{"id":5607,"date":"2014-11-28T14:25:41","date_gmt":"2014-11-28T14:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/?p=5607"},"modified":"2020-06-20T22:38:51","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T22:38:51","slug":"how-indian-philosophy-influenced-jung","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/2014\/11\/how-indian-philosophy-influenced-jung\/","title":{"rendered":"How Indian Philosophy Influenced Jung"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Whatever is here, the same is over there;
\nand what is over there is also right\u00a0here.
\nFrom death to death he goes,
\nwho sees any kind of diversity.
\nFor that is this.
\nWith your mind alone you must understand it \u2013
\nthere is here no distinction at all!” –\u00a0Katha Upanishad<\/em>\u00a0II.1<\/p>\n

“Brahman is the union and dissolution of all opposites, and at the same time stands outside them as an irrational factor. It is therefore wholly beyond cognition and comprehension.” – Jung: Psychological Types<\/em> \u00a7330<\/p>\n

“Although Brahman, the world-ground and world-creator, created the opposites, they must nevertheless be cancelled out in it again\u2026” – Jung: Psychological Types<\/em> \u00a7329<\/p>\n

By Ryan Smith<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Psychological Types, <\/em>Jung hints that the spiritual development of the personality is the fifth mental function that stands outside of the mundane interplay of the functions as a type of meta-function. To activate this meta-function in the psyche, one must, develop the spiritual facilities in one\u2019s personality.<\/p>\n

\"junghyou\"<\/a>Spirituality is not religion – one can be spiritual without being religious; religious without being spiritual; one can be both, or one can be neither.<\/p>\n

Philosophically, Carl Jung was a solipsist<\/a>. Although his stated degree of support for this position waxed and waned, the solipsism was always there. Solipsism is the philosophical belief that one\u2019s own subjective consciousness is the only thing that is real. With regard to Jungian typology, this belief has the practical implication that if solipsism is true, then all the functions are equally valid, just as all psychic perceptions of phenomena are equally \u2018true.\u2019[1] This would seem to be the inevitable conclusion that rears its head at us from much of Jung’s work.[2] Hence, one reason that Indian philosophy was so appealing to Jung was that there, in the meditative traditions of the East, he believed he had found a philosophical method of investigation that gave priority to the exploration of human consciousness over the materialistic and \u2018extroverted\u2019 mode that he saw as dominant in the West.<\/p>\n

Brahman<\/strong> Eludes Us When the Functions Polarize<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A division \u2026 that is carried to the extreme … makes man, who is not a machine but many-sided, sick. The opposites should be evened out in the individual.” – Jung: Personal Letter to Hans Schmid-Guisan<\/em>[3]<\/p>\n

According to Jung, the further we go back in history, the fainter the concept of individuality will be, and the closer we get to our own time, the more clearly defined the concept of individuality will be.[4] With regard to typology, this meant, for Jung, that the functions are over-separated in the psyche of us moderns. Jung furthermore believed that this over-separation, where each function is clearly differentiated and separated into a dominant, auxiliary, tertiary, or inferior level in the psyche, is actually a source of psychological unhealth.[5]<\/p>\n

In his studies of Indian philosophy, Jung found the spiritual concept of an all-encompassing, highest consciousness, namely Brahman, and in Psychological Types, <\/em>Jung uses the concept of Brahman to represent the meta-cognitive, ineffable integration of the functions that emerges when the personality is developed enough to go beyond the opposites that are inherent in the functions.[6]<\/p>\n

To this end, Jung warns the student who wishes to realize Brahman against the dangers of regarding the scientific worldview as comprehensive (and as fact would have it, there is indeed no scientific proof<\/a> that the scientific worldview can be rendered exhaustive).[7] Jung\u2019s point here is not that he is against science as such; he simply recommends that we regard it as a<\/em> way of knowing, rather than as the only <\/em>way of knowing. According to Jung, regarding science and logic (or any other one-sided perspective for that matter) as the only possible mode of inquiry shuts the conscious mind off from the totality of psychic life, thus causing the highest form of consciousness to elude us.<\/p>\n

As an example of what happens when the functions over-separate, Jung mentioned Friedrich Nietzsche as a thinker whose Intuitive and Thinking functions were separated too greatly from his Feeling and Sensation functions. Lacking any conception of Brahman as a spiritual mediator of psychic life, Nietzsche was eventually led to declare himself his own god.[8] However, according to Jung, the overly active distinction between the functions that was active in Nietzsche\u2019s psyche could not be upheld, and the neglected functions of Sensation and Feeling eventually came crashing into consciousness through Nietzsche\u2019s spasmodic and pseudo-religious championing of the Dionysian<\/a>.[9]<\/p>\n

Jung\u2019s Examination of<\/strong> Brahman in \u2018Psychological Types\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Psychological Types<\/em> Jung discusses the Indian concept of supreme consciousness (Brahman) as a fifth function (or rather meta-function) that regulates the interplay of opposites in the psyche. Jung treats Brahman approvingly, and he regards it as a means (if not the <\/em>means) to mediate the oppositional character of the functions and for the individual to develop his personality beyond the tyranny of the individual type (each of the 16 types being really a limitation<\/em> on consciousness, sorted according to the functions).<\/p>\n

To Jung, Indian concepts such as rta<\/em> and dharma<\/em> possess a purity and arcane quality that are virtually unknown in the West. One reason for the potency of these concepts, according to Jung, is that they owe their origin to the introverted traditions of the East which quell the psychic noise of the opposites through meditation<\/a>. In deep trance-like states, the wise men of the East realize a type of consciousness that is beyond functions, allowing them to unearth insights of the greatest arcane significance from the depths of the Collective Unconscious<\/a>.[10] Hence in Jung\u2019s view, Indian concepts like rta<\/em> and dharma<\/em> are purer as archetypes than the ones that are seen in the West (such as \u2018The Trickster\u2019 or \u2018The Wise Old Woman\u2019) since our archetypes are still embodied in human form, whereas Indian concepts have reached the stage of pure ideas.<\/p>\n

However, though Jung grants the Indian archetypes a greater degree of conceptual purity than their Western counterparts, he nevertheless disagrees with Indian traditions such as Buddhism and Vedanta when these traditions assert that the individual is able to achieve complete liberation from the personal ego the way that Vedantins achieve moksa<\/em> or Buddhists achieve nirvana<\/em>. On this point of disagreement, Jung\u2019s philosophical outlook is distinctly Western in the sense that he asserts that any complete negation of the personal ego is by definition<\/em> impossible. As Jung would have it, should a Hindu or Buddhist master actually succeed in shedding the personal ego entirely, he would soon find himself in a state of psychic death.<\/p>\n

\"india\"<\/a>As I just said, Jung\u2019s argument against the possibility of nirvana<\/em> or moksa<\/em> is that it is by definition <\/em>impossible. And though he warned us against trusting too much in reason or science as the only ways of knowing, Jung\u2019s argument against the possibility of a state of consciousness devoid of the personal ego actually seems to do just that: Jung appears to draw the logical distinction between a subject-bound experience of reality and then reality-in-itself, as first drawn by Immanuel Kant, and then concludes that, by definition, insofar as there exists a supreme mode of consciousness in which the personal ego does not exist, \u201cwe do not exist.\u201d[11] In other words, Jung agrees that there is such a state as supreme consciousness beyond the functions (Brahman), but he denies that this state is devoid of the notion of a personal ego.<\/p>\n

However, the Vedic seers of the Upanishads had already addressed arguments such as Jung\u2019s more than a thousand years before he voiced them. According to the Vedantins, in the supreme state of consciousness, we are beyond the mundane reifying functions that provide us with skewed perceptions and judgments fitted to the understanding of our personal subject. In this state we perceive only Brahman as the singular and supreme object<\/a>, devoid of all difference. And it follows, then, that in this state of consciousness, the personal subject, too, is simply a part of the supreme One; the unity that has no duality and no knower. In other words, it is a state of consciousness where the knower gets lost in the known.[12] In this consciousness there is only a supreme intuition without the slightest trace of distinction between subject and object, thus leaving no place for the personal ego at all.<\/p>\n

Jung between Ego and Self, Atman and Brahman<\/strong><\/p>\n

“\u2026for the ego gropes in darkness while the Self lives in light\u2026” –\u00a0Katha Upanishad<\/em>\u00a0I.3<\/p>\n

As we have seen, while Jung accepted the existence of Brahman as a psychic entity capable of regulating the opposites of the psyche, he denied the Indian conception that the personal ego can fuse with Brahman, thus negating the existence of the personal ego altogether. That was not Jung\u2019s only point of divergence. While Jung did perhaps postulate Brahman as a meta-function in Psychological Types<\/em>, he nevertheless found himself in disagreement with the Vedic seers of India who had seen Brahman as a completely transcendental object, which was indeed the only true object, and which was devoid of all distinction. For Jung\u2019s part, he preferred to think of Brahman as having separated into multiple instances of the same basic form, similar to how DNA has the same basic structure in all individuals but we nevertheless speak of each individual as having his own DNA, rather than conceiving of DNA as a single super-entity that is essentially the same in all individuals.[13] Hence, while the Indians say there is one<\/em> Brahman that is a supreme transcendental object devoid of distinction and multiplicity, Jung saw Brahman as a diversified entity, spread onto each instance of life in the cosmos, somewhat like how DNA is active in encoding the genetic instructions in all living organisms.<\/p>\n

From the perspective of Indian philosophy, Jung\u2019s version of Brahman is neutered and \u201cmade safe\u201d to protect his dearly-held notion of the personal ego. According to Vedanta philosophy, the world may indeed appear to be multifaceted and dualistic to us, but as the Katha Upanishad<\/em> says, in the supreme mode of consciousness we look upon the world and ascertain that “there is here no distinction at all!” Indeed, from the standpoint of Vedanta, mistaking the apparent multiplicity of the world for the actual truth about Brahman is one of the hallmarks of spiritual ignorance.[14] To the individual who has realized Brahman, the seeming multiplicity of colors and sounds that surrounds us is really no more than a series of dream objects. True insight removes the false multiplicity to reveal that there is only the supreme object of Brahman that is completely without distinction or difference.<\/p>\n

Another way in which Jung drew on Indian ideas was in connection with his well-known distinction between the ego and the Self. The Jungian opposition between the ego and the Self has become very popular, and has even made it into pop culture and instances of New Age literature that have nothing to do with Jung or Jungian circles at all.<\/p>\n

According to Jung, the Self is defined as the true center of the individual\u2019s total consciousness (defined as the person\u2019s ego consciousness + his personal unconscious + the Collective Unconscious) in the same way that the ego is the center of ordinary consciousness (defined as ego-consciousness alone). Regarding the genealogy of these ideas, it is not unfair to say that Jung appropriated the distinction between Atman<\/em> and Brahman from Indian philosophy and repackaged the borrowed concepts to serve as ego [Atman<\/em>] and Self [Brahman] in his own work.<\/p>\n

When we briefly discussed the concepts of rta<\/em> and dharma<\/em> above, we saw that Jung gave precedence to his theory of the Collective Unconscious when accounting for their explanatory power: Rather than granting that these ideas were unusually compelling in their own right, Jung posited that they owed their appeal to their unique relation to his own concept of the Collective Unconscious. In the same way, when appropriating the concepts of Atman<\/em> and Brahman for his own use, Jung would deny that he had merely repackaged them from Indian philosophy: Embarking upon a line of argument that posited the Collective Unconscious to be primordial to other ideas as he did, Jung claimed that Atman<\/em> and Brahman were really \u201cuniversal ideas\u201d of which the Indians had furnished but one possible proof. Hence in Jung\u2019s view, he was not merely repackaging Indian ideas, but giving expression to \u201cuniversal ideas,\u201d which in his versions were uniquely adapted to the psychological temperament and intellectual climate of the West.[15]<\/p>\n

One may legitimately ask whether it was really necessary to refurbish the Indian concepts to fit with a Western agenda the way Jung does. One particularly dark perspective, which has been levelled at Jung in the past, is that he needlessly reinvented several Indian and Chinese concepts and then presented them to the West as his own ideas.[16] What Jung\u2019s genuine motives were in this regard we cannot know for certain, but whatever may be the case, it is certainly true that today many of the concepts that Jung acquired from Indian philosophy are often referred to as Jungian<\/em> concepts with no mention of Oriental influences or Indian philosophy whatsoever.<\/p>\n

Functions Unite in the Self, not in the Ego<\/strong><\/p>\n

As we have seen, Jung (1) acknowledged Brahman as a meta-function capable of reuniting the functions in the psyche, thus enabling him to achieve a state of consciousness beyond the individual type, but (2) denied that such a state of difference-less consciousness could ever entail liberation from the personal ego. In other words, Jung would agree that we can go beyond the constrictions of consciousness set for us by our psychological type, but he would maintain that, even in this state of supreme consciousness that lies beyond types, there would still be the notion of a personal ego as this concept has usually been defined in the Western tradition. Though the two concepts are somewhat confounded in Jung\u2019s typology (the ego usually being identified with the top three functions), the personal type is not all that there is to the notion of a personal ego: At a deeper level, there is also the notion of the ego as a structure-imposing agent that reifies and delimits external occurrences, allowing them to be perceived as objects, and imposes subject-object distinctions upon psychic perceptions, allowing us to perceive ourselves as different from the world around us.<\/p>\n

As the initiator of this discussion in modern times, Descartes had said that the only thing we can be sure of is our own cognitive activity. Adding to that, Kant had postulated that the categories by which we experience reality are inherent in us,<\/em> not in the things in themselves<\/a>. Finally, Freud had said that the delineating consciousness functions not just by breaking undifferentiated reality down into impersonal and seemingly objective categories, but that the ego also keeps specific intra-psychic contents out of consciousness as a means of economy and defense. It is this quintessentially Western conception of the ego that Jung regards as indispensable to the concept of psychic life and which he denies that the supreme consciousness of Brahman can ever blot out.[17] To go quickly:<\/p>\n