What Happened to the Unconscious?

The first half of the 20^th century brought into the light of Western consciousness the great discovery of the unconscious.  The great initial pioneer Sigmund Freud, followed by the even greater explorer and surveyor Carl G. Jung, showed the world the actual workings of the unconscious in our conscious lives, from the most individually mundane effects, such as our tics and foibles, to the most collective inundations of our collective consciousness in war and mass phenomenon such as fascism, communism, and commercialism.

Then after the most compelling and complete demonstration of the overcoming of collective rationality by the irrationality of the collective unconscious from WWI to the culmination that was World War II, Western collective consciousness reacted by closing down and shutting away the very acknowledgement of the unconscious.  Western psychology turned to rationalism in hope of explaining the irrational, and the unconscious was driven out of psychology, with “psychology” being redefined without the unconscious element as “behaviorism,” “cognitive studies,” ”neuro-psychology” “evolutionary psychology,” etc.  This is an utter and complete failure, because the totality of the psyche includes both the conscious and the unconscious, and any attempt to rationally explain the irrational aspects of the unconscious by ignoring the unconscious is set up for failure.    

The rationalist delusion of the previous 70 years has forced the psychology of the unconscious underground.  And as Jung noted over and over again, when an important part of our psychic reality is submerged, it always and inevitably comes back to overwhelm us in ways we find problematic.  The denied elements of our personal unconscious, the complexes, reappear as disturbances in our body or mental functions, as somatic symptoms or psychic disturbances such as hauntings or obsessions.  The denied elements of our collective unconscious, the archetypes, reappear in stark polarized contrasts as “demons,” “daimons,” or “divinities,” as social contagions resulting in genocide, occupation, and apartheid, as social mass movements for weal or woe seeming to appear overnight, etc.

No matter how much people may try, there is no exclusively rational explanation for the election of Donald Trump as president, because it is an expression of the repressed unconscious factors that created a “faith” mentality in the people who voted for him. The rationality of consciousness (organized as it is around the ego complex) can never deal with faith, because the best that rationality can offer can never touch the unconscious basis of faith.  Rationally can only call “faith” a form of nonsense, i.e. irrational, and then believe it has taken care of the matter.

In analyzing the problem of the rationalist critique of faith without reference to the unconscious, Jung wrote in “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity”:  “Naturally, it never occurs to these critics that their way of approach is incommensurable with their object. They think they have to do with rational facts, whereas it entirely escapes then that it is and always has been primarily a question of irrational psychic phenomena.” (p. 153 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.)  It is the denial of a basic recognition of the collective psychic phenomena at work in the Trump election that befuddles all attempts by the political and social pundits to explain it.

We have seen over and over again interviews with “Trump followers” who deny the basis facts of Trump and instead project onto Trump a faithful expectation that he will eventually fulfill their desires for a better government.  This is an act of faith of the deepest feelings. The factual historical personality is obscured behind the projections of the unconscious looking for an appropriate screen upon which to projects its symbols.  When faith is at work for a “higher cause,” it is invariably the archetype of the totality of the person, i.e., the individual’s wholeness, attempting to find its way into consciousness.   The psychic phenomena of a person who feels cut off, separated, and estranged from both themselves and their society stimulates their collective unconscious to respond by insinuating the archetype of their self-realization of their fundamental totality into their personal consciousness.  This is experienced directly and irrationally, and even the person’s own rationalizations used to explain it come after the fact.

The recognition of the unconscious opens a door to the confusing and terrifying emotions, imaginings, and thoughts of our inner life that most people are more than happy to close immediately. The anti-Trump voter as well as the Trump voter are equally eager to pretend there are no psychic phenomena at play here, and it is all just a matter of rational analysis and discussion to determine the facts. But the abrupt and widespread appearance of the social meme of “fake news” in conjunction with the “Trump-era” shows the archetypal influence behind Trump’s meteoric rise in politics. The label “fake news” is telling us to our faces that the collective social forces we are dealing with are irrational psychic forces working on the level of symbols not facts. Itr is not a question of which media outlet is or is not dealing in “fake news,” because at bottom, they all are in their own ways.  The New York Times has its particular way of presenting “fake news” just like FOX News has its own way of presenting “fake news.” The common denominator of all fake news is its failure to address its contextual prejudices supporting its perspective, and this is due to the failure to acknowledge the unconscious psychic phenomena at work in the presentation of the news.   

The completeness which the archetype of our own wholeness seeks is not something that can tamed or determined by our conscious ego.  Our conscious ego seeks our wholeness from within the bifurcated environment of consciousness, and therefore can only conceive of wholeness and totality as “perfection.”  But real wholeness and totality must necessarily include our nocturnal side, the very aspects of ourselves that we have shunned or exiled.   Thus when we consciously open ourselves to a search for our wholeness, we are faced with the problem of suffering and “evil” in the world and in ourselves as intimately expressed by our own shadow side.  People who long for such wholeness, but have no personal guide who has experienced the journey, are confused by the necessity to confront the world of suffering directly and personally as the gateway to inner unity. They think they can find the perfection of wholeness without facing suffering.  In his extensive monograph “Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self,” Jung notes:

“To strive after teleiosis in the sense of perfection is not only legitimate but is inborn in man as a peculiarity which provides civilization with one of its strongest roots. This striving is so powerful, even, that it can turn into a passion that draws everything into its service. Natural as it is to seek perfection in one way or another, the archetype fulfills its own completeness, and this is a τελείωσις (teleiosis) of quite another kind. Where the archetype predominates, completeness is forced upon us against all our conscious strivings, in accord with the archaic nature of the archetype. The individual may strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect— τελειόι--as also your heavenly father is perfect.”) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.”(p. 69 Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part II.) 

When we seek the wholeness of ourselves, we are usually drawn by affinity to a living archetypal symbol of that wholeness such as the Buddha or the Christ.  If we follow the Buddha we must begin the journey with the First Noble Truth of Suffering, and if we follow the Christ we must begin with identification with the Passion (i.e., suffering) and crucifixion of the Christ.  The Taoist archetypal symbol of wholeness, the Taiji  is not anthropomorphic, but its containment of the opposites of yin and yang, dark and light, within the circle of completeness confronts the follower directly with the necessity of dealing with their own dark side if wholeness is to be realized.  Ultimately there is no way to wholeness except through the confrontation and integration of suffering and the shadow side of ourselves. We can’t become complete by running away from suffering.

It is the archetypal unconscious impetus to seek completeness being perverted by the conscious prejudice against suffering that leads to the illusion we can become perfect by getting rid of the “bad things of life.” This psychic phenomenon is exactly expressed in the Trump voters’ resonance with the symbol of “draining the swamp” projected onto government.  Those who would be personally perfect and then project this desire onto the social screen desire a perfect government. Their own sense of imperfection, as a being personally filled with swamp creatures within their own inner world, is projected outward onto the government as a swamp needing to be drained.  The psychic dimension of this projection is evidenced by the denial of the Trump voters who literally can not see that Trump has brought more “swamp creatures” into his government than any previous president. This self-blinding in consciousness is a primary symptom of the archetype’s unconscious influence. 

Trump is the manifested expression of our denial of the unconscious. The so-called anti-Trump resistance is also an expression of our denial of the unconscious as shown by its psychic contagion of a new Mc Carthyite “red scare” anti-Russian hysteria.  Because the anti-Trump forces can not acknowledge either the conscious or unconscious psychic forces behind Trump’s popularity, they project their dissociated psychic contents, with the sense of “evil,” onto an available target like “Russia,” so that they no longer care for the facts to be proven before they are certain of their conclusions. Their certainty before the determination of any evidence and their eager grasping at any straw or suggestion of “collusion” without a verification demonstrate conclusively the unconscious influences. 

So what happened to the unconscious?  It seems that humankind’s struggle with its own dark side in WWII was so traumatic that our collective consciousness revolted against itself and drove out the messenger that offered the only hope of understanding what had happened because merely trying to understand was too terrible. Using the terminology of rationalism, the study of the unconscious was tarred and feathered as “mystical” or, to use a more technical term, “woo woo.”  .  This kind of over-rationalization and sloganeering literalization by the perspective of materialism shows the unconscious influence in the repression itself.   Materialism became the new religion of science and dogmatically repressed the scientific study of psychic phenomenon from the psychological perspective.  Only the materialist perspective was officially allowed in the post-war study of the psyche within the major educational institutions funded by commercial and military interests.   

Psychology deals with the facts of mental contents. The fact that the idea or symbol exists as a psychic phenomenon is the truth that psychology studies. Thus the fact of the idea or symbol of a God (or the Buddhist Dharmakaya of Taoist Taiji) as the symbol of our own desire for wholeness, and the incarnation or birth of that symbol as a person who manifests that wholeness in human form (e.g., Christ, Buddha, or Immortal), is the rightful object of the study of psychology, and this is not a question of neurons firing or the literal historical objectification of the symbol in any particular individual. It is not the individual but the archetypal symbol projected onto the individual that allows the historical person to be honored or worshipped far beyond the historical death of the individual, precisely because the archetypal aspect is collective not individual.. 

As Jung said, “It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and commons sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal overwhelming forces.” (p. 15 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.)    The impersonal overwhelming forces of the collective unconscious that brought Trump to the presidency must be studied and understood or we make a fatal mistake in regard to the human psyche as well as to our society and culture. .

~end~

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications

This is a new feature for the TWW Blog with the hope of adding a little more coherence to the line up.  Under the title of “Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications” I will be outlining my pet peeves about Buddhism’s “coming to the West.”  Being aware of the processes of accommodation, acclimation, and acculturation that occur in transplanting Buddha Dharma into another culture is my primary concern.  The Buddha Dharma is the teaching of how mind awakens.  This awakening is not bound to any particular culture and is universally available to and inherent within each and every single person and living being. 

One of the most important factors in Buddhism’s arrival in the West is the necessity of disentangling the cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma from those aspects that are the common denominator of the human mind, i.e., the Buddha aspects. This happens whenever Buddhism enters a new cultural context.  It happened whenever and wherever Buddhism spread beyond the region where the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, actually walked as a living, breathing, spiritual mendicant, e.g., into the areas now known as Southern India, Northwestern India, Southeast Asia, Ancient Gandhara, Centeral Asia. China, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

The core problem is that we mostly do not know what is cultural and what is mind. As Buddhism spread throughout the regions of Asia, there was a general cultural communication that facilitated the transplanting of Buddha Dharma without a head on collision of cultural themes.  For example, Buddhism moves relatively easily into a culture that has either an animistic-shamanistic or pluralistic-pantheistic approach, because it can either become one more view among others in a panoply of perspective, or can integrate the perspective of the mind’s awakening within the preexisting metaphors of awakening in a shamanistic cultural matrix. 

But Buddhism has more difficulty in cultures that worship and idolize an anthropomorphic monotheistic hegemonic God, such as the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It is therefore historically significant that Buddhism is now able to come to the West, only after the West has had its own form of “Enlightenment” wherein the Dharma of Science has been able to free its own culture from the dogmatic rule of an anthropomorphic God.    

This current historical condition now presents problems of its own for Buddha Dharma coming to the West, as now practitioners of Buddha Dharma must take advantage of the cultural space created between the old precincts dominated by the God-religion and the new fields of the scientific worldview, while at the same time addressing the concerns of each.  Buddhism’s finding its place in the West between the polarization of an other-worldly God religion and a worldly science is analogous to Buddhism’s finding its place in China between the preexisting forms of Taoism and Confucianism. 

Part of the difficulty will be for Buddha Dharma to simultaneously shed the Indian, Chinese Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultural encrustations, yet remember and retain Buddha Dharma itself.  As we wash off the cultural accretions, this of course presents us with the paradigmatic conundrum of not throwing the baby out with the bath water.   As just one example, we can see in the West that some adherents to a materialistic scientific worldview misperceive karma and rebirth as merely cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma that can be jettisoned.  But as I see it, we have in the scientific field of psychology the common denominator of the study of the psyche with which Buddha Dharma can ally itself to show us that in the scientific study of mind, every single human culture that has existed has some form of teaching about karma and rebirth, e.g., the Christian teaching of “you reap what you sow.”  

For instance, in 1939 Carl G. Jung wrote an essay titled "Concerning Rebirth" recognizing that the concept of rebirth has various aspects and outlining five categories of rebirth as psychological forms that the archetype of rebirth manifests itself.  Jung points out that rebirth is not a materialistically measurable phenomenon, it can't be weighed or photographed, but it is a "purely psychic reality." Jung said,

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact that all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is not surprising that a concurrence of affirmations concerning rebirth can be found among the most widely differing peoples. There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss--without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance. [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1, Par. 207.]

 

Therefore by recognizing the role of psychology we can scientifically determine that karma and rebirth are not merely cultural notions to be discarded but are archetypes of the universal collective unconscious that is the foundation of all cultures, and both karma and rebirth can be scientifically and personally studied today, with the 2500 year history of such Buddhist study providing insights for us today .    

For this series, the heading “Caveats” will warn about and point out the problems in sentences and ideas that I come across in English speaking texts, usually describing the Buddha Dharma erroneously, giving false impressions, causing confusion, or generally mistaking or misstating something about the Buddha Dharma.

The heading “Corrections” will attempt the brief restatement from my perspective to correct what was written.

The heading “Clarifications” will articulate the reasons for announcing the caveat and making the correction.

It should go without saying that I’m not writing from a position of a particular orthodoxy, but from a particular perspective.  The point is not that these corrections are intended to establish objective dogmatic views that everyone must adhere to, but that they reveal the “truth of perspective” itself, which is a central aspect of the core teachings of the Buddha Dharma, i.e., having an “Aligned View” is the first of the folds of the Eightfold Path that is basic to Buddhism.     

Here, the Buddha Dharma view we are centrally aligning with is the One Vehicle. This mind-only perspective “stands on zero” as the nondual teaching of emptiness (sunyata) and manifests Buddha Nature as the coming and going of thusness (Tathagata) for the great matter of bringing people to hear of, learn about, and enter into the Buddha’s seeing and knowing in order to alleviate the imbalance and off-centeredness (dukkha) that inevitably arises with self-consciousness and causes the general distress and dissatisfaction inherent in our lives that leads to our greed, hatred, delusions and the whole plethora of vexations, and ultimately to our killing, harming, stealing, lying, and generally bad behaviors towards each other.   

My initial anticipation is that many of first blogs of the series will circle around the areas of confusion between the One Vehicle and the Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha themes of Buddha Dharma as understood by scholastics in the West. 

This page will act as the introduction and table of contents for the blogs posted in this series, as well as a preview of blogs I hope to include.  The posted blogs can also be found by clicking on the “CCC” link in the list of Labels on the side of the pages.

If you have any suggestions or pet peeves of your own about how Buddha Dharma is being accommodated and acculturated in the West, please let me know in the comments.

_/|\_

Gregory

Posts in this series:

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications: The meaning of ‘ Mind-only’

Anticipated Topics for Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications:

~ Manas, the 7^th Consciousness
~ Alayavijnana, the 8th Consciousness
~ Mind Only (citta-matra), Consciousness Only (vijnana-matra), and Notification Only (vijnapti-matra)
~ Lankavatara Sutra, The Sutra of Going Down to Lanka
~ Zen and Zen Samadhi
~ Samatha Vipassyana and Samadhi Prajna
~ Tendai Shikan and Zen Shikantaza
~ Five Types of Zen

The Unconscious in Buddha Dharma

            As we in the West are discovering the teachings of Buddha Dharma about mind and consciousness, we are confronted with the necessity of rediscovering our own repressed traditions of the study of the psyche, consciousness, and the unconscious.

Western explorers of the psyche discovered the unconscious in the 19^th century.  The Buddhist explorers of mind, through their deep meditation, discovered the unconscious over two thousand years ago.  Since then, the Buddhist admonition to “turn the light around and shine it on yourselves,” as stated by Linji in the 9^th century (or “take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward on your self,” as Dogen restated it in the 12th century, or “to personally turn around to face inward” as Hakuin restated it in the 18^th century) is the direction to study the unconscious by introspection.  In Buddhism, the unconscious is called the storehouse- or treasury-consciousness (Skt. alayavijnana) and the fruit of this introspective study was the Mahayana Sutras.    

In the 20^th century Carl G. Jung explored the unconscious more than any other psychologist. He identified two layers or poles of the unconscious, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious (the later he also called the impersonal, transpersonal, or universal features of the unconscious). [CW 7, §§ 102, 103, 445, & 452. See note.]  The first layer consists of those elements, features, or aspects of the unconscious that are acquired during one’s own lifetime and experience.  Jung emphasized that the deeper layer of the collective psyche is inherited, and he called this the region of the archetypal contents where these “primordial images are the most ancient and the most universal ‘thought-forms’ of humanity.” [CW 7, §§ 104.]  In Buddhist terminology (using agricultural metaphors of the time, as we would use computer metaphors for the mind today), the personal features are those seeds (Skt. bija) of the storehouse consciousness that are “planted” (continuing the cultivation metaphor) during one’s lifetime, and the impersonal features in the storehouse are the seeds placed there “from past lives” as immeasurable in number as the grains of sands of the Ganges river.   

Jung found that the personal unconscious contains all the material that was once conscious, e.g., memories, repressed material, subliminal sense perceptions, etc., while the collective unconscious contains “all the material which has not yet reached the threshold of consciousness.”  [CW 7, §§204 & 441.]  These structural elements of the deepest unconscious are the archetypes. They are psychic structures that are just as inherited, as impersonal, and as collective as the physical structures of our bodies, e.g., our bilateral symmetry,  our circulatory, skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems, etc..  As our individual bodies are unique expressions of these universal forms, so to are our individual consciousnesses unique expressions of the universal forms of mind.

In the Five Skandhas, one of the Buddhist’s schematic representations of mind, the structures of the unconscious are called the first four skandhas with consciousness designated the Fifth Skandha.  Early Buddhism through such schematics of mind as the Five Skandhas and the Eighteen Dhatus tacitly recognized that there is an unconscious dimension to mind, but it was the later Ekayana/Mahayana development of the schematic representation of the Eight Consciousnesses that made the unconscious explicit in Buddhism with the eighth storehouse consciousness as the storehouse of all the seeds that are present in mind either as submerged or as not yet conscious. Jung’s reference to inherited primordial “universal thought-forms” corresponds directly with samskara, the Fourth Skandha, which is often translated as “mental formations.”

A primary problem we have to face directly in Western culture, as we meet, accommodate, appropriate, and acculturate the Buddha Dharma, is this question of the unconscious, because in Western culture, as it is dominated by the scientism dogma stating that only the physical exists, the mind does not exist, and “the psychic” has had its relation to mind stripped away and is considered as nothing more than superstitious supernaturalism or hallucinatory imagination.  

The fact is that the study of the psyche is the study of mind “from the inside” while the study of neurophysiology is the study of mind “from the outside” as a brain.   The West is deeply confused about this distinction.  The two approaches to mind are not the same, and while there is value in correlating the discoveries made from each perspective in this field of study, the study from the outside can never and will never replace the need or importance of the study from the inside.  This study “from the inside” is exactly what Buddhism calls “turning the light around and shining it inward on ourselves” and points directly to the appeal that Buddhism has in the West for those who long to escape the domination of the field of the study of mind by the physicalist dogmas of physicists and other practitioners of the physical sciences.  

[Note: Jung quotes from The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung, Vol. 7. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. ]

[Edited 3/11/17]

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