to know what “psyche” is, we can deal with the phenomenon of “mind.”
We do not assume that the mind is a metaphysical entity or that there is any connection between an individual mind and a hypothetical Universal Mind.
Our psychology is, therefore, a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications.
The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe.
Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon of the cosmos, and his “anima” is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, or spark of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul.
760 Psychology accordingly treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure that derive ultimately from certain unconscious dispositions.
It does not consider them to be absolutely valid or even capable of establishing a metaphysical truth.
We have no intellectual means of ascertaining whether this attitude is right or wrong.
We only know that there is no evidence for, and no possibility of proving, the validity of a metaphysical postulate such as “Universal Mind.”
If the mind asserts the existence of a Universal Mind, we hold that it is merely making an assertion.
We do not assume that by such an assertion the existence of a Universal Mind has been established.
There is no argument against this reasoning;, but no evidence, either, that our conclusion is ultimately right.
In other words, it is just as possible that our mind is nothing but a perceptible manifestation of a Universal Mind.
Yet we do not know, and we cannot even see, how it would be possible to recognize whether this is so or not.
Psychology therefore holds that the mind cannot establish or assert anything beyond itself.
761 If, then, we accept the restrictions imposed upon the capacity of our mind, we demonstrate our common sense.
I admit it is something of a sacrifice, inasmuch as we bid farewell to that miraculous world in which mind-created things and beings move and live.
This is the world of the primitive, where even inanimate objects are endowed with a living, healing, magic power, through which they participate in us and we in them.
Sooner or later we had to understand that their potency was really ours, and that their significance was our projection.
The theory of knowledge is only the last step out of humanity’s childhood, out of a world where mind-created figures populated a metaphysical heaven and hell.
Despite this inevitable epistemological criticism, however, we have held fast to the religious belief that the organ of faith enables man to know God.
The West thus developed a new disease: the conflict between science and religion.
The critical philosophy of science became as it were negatively metaphysical —in other words, materialistic—on the basis of an error in judgment; matter was assumed to be a tangible and recognizable
reality.
Yet this is a thoroughly metaphysical concept hypostatized by uncritical minds.
Matter is an hypothesis.
When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God.
Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-critical Weltanschauung.
In contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children.
They cling to the world of childhood.
A famous modern theologian confesses in his autobiography that Jesus has been his good friend “from childhood on.”
Jesus is the perfect example of a man who preached something different from the religion of his forefathers.
But the imitatio Christi does not appear to include the mental and spiritual sacrifice which he had to undergo at the beginning of his career and without which he would never have become a saviour.
763 The conflict between science and religion is in reality a misunderstanding of both.
Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin.
It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing.
Whether you call the principle of existence “God,” “matter,” “energy,” or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have simply changed a symbol.
The materialist is a metaphysician malgre lui.
Faith, on the other hand, tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds.
It is unwilling to give up the primitive, childlike relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to o on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided
over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents.
Faith may include a sacrificium intellectus (provided there is an intellect to sacrifice), but certainly not a sacrifice of feeling.
In this way the faithful remain children instead of becoming as children, and they do not gain their life because they have not lost it.
Furthermore, faith collides with science and thus gets its deserts, for it refuses to share in the spiritual adventure of our age.
764 Any honest thinker has to admit the insecurity of all metaphysical positions, and in particular of all creeds.
He has also to admit the unwarrantable nature of all metaphysical assertions and face the fact that there is no evidence whatever for the ability of the human mind to pull itself up by its own bootstrings,
that is, to establish anything transcendental.
765 Materialism is a metaphysical reaction against the sudden realization that cognition is a mental faculty and, if carried beyond the human plane, a projection.
The reaction was “metaphysical” in so far as the man of average philosophical education failed to see through the implied hypostasis, not realizing that “matter” was just another name for the supreme principle.
As against this, the attitude of faith shows how reluctant people were to accept philosophical criticism.
It also demonstrates how great is the fear of letting go one’s hold on the securities of childhood and of dropping into a strange, unknown world ruled by forces unconcerned with man.
Nothing really changes in either case; man and his surroundings remain the same.
He has only to realize that he is shut up inside his mind and cannot step beyond it, even in insanity; and that the appearance of his world or of his gods very much depends upon his own mental
condition.
766 In the first place, the structure of the mind is responsible for anything we may assert about metaphysical matters, as I have already pointed out.
We have also begun to understand that the intellect is not an ens per se, or an independent mental faculty, but a psychic function dependent upon the conditions of the psyche as a whole.
A philosophical statement is the product of a certain personality living at a certain time in a certain place, and not the outcome of a purely logical and impersonal procedure.
To that extent it is chiefly subjective; whether it has an objective validity or not depends on whether there are few or many persons who argue in the same way.
The isolation of man within his mind as a result of epistemological criticism has naturally led to psychological criticism.
This kind of criticism is not popular with the philosophers, since they like to consider the philosophic intellect as the perfect and unconditioned instrument of philosophy.
Yet this intellect of theirs is a function dependent upon an individual psyche and determined on all sides by subjective conditions, quite apart from environmental influences.
Indeed, we have already become so accustomed to this point of view that “mind” has lost its universal character altogether.
It has become a more or less individualized affair, with no trace of its former cosmic aspect as the anima rationalis.
Mind is understood nowadays as a subjective, even an arbitrary, thing.
Now that the formerly hypostatized “universal ideas” have turned out to be mental principles, it is dawning upon us to what an extent our whole experience of so-called reality is psychic; as a matter of fact, everything thought, felt, or perceived is a psychic image, and the world itself exists only so far as we are able to produce an image of it.
We are so deeply impressed with the truth of our imprisonment in, and limitation by, the psyche that we are ready to admit the existence in it even of things we do not know: we call them “the unconscious.”
767 The seemingly universal and metaphysical scope of the mind has thus been narrowed down to the small circle of individual consciousness, profoundly aware of its almost limitless subjectivity
and of its infantile-archaic tendency to heedless projection and illusion.
Many scientifically-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism.
By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath, we have developed an enthusiasm for—mountains of facts, far beyond any single individual’s power to survey.
We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole, but nobody is quite sure, because no human brain can possibly comprehend the gigantic sum total of this mass-produced knowledge.
The facts bury us, but whoever dares to speculate must pay for it with a bad conscience—and rightly so, for he will instantly be tripped up by the facts.
768 Western psychology knows the mind as the mental functioning of a psyche.
It is the “mentality” of an individual.
An impersonal Universal Mind is still to be met with in the sphere of philosophy, where it seems to be a relic of the original human “soul.”
This picture of our Western outlook may seem a little drastic, but I do not think it is far from the truth.
At all events, something of the kind presents itself as soon as we are confronted with the Eastern mentality.
In the East, mind is a cosmic factor, the very essence of existence; while in the West we have just begun to understand that it is the essential condition of cognition, and hence of the cognitive existence of the world.
There is no conflict between religion and science in the East, because no science is there based upon the passion for facts, and no religion upon mere faith; there is religious cognition and cognitive religion.
With us, man is incommensurably small and the grace of God is everything; but in the East, man is God and he redeems himself.
The gods of Tibetan Buddhism belong to the sphere of illusory separateness and mind-created projections, and yet they exist; but so far as we are concerned an illusion remains an illusion, and thus is nothing at all.
It is a paradox, yet nevertheless true, that with us a thought has no proper reality; we treat it as if it were a nothingness.
Even though the thought be true in itself, we hold that it exists only by virtue of certain facts which it is said to formulate.
We can produce a most devastating fact like the atom bomb with the help of this ever-changing phantasmagoria of virtually nonexistent thoughts, but it seems wholly absurd to us that one could ever establish the reality of thought itself.
769 ‘Psychic reality” is a controversial concept, like “psyche” or “mind.” By the latter terms some understand consciousness and its contents, others allow the existence of “dark” or “subconscious”
representations.
Some include instincts in the psychic realm, others exclude them.
The vast majority consider the psyche to be a result of biochemical processes in the brain cells.
A few conjecture that it is the psyche that makes the cortical cells function.
Some identify “life” with psyche.
But only an insignificant minority regards the psychic phenomenon as a category of existence per se and draws the necessary conclusions.
It is indeed paradoxical that the category of existence, the indispensable sine qua non of all existence, namely the psyche, should be treated as if it were only semi-existent. Psychic existence is
the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image.
Only psychic existence is immediately verifiable.
To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually non-existent.
This is a fact which, with few exceptions—as for instance in Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the West has not yet fully realized.
But Schopenhauer was influenced by Buddhism and by the Upanishads.
770 Even a superficial acquaintance with Eastern thought is sufficient to show that a fundamental difference divides East and West.
The East bases itself upon psychic reality, that is, upon the psyche as the main and unique condition of existence.
It seems as if this Eastern recognition were a psychological or temperamental fact rather than a result of philosophical reasoning.
It is a typically introverted point of view, contrasted with the equally typical extraverted point of view of the West.
Introversion and extraversion are known to be temperamental or even constitutional attitudes which are never intentionally adopted in normal circumstances.
In exceptional cases they may be produced at will, but only under very special conditions.
Introversion is, if one may so express it, the “style” of the East, an habitual and collective attitude, just as extraversion is the “style” of the West.
Introversion is felt here as something abnormal, morbid, or otherwise objectionable.
Freud identifies it with an autoerotic, “narcissistic” attitude of mind.
He shares his negative position with the National Socialist philosophy of modern Germany, which accuses introversion of being an offence against community feeling.
In the East, however, our cherished extraversion is depreciated as illusory desirousness, as existence in the samsdra, the very essence of the rdddna-chim which culminates in the sum of the world’s sufferings.
Anyone with practical knowledge of the mutual depreciation of values between introvert and extravert will understand the emotional conflict between the Eastern and the Western standpoint.
For those who know something of the history of European philosophy the bitter wrangling about “universals” which began with Plato will provide an instructive example.
I do not wish to go into all the ramifications of this conflict between introversion and extraversion, but I must mention the religious aspects of the problem.
The Christian West considers man to be wholly dependent upon the grace of God, or at least upon the Church as the exclusive and divinely sanctioned earthly instrument of man’s redemption.
The East, however, insists that man is the sole cause of his higher development, for it believes in “self-liberation.”
771 The religious point of view always expresses and formulates the essential psychological attitude and its specific prejudices, even in the case of people who have forgotten, or who have never heard of, their own religion.
In spite of everything, the West is thoroughly Christian as far as its psychology is concerned.
Tertullian’s aninia naturaliler Christiana holds true throughout the West—not, as he thought, in the religious sense, but in a psychological one.
Grace comes from elsewhere; at all events from outside.
Every other point of view is sheer heresy.
Hence it is quite understandable why the human psyche is suffering from undervaluation.
Anyone who dares to establish a connection between the psyche and the idea of God is immediately accused of “psychologism” or suspected of morbid “mysticism.”
The East, on the other hand, compassionately tolerates those “lower” spiritual stages where man, in his blind ignorance of karma, still bothers about sin and tortures his imagination with a belief in absolute gods, who, if he only looked deeper, are nothing but the veil of illusion woven by his own unenlightened mind.
The psyche is therefore all-important; it is the all-pervading Breath, the Buddha-essence; it is the Buddha-Mind, the One, the Dharrjiakdya.
All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it.
This is the basic psychological prejudice that permeates Eastern man in every fibre of his being, seeping into all his thoughts, feelings, and deeds, no matter what creed he professes.
772 In the same way Western man is Christian, no matter to what denomination his Christianity belongs.
For him man is small inside, he is next to nothing; moreover, as Kierkegaard says, “before God man is always wrong.”
By fear, repentance, promises, submission, self-abasement, good deeds, and praise he propitiates the great power, which is not himself but totaliter aliter, the Wholly Other, altogether perfect and “outside,” the only reality.
If you shift the formula a bit and substitute for God some other power, for instance the world or money, you get a complete picture of a Western man—assiduous, fearful, devout, self-abasing, enterprising, greedy, and violent in his pursuit of the goods of this world: possessions, health, knowledge, technical mastery, public welfare, political power, conquest, and so on.
What are the great popular movements of our time?
Attempts to grab the money or property of others and to protect our own.
The mind is chiefly employed in devising suitable *’isms” to hide the real motives or to get more loot.
I refrain from describing what would happen to Eastern man should he forget his ideal of Buddhahood, for I do not want to give such an unfair advantage to my Western prejudices.
But I cannot help raising the question of whether it is possible, or indeed advisable, for either to imitate the other’s standpoint.
The difference between them is so vast that one can see no reasonable possibility of this, much less its advisability.
You cannot mix fire and water.
The Eastern attitude stultifies the Western, and vice versa.
You cannot be a good Christian and redeem yourself, nor can you be a Buddha and worship God.
It is much better to accept the conflict, for it admits only of an irrational solution, if any.
773 By an inevitable decree of fate the West is becoming acquainted with the peculiar facts of Eastern spirituality.
It is useless either to belittle these facts, or to build false and treacherous bridges over yawning gaps.
Instead of learning the spiritual techniques of the East by heart and imitating them in a thoroughly Christian way—imitatio Christ—with a correspondingly forced attitude, it would be far more to the point to find out whether there exists in the unconscious an introverted tendency similar to that which has become the guiding spiritual principle of the East.
We should then be in a position to build on our own ground with our own methods.
If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that “everything good is outside,” whence it has to be fetched and pumped into
our barren souls. ”
It seems to me that we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough without having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace.
But we cannot embark upon this ambitious enterprise until we have learned how to deal with our spiritual pride and blasphemous self-assertiveness.
The Eastern attitude violates the specifically Christian values, and it is no good blinking this fact.
If our new attitude is to be genuine, i.e., grounded in our own history, it must be acquired with full consciousness of the Christian values and of the conflict between them and the introverted attitude of the East.
We must get at the Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious.
We shall then discover how great is our fear of the unconscious and how formidable are our resistances. Because of these resistances we doubt the very thing that seems so obvious to the East, namely, the self-liberating power of the introverted mind.
774 This aspect of the mind is practically unknown to the West, though it forms the most important component of the unconscious.
Many people flatly deny the existence of the unconscious, or else they say that it consists merely of instincts, or of repressed or forgotten contents that were once part of the conscious mind.
It is safe to assume that what the East calls “mind” has more to do with our “unconscious” than with mind as we understand it, which is more or less identical with consciousness.
To us, consciousness is inconceivable without an ego; it is equated with the relation of contents to an ego.
If there is no ego there is nobody to be conscious of anything.
The ego is therefore indispensable to the conscious process.
The Eastern mind, however, has no difficulty in conceiving of a consciousness without an ego.
Consciousness is deemed capable of transcending its ego condition; indeed, in its “higher” forms, the ego disappears altogether.
Such an ego-less mental condition can only be unconscious to us, for the simple reason that there would be nobody to witness it.
I do not doubt the existence of mental states transcending consciousness.
But they lose their consciousness to exactly the same degree that they transcend consciousness.
I cannot imagine a conscious mental state that does not relate to a subject, that is, to an ego.
The ego may be depotentiated—divested, for instance, of its awareness of the body—but so long as there is awareness of something, there must be somebody who is aware.
The unconscious, however, is a mental condition of which no ego is aware. It is only by indirect means that we eventually become conscious of the existence of an unconscious.
We can observe the manifestation of unconscious fragments of the personality, detached from the patient’s consciousness, in insanity.
But there is no evidence that the unconscious contents are related to an unconscious centre analogous to the ego; in fact there are good reasons why such a centre is not even probable.
775 The fact that the East can dispose so easily of the ego seems to point to a mind that is not to be identified with our “mind.”
Certainly the ego does not play the same role in Eastern thought as it does with us. It seems as if the Eastern mind were less egocentric, as if its contents were more loosely connected with the subject, and as if greater stress were laid on mental states which include a depotentated ego.
It also seems as if hatha yoga were chiefly useful as a means for extinguishing the ego by fettering its unruly impulses.
There is no doubt that the higher forms of yoga, in so far as they strive to reach samadhi, seek a mental condition in which the ego is practically dissolved.
Consciousness in our sense of the word is rated a definitely inferior condition, the state of avidya (ignorance), whereas what we call the “dark background of consciousness” is understood to be a
“higher” consciousness.
Thus our concept of the “collective unconscious” would be the European equivalent of buddhi, the enlightened mind.
776 In view of all this, the Eastern form of “sublimation” amounts to a withdrawal of the centre of psychic gravity from ego-consciousness, which holds a middle position between the body and the ideational processes of the psyche.
The lower, semi-physiological strata of the psyche are subdued by askesis, i.e., exercises, and kept under control.
They are not exactly denied or suppressed by a supreme effort of the will, as is customary in Western sublimation.
Rather, the lower psychic strata are adapted and shaped through the patient practice of hatha yoga until they no longer interfere with the development of “higher” consciousness.
This peculiar process seems to be aided by the fact that the ego and its desires are checked by the greater importance which the East habitually attaches to the “subjective factor.”
By this I mean the “dark background” of consciousness, the unconscious.
The introverted attitude is characterized in general by an emphasis on the a priori data of apperception.
As is well known, the act of apperception consists of two phases: first the perception of the object, second the assimilation of the perception to a preexisting pattern or concept by means of which the object is “comprehended.”
The psyche is not a nonentity devoid of all quality; it is a definite system made up of definite conditions and it reacts in a specific way.
Every new representation, be it a perception or a spontaneous thought, arouses associations which derive from the storehouse of memory.
These leap immediately into consciousness, producing the complex picture of an “impression,” though this is already a sort of interpretation.
The unconscious disposition upon which the quality of the impression depends is what I call the “subjective factor.”
It deserves the qualification “subjective” because objectivity is hardly ever conferred by a first impression.
Usually a rather laborious process of verification, comparison, and analysis is needed to modify and adapt the immediate reactions of the subjective factor.
777 The prominence of the subjective factor does not imply a personal subjectivism, despite the readiness of the extraverted attitude to dismiss the subjective factor as “nothing but” subjective.
The psyche and its structure are real enough.
They even transform material objects into psychic images, as we have said.
They do not perceive waves, but sound; not wave-lengths, but colours. Existence is as we see and understand it.
There are innumerable things that can be seen, felt, and understood in a great variety of ways.
Quite apart from merely personal prejudices, the psyche assimilates external facts in its own way, which is based ultimately upon the laws or patterns of apperception.
These laws do not change, although different ages or different parts of the world call them by different names.
On a primitive level people are afraid of witches; on the modern level we are apprehensively aware of microbes.
There everybody believes in ghosts, here everybody believes in vitamins.
Once upon a time men were possessed by devils, now they are not less obsessed by ideas, and so on.
The subjective factor is made up, in the last resort, of the eternal patterns of psychic functioning.
Anyone who relies upon the subjective factor is therefore basing himself on the reality of psychic law.
So he can hardly be said to be wrong.
If by this means he succeeds in extending his consciousness downwards, to touch the basic laws of psychic life, he is in possession of that truth which the psyche will naturally evolve if not fatally interfered with by the non-psychic, i.e., the external, world.
At any rate, his truth could be weighed against the sum of all knowledge acquired through the investigation of externals.
We in the West believe that a truth is satisfactory only if it can be verified by external facts.
We believe in the most exact observation and exploration of nature; our truth must coincide with the behaviour of the external world, otherwise it is merely “subjective.”
In the same way that the East turns its gaze from the dance of prakriti (physis) and from the multitudinous illusory forms of mayaJ the West shuns the unconscious and its futile fantasies.
Despite its introverted attitude, however, the East knows very well how to deal with the external world.
And despite its extraversions the West, too, has a way of dealing with the psyche and its demands; it has an institution called the Church, which gives expression to the unknown psyche of man through its rites and dogmas.
Nor are natural science and modern techniques by any means the invention of the West.
Their Eastern equivalents are somewhat old-fashioned, or even primitive.
But what we have to show in the way of spiritual insight and psychological technique must seem, when compared with yoga, just as backward as Eastern astrology and medicine when compared with Western science.
I do not deny the efficacy of the Christian Church; but, if you compare the Exercitia of Ignatius Loyola with yoga, you will take my meaning.
There is a difference, and a big one.
To jump straight from that level into Eastern yoga is no more advisable than the sudden transformation of Asian peoples into half-baked Europeans.
I have serious doubts as to the blessings of Western civilization, and I have similar misgivings as to the adoption of Eastern spirituality by the West.
Yet the two contradictory worlds have met.
The East is in full transformation; it is thoroughly and fatally disturbed.
Even the most efficient methods of European warfare have been successfully imitated.
The trouble with us seems to be far more psychological.
Our blight is ideologies—they are the long-expected Antichrist!
National Socialism comes as near to being a religious movement as any movement since a.d. 622.
Communism claims to be paradise come to earth again.
We are far better protected against failing crops, inundations, epidemics, and invasions from the Turk than we are against our own deplorable spiritual inferiority, which seems to have little resistance to psychic epidemics.
779 In its religious attitude, too, the West is extraverted.
Nowadays it is gratuitously offensive to say that Christianity implies hostility, or even indifference, to the world and the flesh.
On the contrary, the good Christian is a jovial citizen, an enterprising business man, an excellent soldier, the very best in every profession there is.
Worldly goods are often interpreted as special rewards for Christian behaviour, and in the Lord’s Prayer the adjective kinovaLos, super-substantialis referring to the bread, has long since been omitted, for the real bread obviously makes so very much more sense!
It is only logical that extraversion, when carried to such lengths, cannot credit man with a psyche which contains anything not imported into it from outside, either by human teaching or divine grace.
From this point of view it is downright blasphemy to assert that man has it in him to accomplish his own redemption.
Nothing in our religion encourages the idea of the self-liberating power of the mind.
Yet a very modern form of psychology—”analytical” or “complex” psychology—envisages the possibility of there being certain processes in the unconscious which, by virtue of their symbolism, compensate the defects and anfractuosities of the conscious attitude.
When these unconscious compensations are made conscious through the analytical technique, they produce such a change in the conscious attitude that we are entitled to speak of a new level of consciousness.
The method cannot, however, produce the actual process of unconscious compensation; for that we depend upon the unconscious psyche or the “grace of God”—names make no difference. But the unconscious process itself hardly ever reaches consciousness without technical aid.
When brought to the surface, it reveals contents that offer a Striking contrast to the general run of conscious thinking and feeling.
If that were not so, they would not have a compensatory effect.
The first effect, however, is usually a conflict, because the conscious attitude resists the intrusion of apparently incompatible and extraneous tendencies, thoughts, feelings, etc.
Schizophrenia yields the most startling examples of such intrusions of utterly foreign and unacceptable contents.
In schizophrenia it is, of course, a question of pathological distortions and exaggerations, but anybody with the slightest knowledge of the normal material will easily recognize the sameness of the
underlying patterns.
It is, as a matter of fact, the same imagery that one finds in mythology and other archaic thought-forms.
780 Under normal conditions, every conflict stimulates the mind to activity for the purpose of creating a satisfactory solution.
Usually—i.e., in the West—the conscious standpoint arbitrarily decides against the unconscious, since anything coming from inside suffers from the prejudice of being regarded as inferior or somehow wrong.
But in the cases with which we are here concerned it is tacitly agreed that the apparently incompatible contents shall not be suppressed again, and that the conflict shall be accepted and suffered.
At first no solution appears possible, and this fact, too, has to be borne with patience.
The suspension thus created “constellates” the unconscious—in other words, the conscious suspense produces a new compensatory reaction in the unconscious.
This reaction (usually manifested in dreams) is brought to conscious realization in its turn.
The conscious mind is thus confronted with a new aspect of the psyche, which arouses a different problem or modifies an old one in an unexpected way.
The procedure is continued until the original conflict is satisfactorily resolved.
The whole process is called the “transcendent function.” It is a process and a method at the same time.
The production of unconscious compensations is a spontaneous process; the conscious realization is a method.
The function is called “transcendent” because it facilitates the transition from one psychic condition to another by means of the mutual confrontation of opposites.
781 This is a very sketchy description of the transcendent function, and for details I must refer the reader to the relevant literature.il
But I felt it necessary to call attention to these psychological observations and methods because they indicate the way by which we may find access to the sort of “mind” referred to in our text.
This is the image-creating mind, the matrix of all those patterns that give apperception its peculiar character.
These patterns are inherent in the unconscious “mind”; they are its structural elements, and they alone can explain why certain mythological motifs are more or less ubiquitous, even where migration as a means of transmission is exceedingly improbable.
Dreams, fantasies, and psychoses produce images to all appearances identical with mythological motifs of which the individuals concerned had absolutely no knowledge, not even indirect knowledge acquired through popular figures of speech or through the symbolic language of the Bible.
The psychopathology of schizophrenia, as well as the psychology of the unconscious, demonstrate the production of archaic material beyond a doubt.
Whatever the structure of the unconscious may be, one thing is certain: it contains an indefinite number of motifs or patterns of an archaic character, in principle identical with the root ideas of mythology and similar thought-forms.
782 Because the unconscious is the matrix mind, the quality of creativeness attaches to it.
It is the birthplace of thought-forms such as our text considers the Universal Mind to be.
Since we cannot attribute any particular form to the unconscious, the Eastern assertion that the Universal Mind is without form, the darupaloka, yet is the source of all forms, seems to be psychologically
justified.
In so far as the forms or patterns of the unconscious belong to no time in particular, being seemingly eternal, they convey a peculiar feeling of timelessness when consciously realized.
We find similar statements in primitive psychology: for instance, the Australian word aljira ^^ means ‘dream’ as well as ‘ghostland’ and the ‘time’ in which the ancestors lived and still live.
It is, as they say, the ‘time when there was no time.’
This looks like an obvious concretization and projection of the unconscious with all its characteristic qualities—its dream manifestations, its ancestral world of thought-forms, and its timelessness.
783 An introverted attitude, therefore, which withdraws its emphasis from the external world (the world of consciousness) and localizes it in the subjective factor (the background of consciousness)
necessarily calls forth the characteristic manifestations of the unconscious, namely, archaic thought-forms imbued with “ancestral” or “historic” feeling, and, beyond them, the sense of indefiniteness, timelessness, oneness.
The extraordinary feeling of oneness is a common experience in all forms of “mysticism” and probably derives from the general contamination of contents, which increases as consciousness dims.
The almost limitless contamination of images in dreams, and particularly in the products of insanity, testifies to their unconscious origin.
In contrast to the clear distinction and differentiation of forms in consciousness, unconscious contents are incredibly vague and for this reason capable of any amount of contamination.
If we tried to conceive of a state in which nothing is distinct, we should certainly feel the whole as one. Hence it is not unlikely that the peculiar experience of oneness derives from the subliminal
awareness of all-contamination in the unconscious.
784 By means of the transcendent function we not only gain access to the “One Mind” but also come to understand why the East believes in the possibility of self-liberation.
If, through introspection and the conscious realization of unconscious compensations, it is possible to transform one’s mental condition and thus arrive at a solution of painful conflicts, one would seem
entitled to speak of “self-liberation.”
But, as I have already hinted, there is a hitch in this proud claim to self-liberation, for a man cannot produce these unconscious compensations at will.
He has to rely upon the possibility that they can be produced.
Nor can he alter the peculiar character of the compensation: est ut est ant 71071 est— it is as it is or it isn’t at all.’
It is a curious thing that Eastern philosophy seems to be almost unaware of this highly important fact.
And it is precisely this fact that provides the psychological justification for the Western point of view.
It seems as if the Western mind had a most penetrating intuition of man’s fateful dependence upon some dark power which must co-operate if all is to be well. Indeed, whenever and wherever the unconscious fails to co-operate, man is instantly at a loss, even in his most ordinary activities.
There may be a failure of memory, of coordinated action, or of interest and concentration; and such failure may well be the cause of serious annoyance, or of a fatal accident, a professional disaster,
or a moral collapse.
Formerly, men called the gods unfavourable; now we prefer to call it a neurosis, and we seek the cause in lack of vitamins, in endocrine disturbances, overwork, or sex.
The co-operation of the unconscious, which is something we never think of and always take for granted, is, when it suddenly fails, a very serious matter indeed,
785 In comparison with other races—the Chinese for instance —the white man’s mental equilibrium, or, to put it bluntly, his brain, seems to be his tender spot.
We naturally try to get as far away from our weaknesses as possible, a fact which may explain the sort of extraversion that is always seeking security by dominating its surroundings.
Extraversion goes hand in hand with mistrust of the inner man, if indeed there is any consciousness of him at all.
Moreover, we all tend to undervalue the things we are afraid of.
There must be some such reason for our absolute conviction that nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu, which is the motto of Western extraversion.
But, as we have emphasized, this extraversion is psychologically justified by the vital fact that unconscious compensation lies beyond man’s control. I know that yoga prides itself on being able to control even the unconscious processes, so that nothing can happen in the psyche as a whole that is not ruled by a supreme consciousness.
I have not the slightest doubt that such a condition is more or less possible.
But it is possible only at the price of becoming identical with the unconscious.
Such an identity is the Eastern equivalent of our Western fetish of “complete objectivity,” the machine-like subservience to one goal, to one idea or cause, at the cost of losing every trace of inner life.
From the Eastern point of view this complete objectivity is appalling, for it amounts to complete identity with the samsara; to the West, on the other hand, samadhi is nothing but a meaningless dream-state.
In the East, the inner man has always had such a firm hold on the outer man that the world had no chance of tearing him away from his inner roots; in the West, the outer man gained the ascendancy to such an extent that he was alienated from his innermost being.
The One Mind, Oneness, indefiniteness, and eternity remained the prerogative of the One God. Man became small, futile, and essentially in the wrong.
786 I think it is becoming clear from my argument that the two standpoints, however contradictory, each have their psychological justification.
Both are one-sided in that they fail to see and take account of those factors which do not fit in with their typical attitude.
The one underrates the world of consciousness, the other the world of the One Mind.
The result is that, in their extremism, both lose one half of the universe; their life is shut off from total reality, and is apt to become artificial and inhuman.
In the West, there is the mania for “objectivity,” the asceticism of the scientist or of the stockbroker, who throw away the beauty and universality of life for the sake of the ideal, or not so ideal, goal.
In the East, there is the wisdom, peace, detachment, and inertia of a psyche that has returned to its dim origins, having left behind all the sorrow and joy of existence as it is and, presumably, ought to be.
No wonder that one-sidedness produces very similar forms of monasticism in both cases, guaranteeing to the hermit, the holy man, the monk or the scientist unswerving singleness of purpose.
I have nothing against one-sidedness as such. Man, the great experiment of nature, or his own great experiment, is evidently entitled to all such undertakings—if he can endure them.
Without one-sidedness the spirit of man could not unfold in all its diversity.
But I do not think there is any harm in trying to understand both sides.
787 The extraverted tendency of the West and the introverted tendency of the East have one important purpose in common: both make desperate efforts to conquer the mere naturalness of life.
It is the assertion of mind over matter, the opus contra naturam, a symptom of the youthfulness of man, still delighting in the use of the most powerful weapon ever devised by nature: the conscious mind.
The afternoon of humanity, in a distant future, may yet evolve a different ideal. In time, even conquest will cease to be the dream. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Pages 475-493
