Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Then the tower is imagined with its four posts. Here the quaternity comes in (it plays a still more significant role in the Shri-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra) and the process re aches its culmination with the highest being, Buddha, sitting on his flowered throne on the tower.
When this realization succeeds, the Yogin who is meditating is Buddha, the spirit which spreads over the whole world, the universal Buddha.
This figure is identical with ” mind ” in English and “Bewusstsein” (consciousness) in German, Buddha-consciousness, whatever that is.
This Buddha is a parallel to the medieval ” inner Christ. “In those days identity with Christ was attained through meditation.
Stigmatization is an expression of this medieval idea.
The Shrt-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra is exceedingly rich in material, it is impossible to give you a resume of it, so I shall only speak of the Tantrik sequence of symbols which forms its skeleton.
It expresses the successive stages of the whole exercise and extends from avidya, not-knowing, the normal condition, to the highest enlightenment.
The first condition is the Void; in the text it is called Shunyata, which means Void in the dogmatic Buddhist sense.
This is not the Void, however, which is reached through the Buddha-mind, but avidya, the Void of the world in which people live who do not know that the world exists – and then it does not.
The conception that the world only exists be cause we see it, that it is a phenomenon of human consciousness, is the very foundation of the eastern attitude.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy was deeply influenced by the gleams of eastern philosophy which reached Europe with the first collection of the Upanishads.
We, in the West, are all in the deep darkness of avidya and badly in need of redemption.
We need to achieve psychic understanding, not just to be, but to know that roe are .
This understanding begins with the “separatio”, for the contents of the Void must be discriminated in order that we may know they exist, the Void, therefore, is divided into the four elements .
This quartering is the very foundation of enlightenment, translated into modern terms it is the analysis of the four functions.
This “separatio” is a system of orientation, like the cross threads in a telescope.
The four elements are identical with the four points of the horizon end the four seasons, it is a perfect system of ordering.
The circle can be divided into sixteen or more parts, but the quartering is the simplest, and is the archetypal concept of the human psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Seminar, 28 April 1939, Pages 204-205