Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Five Manifestations of the Buddha 53
a good Christian and redeem yourself; nor can you be a Buddha and worship God.
(Jung, 1954, p. xxxvii)
Jung went on in this essay to equate enlightenment to an awareness of the
collective unconscious, and consistent with his theory draws a direct connection
between enlightenment, introversion and insanity:
The introverted attitude is characterized in general by an emphasis on the a priori
data of apperception. [In this context] 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 origins. (pp. xl, xivi)
Jung saw the extraverted attitude of the West struggling for greater insight
into the nature of consciousness and awareness of being, and he saw the introverted
East as struggling to become more rational and relational:
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 of One Mind.
The result is that, in their extremism, both lose half of the universe, their life is shut
off from total reality, and is apt to become artificial and inhuman. (p. xlvii–xlix)
And he concluded with a warning to both camps:
There is a difference, and a big one [between Christian striving for Truth and yoga].
To jump straight... 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. (p. xlii)
Jung did see Western psychotherapy as offering a sort of metaphysical
bridge between East and West, and recognized that the difference is largely an
apperceptive one. He advises us, in fact, that in Zen: “It is not that something
different is seen, but that one sees differently” (Jung, 1964, p. 17). From his perspective
meditation practice “reverts energy needed for conscious processes to the
unconscious ... and reinforces its natural supply up to a certain maximum [that]
increases the readiness of the unconscious contents to break through to the consciousness”
(p. 22). However, he concluded his remarks on a curious note. He
wrote that since Zen is oriented toward those “ready to make any sacrifice for the
sake of truth” it is fundamentally dissimilar to psychotherapy which is oriented
toward “the most stubborn of all Europeans,” who lack “the intelligence and
will-power” that Zen demands (pp. 25, 29).